Real Life Inquiry

For my Real Life Reading Inquiry I chose the topic of fluency. I helped tutor my younger cousin who is in 2nd grade. For the purpose of this project, we will call him Carter. He is a bright child who does well in school, he just has difficulty with reading. Specifically, Carter has difficulty decoding words in a text. His mom told me that he spends so much time on trying to figure words out that he is not understanding what he is reading. Throughout the year they have been getting one book per week to read and then they take a quiz on it at the end of the week. Carter has an accumulation of these paper books at his house. I met with him on a Sunday and worked with him when he didn't have one of these books. To help with his word decoding I chose a paper book that he had already read and was a little bit easier for him to read. He did pretty well the first two pages and then we got to the third page with the sentence, "Mary danced with her dad." He got all of the words right except 'danced.' He skipped over the word he didn't know at first. First, I asked him if he recognized any chunks of words within that word. He replied with "an." Then I told to him to use the old sound it out method. He finally said 'danced' correctly. I gave him a list of things to do when he comes to a word he doesn't recognize. First, I told him to see if there were any words within that word that he already knew and recognized. Second, I told him to see if he could sound it out and if that didn't help see if there were other words in the sentence that could help him figure it out. Third, I told him to look at pictures if there were any because that can help figure out words. Fourth, I told him that if he couldn't figure it out that it was ok to ask for help. I also told him that whenever he does finally figure out the word to go back and reread the sentence with the new word in it. I think that he is slightly self conscious about going back and  rereading because he says that it takes longer to do that and he doesn't want to be the last one to finish reading something. I explained to him that I'm in college and I come to words I don't know all the time and that I have to go back and reread things frequently. I also tried to explain that everyone does it, even adults who have been reading for a very long time. I also said it doesn't matter how long it takes you to read something as long as you are understanding what you are reading and that it doesn't mean that you are dumb at all. I hoped that I helped Carter with his word decoding and that he will become a better fluent reader after the steps I gave him to go through.