Word by Word · a running record tool
What a running record looks like when it is finished, and what a teacher does with it on Monday.
Lesson 20. Fifty-five words. The lesson teaches the –s ending, the one that turns nap into naps. Maya read it aloud in one minute and twenty-two seconds while her teacher marked along.
Sam and Dan sitread as “sat”SV in the sun.
A cat napsread as “nap”V in a pot.
Mud is in the pot.
"Cat! Get up!" said Sam.
Sam patsread as “pat”V the cat.
Mud is on it! Mud is on Sam.
Dan dipsself-corrected “dip” a mop in a tub.
Dan mopsread as “mop”V up the mud.
The cat naps. Sam naps in the sun.
Orange: counted as an error. Green: she fixed it herself, which does not count against her. The letters above are what her teacher judged she was using.
Ninety-three per cent and Instructional is a fair summary, and on its own it tells a teacher to keep going at roughly this level. It does not tell them what to teach.
The pattern does. Three of Maya’s four errors are the same error.
| Word | She read | What she was using |
|---|---|---|
| naps | nap | Visual |
| pats | pat | Visual |
| mops | mop | Visual |
| sit | sat | Structure, Visual |
She dropped the –s three times, on the lesson named for it. She got the base word right every time. She is reading the front of the word and letting the end go.
The cue tally says the same thing from the other side: Meaning 0, Structure 1, Visual 4. Every miscue was driven by what the word looked like. None were caught by whether the sentence still made sense, which is how A cat nap in a pot went past her without a flicker.
Her retell was marked Some of it: “A cat got in the pot. It got muddy. Then they cleaned it.” She has the story. She is not using it while she reads.
Not a repeat of Lesson 20. She can read every base word in it. The teaching point is the ending she is dropping, and the habit of checking that a sentence still means something. That is a five-minute small-group focus, not a re-test.
Then read her again in two weeks and see whether the –s is sticking. That is the whole argument for this tool. The marking takes about as long as the reading, so you can afford to do it often enough for the second reading to tell you something.
This loads Maya’s record into the tool, exactly as her teacher left it. Nothing is sent anywhere. It is written to your own browser, and you can clear it again.