Summary Of A Fishy Story

Using a variety of informal and formal methods to measure students’ reading development is important to properly measure learning, comprehension, and development. These assessments also improve students’ abilities and appropriate future instruction. The video clip of “A Fishy Story” being read by a first grader in his fall term is a great example of many ways his reading could be measured in order to improve his abilities as a reader. There are some areas of weakness that the child exhibits during his reading of A Fishy Story. His word recognition could use strengthening. At the beginning, he relies heavily on his recognition of the word fish. He is unable to recognize the variation “fishy” when it appears, reverting to an assumption rather than reading the

He reads the book at a moderate pace. Slow reading can be a sign that decoding is taking an excessive amount of time(Gunning, 2014, p95). The repetitive nature of the book presents a challenge in this example. Each page begins with “On [day of the week], I dreamed I caught a fish.” The student moves quickly through this phrase, likely more from memory and pattern recognition than phonetic reading. Once he reaches the final page, “On Sunday I really went fishing”, his pace slows down significantly, and he struggles with some of the words. This demonstrates that his pattern recognition and context clues are strong, but his phonetic skills and vocabulary need attention. An individual reading inventory (IRI) would give this teacher more insight on how his fluency and comprehension interact. The IRI itself would assess his fluency, or how much he can read per minute. The questions provided in the IRI would gauge his comprehension. His rate was quick, perhaps he was not allowing adequate time to fully comprehend the material. an IRI would provide more information(Flippo, Holland, McCarthy, & Swinning, 2009,