Isaiah Polk

9/24/20

Hello __________,

Recently I have worked with your daughter, Molly, on her latest fluency assessment, and today

I am here to provide you with an update on her fluency progress. At the fifth-grade level there

are certain goals we are trying to strive for by the end of the year. There are four different

categories we look at: expression and volume, phrasing (within sentences), smoothness (within

sentences), and pace. In this assessment I will further explain these categories and reveal your

daughter’s scores. I will also provide some exercises that I would recommend for Molly to do at

home.

Expression and volume was one of the categories that could use some working on. Molly’s

volume was actually fine, she read at an appropriate level and read mostly clearly. I am more

concerned with her expression. When grading her performance, I put her at below grade level.

When she was reading, it began to sound like she was being forced to read, instead of just

reading naturally. Her voice and volume also did not change, to the point where it sounded like

every sentence in the passage was the same. However, by the end of the school year, we hope

to have Molly reading with much more enthusiasm and make it sound natural. While in class, I

will be sure that Molly continues to read aloud to either me or the class. I will also make sure at

school, such as conducting mini lessons, we will work on changing vocal tone when there are

exclamation points and question marks at the end of sentences. While at home, I think it will be

beneficial that Molly reads aloud to you for at least 15 minutes a day. While she reads, be sure

to point out the points of the passage where your voice would change in tone, to match the
theme or mood of the story. I believe with continued practice, this issue will progressively

correct itself.

For phrasing, this was the other category that Molly will need to most help with. After her

assessment, I had to score her at below grade level. Phrasing is the use of taking strategic

pauses while reading and paying attention to punctuation. When Molly was reading, there was

little to no phrasing, and she almost ignored all necessary pauses. However, I also believe that

this is something we can correct over time. While Molly is at school, I will most definitely be

working with her one on one to improve her phrasing. I will most likely provide her passages to

read aloud to me, and I will highlight the specific parts of sentences where it is necessary to

take pauses. When Molly is at home, it is still important that Molly practices this skill. I would

have Molly read aloud to you, and while she reads, point out the parts of the sentences where

she should take a short pause. I believe when Molly eventually masters this skill, it will help

improve in the other categories of fluency. It will encourage her to take her time and think

about what she is actually reading.

For smoothness, this is was Molly’s strongest score. There are still some things we can correct,

but I am not too concerned about it. After Molly’s assessment, I decided to score her at almost

grade level for this category. When she was reading, I can tell she has fairly good word

recognition, with only a couple breaks in smoothness. What this tells me is that Molly is a

decent reader and should have little issues when progressing to higher grade level texts.

However, to even further improve on this score, I would just encourage her to continue practice
reading. I think the exercises I recommended with the other categories in fluency will be

sufficient enough to improve her smoothness in reading. By the end of the school year I am

certain she will be at grade level.

For the final category I graded her on pace. Molly has the tendency to read very fast. Her fast

pace in reading is also a contributing factor to her low score in phrasing. I know sometimes

when students are nervous, they tend to read fast, or maybe she thought it was a competition

to read as many words as she could in the 1 minute. Either way this is something we should

improve on. For this category I have decided to put her at approaching grade level. On a good

note, I think it is much easier to get a student to slow down their reading than to speed up,

because she already has good word recognition. I have already thought of an activity where

Molly will work with a partner to observe her pace. She will read aloud to her partner and when

she begins to read fast, the partner will hold up a yellow card to silently remind her to slow

down. I also believe that this activity can easily be recreated at home. With continued practice,

she will easily fix this issue.

 Isaiah Polk

After this assignment, I have developed a very different view and appreciation for

fluency. I think assessing a student’s fluency is extremely important for their present and future

academic performances. One major advantage to assessing a student’s literacy skill is you have

the opportunity to fix any literacy skill at an early age. The four categories on the literacy rubric

are the foundation to great academic success. Doing assessments like this project will let the

teacher know what the student should work on and give us a better idea of how we should plan

our future lessons. A challenge I had with this assignment was determining how to assess their

pace. The student I was observing was reading very fast and was blowing through commas and

periods at the end of sentences. On the rubric, they say that if the student is reading slow, then

they will receive a lower score, but how do you score if they read fast? I also considered that if

a student is reading fast, then they also have great word recognition. So I tried to find the

middle ground with my grading decision. Overall, I had a decent time assessing the student’s

literacy skill. The process seemed fairly straight forward to me and I didn’t have too many

obstacles. From this I have learned the importance of taking notes right away as the student is

reading, because it will really help the teacher in making their grading decisions.

As I have stated before, I believe that there is great purpose in assessing oral reading

fluency. From this practice I now better ideas of different lessons I can place in my future

classrooms to improve on their fluency skills. The fluency rubric provided for this assignment

also provides a lot of clarity of what teachers should be looking for when assessing their

students. However, I think I would like to expand on this rubric to include a fifth column when

grading. There were times when I wanted to put my students between two different number
until I forced myself to pick a grade. I also would like to see how different it would be for

students who read too fast in the pace category.