Tutoring Reflection

     I just completed my fourth and final tutoring session with my student.  All of the sessions have been conducted in the classroom during specials or recess, so other students have not been present so as to minimize distractions.  The lessons have focused on reading comprehension strategies that the student can use to remember more of what she has read.  The first two sessions addressed before, during and after reading strategies and the use of anticipation guide to activate background knowledge.  I was not able to complete as much of these sessions as I would have liked given the time available and the student's tendency to bring up unrelated stories and pieces of information.  Because of this, I shortened my final two sessions and had them focus on the same book.  The first session included a read aloud to the student and then the student read the story to me.  We stopped at various points in the story to discuss visualization techniques she could use to help better understand the story.  The final session then focused on author's message.  The student was able to retell a fair amount of the plot and elements of the story, which indicated to me that she made more of a connection with the text and related more to fiction, given the first two sessions used informational text.  We then reviewed all of the strategies we had discussed over the four sessions, summarizing how the student could use those strategies when we re-test.  Interestingly, the student mentioned that she was going to read fast because that is what the DIBELS test was assessing.  This answered one of my questions in my journal that questioned if she read at such a fast rate because that was what she thought she needed to do to be successful.  This presented a great opportunity for me to remind her that we are reading to learn in third grade (and on the re-test she will take), so it is most important for her to remember what she has read and not read it as fast as she can.  Today was a big breakthrough when she actually admitted (without probing) that she read so fast because of her past experiences with reading tests.  While I don't expect drastic improvement from my four short sessions, I do believe the student is beginning to understand that the purpose of reading is to comprehend and not just recognize words and she will begin to modify her reading rate to meet this need.