Purpose:
The purpose of this semester was to learn how to teach different strategies to help students become better readers. I had to learn what my students' needs are through different types of assessments and help her become stronger in areas in which she struggles. I did assessments including interest and motivational survey. From these, I learned that she enjoys free reading, especially graphic novels. She also loves going to the library and finding new books. She does not like reading aloud in class, though. I was able to determine my student needs most help with vocabulary and spelling. The assessments I used to gather that information was the initial spelling test, running records, and talking with her as she read a loud to me. Her vocabulary does not affect her comprehension or fluency at all, so it took a few times for it to click that that is what she needs help with. Both word sorts and vocabulary activities really helped her and by the end she was able to use some of the strategies we worked on without me having to prompt her.
Recommendations:
Two recommendations for classroom teacher:
1. I would continue assessing her with running records to see what her frustration level is.
2. I would also have her continue to work on some vocabulary strategies. This could include providing vocabulary flash cards, while reading aloud pointing out a few words and describe the meaning, have a graphic organizer for students to write new vocal words that they can reference back to, etc.
Two recommendations for home involvement:
1. Work on vocabulary in daily lives. This could include parents trying to use words they don't usually use and then explain it to the child. (Make it an activity... Parent first provides a child friendly definition, use an example of how it would be in their daily lives, third have the student make up their own example, and lastly keep the word active in the house).
2. Read before bed every night. As the child comes across vocabulary they don't know, discuss. Do the same activity above, but with the vocab straight from the book. Continue using those words in your daily lives.
What I Learned:
From this case study, I learned that there are so many different ways to assess different reading skills. I also learned how important word studies can be for students and how much it can benefit them. There are many different ways to do word studies with the same set of words so it keeps it fun and interesting for the kids. I also learned that I need to always push my students so they can reach their full potential. If they act like it is hard or they can't do it at first, tell them to keep trying. My student did this the first lesson or two and by the end I realized she needed to be pushed way harder than I was pushing her. I never got her to reach that frustrational level and that is something they need to be at. As a teacher, I learned a lot of things. First being time management. Only having thirty minutes to work with my student (and being a regular classroom teacher I know it will be much less than that) made me realize that I need to get to work right away so we could get everything accomplished in that amount of time. Another important thing I learned was to teach student prompts they can use to decode words when reading individually. My students biggest downfall was not having a wide enough vocabulary, but if she had prompts/strategies to use when reading by herself, she would be awesome. Making an anchor chart or book marks for the students to have while reading with prompts on them would be super helpful. This was an amazing learning experience and I am excited to use what I have learned in this class in my future classroom.
-Ms. A
