Running Records

At the beginning of the school year, I had to do some running records to assess my students’ reading. I use running records to assess text difficulty and capture students’ progress. In addition, the running records provide me with the information I would need to form my guided reading groups. By placing them into small groups, I can work with students reading at or around the same level and I can target their needs on a small group basis. I found it easier to do running records last year as a first grade teacher since I used MClass and conducted the running records on a Palm pilot. There were prompts to guide me throughout the process and it was just a lot quicker on the Palm. I was also fortunate enough to have my reading specialist come in and model the MClass testing for me. I really lucked out to have her as my resource since she was in my classroom everyday for the entire reading block for a whole month! I am teaching third grade this year and we’re using Fontas & Pinell, everything is by hand and there is no one sitting next to me to guide me through the process. Needless to say, running records were a bit challenging and more time consuming to do this time around since I have to mark up the running records by hand. Therefore, the process took me a bit longer than I had planned so I ended up forming my small groups late towards the end of September. But now that running records are done and groups are formed, I can focus on instruction for my guided reading groups!

As a teacher, running records provide valuable information about my students as readers. As the students are reading, I can track their progress, determine what they already know as readers, what they are focusing on as readers, and what they have overlooked as readers. Running records also allow me to track the students' reading fluency and their reading behaviors. Although it requires effort and takes a lot of time, once done, running records are an invaluable piece of information.

Any thoughts on running records?