Go Speed Reader! Go!

One of Nathan's favorite childhood TV shows was Speed Racer, so sorry for the corny title. Sometimes when things like that pop into my head, I just can't help myself.

Dallin recently did a reading evaluation with his teacher. She used an assessment test called DIBELS to look at Dallin's reading skills as compared to the average kindergartner. The test is performed one on one with the student and the student is evaluated in four areas. Letter identification, initial word sounds, identifying phonetic sounds within a word, and ability to sound out groups of letters. Dallin scored right at the benchmark in one area, above the benchmark in two of the areas, and more than double the benchmark score in one of the areas. What is funny though is that the area he scored best in was identifying the different phonetic sounds within a word, but the area he scored lowest in was initial word sounds. Wouldn't you think if he could identify all the phonetic sounds in the word that he would be able to correctly identify the first sound in each word? I'm thinking that during that part of the test he must have been playing around or spacing out a little, which he is very inclined to do. It's not like it really even matters anyway. It is just an assessment test and the overall finding was that he is performing well. Which we kind of already knew, because he has been doing great at reading to us at home. And all the credit for that, I give to his teacher. I know I've mentioned it before, but I have been so pleased with her. She makes learning wonderfully fun and has taught Dallin so much over the course of this school year. It has been amazing watching how fast he has picked up on new ideas and how often he expresses his love of learning. I really love the way he phrases his thoughts and how he loves to plan for the future. Just the other night he told me, "Mom, I'm thinking that tomorrow I'm going to think about science. I like science. It's AWESOME."