I did a Running Record evaluation from Marie Clay's book on Student "X". I used one of the Pre-Primer stories and one of the Primer stories from the Qualitative Reading Inventory - 4 book. He scored at an Easy Level on the Pre-Primer story with a 98% accuracy rate. The story had 49 words and he made 1 error.
Student "X" scored at an Instructional Level on the Primer story. "X" had a 94% accuracy rate. The story had 119 words. "X" had 7 errors. What I saw in this assessment was that "X" uses initial sounds of unknown words to make up a word that may or may not make sense that starts with the same initial sound. "X" does not look at the whole word.
I took this oportunity to reteach him the strategy of covering up parts of words to find the whole word. For example, with the word "sway". I covered up the word and then uncovered each sound one by one. We used the same method as in the 100 Easy Lessons book to sound out the word. I reminded "X" that a and y are combined to make one sound, the long a sound. This hellped "X" be able to sound out the correct pronunciation and in turn decode the word. I also helped to put dots under the sounds that he could put his fingers on like the book 100 Easy Lessons does. "X" is very visual and all visual clues lead to success.
Example:
s w ay
. . .
