Reading Recovery - My first 2 weeks journey

I have had 4 sessions of training for reading recovery.

What was covered:
* How to do an On Survey - and completing summary.
* How to do a Running Record in detail - what can you learn from a running record.
* What can you expect of a child that will be discontinued.
* How to identify children that qualify for Reading Recovery.

What stood out for me:
* Reading Recovery is for any child after a year at school that is working at a lower level as expected of his/her age.
* ELL students are not excluded.
* If there is no children in the 6 to 7 year band, you can take older children.
* By working with children individually, you are not wasting time teaching things the child already knows. The teaching is specific and at the child's pace.
* Reading recovery helps children not only to make accelerated progress in reading but also in writing.
* You choose your lowest children first, in order to close the gap. Children that are "just below" might still catch up in class, while children that are "well below" will just fall further and further behind. (I am using NS terminology by lack of describing this in a beter way).
* In NZ we teach reading in context before we look at word and letter. In doing a summary on these three levels, identifying strategies the child is using  and problems they are experiencing, I can get a very clear understanding of where the gaps are.

What's next:
* I am now going to start with my identification sheet. I have to select 12 children of which 4 will be chosen to work with.
* Children from 2017 and transferred from other schools gets priority.
* Children closer to 7 gets priority before 6 year olds.
* Then I will start doing my observation surveys with the selected children.

So what?
As I was working with two of my children from my own class, I realised that although they might come out at higher levels in reading, it does not mean that they are good writers. I am eager to research why this is the case. Also, one of my students only used words in his writing that he knew (mostly high frequency words or everyday words from his own vocabulary). How can I help him to get confident in sounding words out and writing them down without my assistance? How can I apply what I have been learning at RR in my class.