Second Week of iPads

This past week I was substituting in a second grade classroom for a week and a half. The teacher had laid out all of the plans extremely well including guided reading. She did not want me doing anything too much with the students so that she would not fall behind. I was mainly working with students in order to improve their fluency, sight words, and vocabulary. I met with two different groups each day and followed very similar plans with each group.

I was mainly in charge of focusing with the lower reading groups in the class. I had another teacher in the classroom with me that was in charge of the higher reading groups. The teacher informed me that  she wanted me to mainly focus on building the students fluency while reading. The teacher had given me a list of iPad apps that she likes to use to help the students with fluency. The one I chose to use with my different groups was Read Me Stories.

In this app, the students were able to pick a story from the list the app gave us. The app had a great deal of different kinds of stories for the students. The students could choose if they wanted to have the story read to them and follow along with the highlighted words, or if they wanted to read the story themselves with the highlighted words. Either way, the students would be able to hear the words out loud and begin to recognize them. If the students choose to read the story on their own and they get stuck on a word, they can press the volume button and it will read that part of the story to you.

I had the students pick a story they wanted to read. I first had them read the story on their own. I had them look at the pictures and look at the highlighted words. If they ever got stuck, I asked them what would make the most sense and had them look at the pictures to aid them. After they read the story once on their own, I let them have the story be read out loud to them. This would allow the students to hear the actual story and hear the words they might have been struggling with.

The students seemed to enjoy working with this app. I believe it helped the students with word recognition and picking up their fluency when they are reading. However, I think there are better apps out there for the students to help with their fluency. The app had limited free stories that the students could choose from. If you wanted a series, you would have to pay for it. Also, I found the app a bit annoying because you had to keep pressing different buttons if you wanted it to read it out loud. Lastly, I wish that if a student was stuck on a particular word, I wish the app would let you hit that specific word instead of reading the entire page over again. However, the students seem to enjoy it and they liked being able to read the stories on their own and also have it read to them.