| During my 3rd year of the Elementary Education
program I worked in a school with a young girl who I have named Christina.
Christina was a sweet young 1st grader who is a reading recovery student.
She likes to be right and will very rarely go off and write on her own
without asking for help for any word that she doesn't know for sure.
I followed her learning throughout the semester and wrote a lesson based
on what I learned. By assessing her in so many ways and then choosing
an aspect of her learning that should be expanded upon I have shown that
I can effectively
understand student learning and modify instruction
(VT2) |
Christina
is what I would consider a child moving into being a transitional speller.
She understands many things about spelling and can here the intial and
last consenant sounds. She also understand that vowels need to be
in the words. She is a strong speller and understands a lot about
sounds. She understands the 'ing' sound as proven in her correct
spelling as well as her word "soming" which is swimming. She knows
a lot of the chunks in spelling as well as how to decode words and spell
them. However, I would almost think that she might be in the phonemic
stage as well. I think this because of her words, "gagon"(dragon)
and "gress"(dress). These words show that she's not able to hear
the first sounds correctly or employ them.
Some of the things that I noticed as far as her
misspellings go she has troubles with 'e's that sound a little like 'a's
in words such as, "mel"(mail) and "diere"(diary) and "dieres"(diaries).
She also has troubles with silent letters, which is shown in "secris"(secrets)
and "wen"(when). She is also missing some of her c, k, or ck words.
This is shown in her words "pecde"(peeked), "stik"(stick), "singk"(sink).
Christina is a transitional
speller. In the Temple et all reading iIt says that "Words spelled
by transitional spelling look like English words, though they are not spelled
correctly. Transitional spellings employ many of the features of
standard spelling - the silent letters for markers, scribal rules, and
the rest - but employ them uncertainly." Christina seems to have
a strong hold on her spelling, but she is not in the last stage of spellings.
She still needs to see more writing and other words. Reading will
also help. I believe that besides the spelling test I gave her, the
results may be skewed. Christina is a girl who enjoys to getting
help, so her spelling may not show her true understanding of spelling. |
This is a journal entry I wrote after looking at writing
samples from Christina as well as giving her a short spelling test (using
words she had not seen before) to determine how she spells words that she
doesn't know. I found that most of her spelling errors were around
vowel digraphs and vowel and consonant blends. |
For the Running Record I used two different books with Christina.
The first one was really easy and so I switched to a different book.
The two books I used were "Scat," said the Cat by Joy Cowley and Walk,
Ride, Run by Jenny Giles.
I pulled out the second book (Walk, Ride, Run) and asked her
to read from that one. She had 12 errors in this book. Of her
12 errors, two of them were appeals. She turned to me and actually
asked me what the word says. 8 of her errors was the same error.
One of the main character's names was Emma and she said Emily every time.
The other two errors she made were substitutions. I felt that for
one of them, she only used visual communications and the other she used
all three. The first substitution she made, besides the Emily/Emma
thing, was dikes for bikes. I said that she only used the visual
because dikes isn't a word nor does it make sense in the sentence.
However, I have noticed that many of the 1st graders in the class mix up
the letters b and d, so that may be a part of that error. The other
error was in the sentence, "Yay, I win!" She read "Yay, I won".
The sentence made sense the way it was read and the syntax was good and
it is visually good.
Christina is using all the information available to her to help
her read most of the time. I would hope that she would try some words
before appealing instead of looking at them and then asking for help. |
Running records are important tools to help you
find where a student is in text level as well as how a child uses the information
given to them to figure out a word. It might be visual or spatial clues
that help a child, but with a running record you can be sure. I did
this running record as a part of my junior block in literacy. |
LESSON ASSESSMENT
Christina was the student that I was watching the most. During
her word sort she found the pattern and sorted them the way she should.
I didn’t tell the students what the patterns were and had them figure out
what the two patterns were on their own. After Christina completed
the job I asked her what the patterns were, she answered me correctly.
I picked out a couple of the words from each column and asked her if the
patterns made the same sound. She insisted that the “ee” words and
the “ea” words made different sounds, even though I made sure that only
long “e” sounds were represented. When Garrett disagreed and told
me the right answer, Christina changed her mind, but when I asked the question
again at the end of the lesson she gave me her original answer.
T - “Christina, what is your pattern?”
C - “These words have 1 ‘e’ and these words have 2 ‘e’s
T – “Good. What sound does the “ee” words make?”
C – “E”
T – “Does the “ea” words make the same sound?”
C – “No.”
T – “What sound does it make?
C – “e-ah.”
I don’t think that Christina or the other students really got out of
this lesson what I would have wanted them too. To really help this child
I would definitely consider working with her more and doing more word sort,
possibly alone. She seemed to really follow Garrett and was not actually
able to explain anything on her own. Doing a variety of different
activities on different hard sounds would help her as I notice that the
hardest parts for her in spelling seem to be mixing up sounds that are
spelled differently, but sound the same. Such as the hard “e” sound
or the C, K, or CK words.
I would say that Christina is a Transtitional word study student.
I know this because it seems that she hears most sounds and can write many
letter combinations easily. She just doesn’t always know which ones
to use and where. She also seems to notice simple patterns and knows
that they will make the same sounds. Such as the fact that while
she didn’t know what sound the “ea” made, she did understand that they
all the made the same sound because they were a pattern. |
Using these assessments I felt that moving towards work
with vowel digraphs would be a good move, since that was one area that
I had noticed that she needed help with. This is the assessment I
wrote after a lesson on word sorting and the word patterns "ee" and "ea".
This lesson showed that I could write a lesson was was assessment informed
(PC2a4) |
During the lesson I was surprised to see my CLP student
not being able to explain things for herself. When she doesn’t usually
know things she at least tries for the most part, but she didn’t do that
this time. I think that for things like this, Christina seems to
work better alone. If I were to redo this lesson, I would like to
focus more on Christina and what she had to say. As well as do whole class
lessons on the subject to solidify the knowledge that she would be gaining
with the extra work.
In the future I would be able to assess Christina better if I
had more time to work on projects like these so that I could get a better
view of whether or not she really understands what I’m trying to do as
well as it would give a broader range of her word level knowledge. |
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