I've been meeting with a couple of students over the past few weeks who are working on "Chunking letters and sounds together" as part of their accuracy goal. The students have demonstrated the ability to chunk letters and sounds together, but continue to read the words they are chunking inaccurately because of other challenges. For example, they have shown that they are able to chunk a word, but read the vowel sound incorrectly and therefore are unable to read the words they are chunking accurately.

In situations like this, how do you assign a touch point to your observations? The students are chunking the words, so my inclination is to say that they should receive a 3, and we should focus on a new accuracy strategy, like flip the sound. However, since they are still reading chunked words inaccurately, is it appropriate to assign a 3 to these students? I am struggling to understand how to assign touch points in the area of accuracy, since readers so frequently need to use multiple strategies to accurately decode a word.

Any thoughts or suggestions?