Wow

In a guided reading lesson it is important that the teacher is carefully listening to each individual reader, taking notes on areas of strength and areas where more time/experience is needed. Always ready to provide any support the student may need in order to decode a word. Anyone who has ever lead a guided reading group with first grade students has undoubtedly had a student look at the first letter or letters of a word and say another word that begins with the same letters. Most of the time when this occurs the sentence becomes so incomprehensible that sometimes the teacher doesn't even have to say anything. The student, if we are lucky, will catch it on their own and go back to reread correcting their mistake. Then there are those other times. This is one of those times.

I was reading with a group of my first graders, who are reading at grade level. My one student's current goal has to do with fluency. He is working on reading at a more natural pace (not racing through the words) while paying attention to punctuation and reading with expression. (He is REALLY focusing on the expression bit at the moment.) Anyway, today he was reading with even more expression than usual. He read the first sentence beautifully. "He was NEVER mad." I beamed with pride as he briefly stopped at the period before continuing to read on to the next sentence. "He NEVER sh*tted." (The word was supposed to be shouted.) Not one single student said anything and the look on the reader's face convinced me that he was working out his mistake. So I fought back my urge to giggle and waited patiently to see if he would fix his mistake. I watched as the confused look left his face and he opened his mouth to say..."Wow!"