Watch and Learn: Assessing Reading Skills Video

     This video showed a 10 year old child being assessed and tutored for reading. This child had a problem decoding words, which meant she spent more time decoding words which led her to become exhausted, which in return affected her reading comprehension abilities. I have never thought of reading as being an academic and emotional process, which now makes perfect sense to me. Children do tend to "shut down" when they feel incompetent and "stupid" in class, especially if they are slow readers or can't pronounce the words in a text. Continuously assessing students is the key to building proficient readers, as constantly assessing their reading strengths and weaknesses is the only way to fix problems, and accelerate strengths. I do believe good teachers do are constantly self evaluating their instruction, which would lead many changes throughout the year according to their students specific needs. I like how in the video the tutor started by telling the child to read as fast as you can, to help build fluency. I do agree that more fluent readers, gain more meaning from text.