Part of Rabel’s classroom literacy instruction was also focused on him writing either the days routine in the morning or after a lesson. I was able to observe several things about Rabel as a writer. I noticed that Rabel enjoys to wre, but once again has a hard time staying on task. Rabel is very intelligent and can write about almost anything. When they were learning how to write poems, I observed him create a poem about the day he went to the zoo. Rabel is a very interesting young boy that when is focused, he can complete any task assigned to him.
I also noticed that his personality comes out in his writing. While Rabel was writing I noticed that he wasn’t scared to use words he didn’t know. His teacher encouraged her students to try their best spelling a word they aren’t familiar with. Something that I noticed Rabel doing more than one time when he thought no one was watching him was writing bad words on his paper and erasing them. According to Rabel’s mom, she had noticed the same thing at home. D. Description of the Child’s Literacy Level and Needs:
After my assessment of Rabel revolving around letter identification, concepts about print, and phonological and phonemic awareness, I was convinced that Rabel’s teacher and parents had equipped him with literacy tools that would help him succeed in school. Ms. Tatis allowed me to view all of Rabel’s work she had stored in her closet from the beginning of the school year. Rabel started off the school year not even knowing how to write his name and only doing scribbles.
On one hand, I was happy that Rabel had come so far along, but I was also worried about Rabel not learning how write words correctly since he was only expected to write sight words correctly. In the Student Alphabet Chart in Section 3 Assessment 1, Rabel pronounced all of the uppercase letters correctly when I pointed to them. However, I noticed that Rabel seemed to spend more time with the lowercase letters. I also noticed that he wasn’t able to identify the letter q, u, and y.
Rabel seemed to have a harder time with lowercase letters, which made me think that it was probably because he thought that they were different from the capital letters. I also think if explored further this could be the reason why he loses interest reading books that aren’t about the topic of his choice. When Rabel is reading and he comes across a word that has letters he has trouble sounding out, occasionally he will try to sound it out, but other times he won’t even give it a try. Even though Rabel is just in kindergarten, he appeared to have mastered almost all of the concepts of print.
In the “Concepts of Print Assessment,” Rabel was capable showing me the front and back of the book as well as the title. He further demonstrated to me that concepts of print was a strength when he showed me that he knew the difference between illustrations and print. The part that was a little tricky for Rabel was the directionality of the print. Some of the words in this particular book were in color, Rabel thought that he should start reading from that word in color instead of where the print actually started.
Also, at first he had a little trouble showing me the beginning and end of words on the page, but once he thought about what I was asking him to do he was able to show me that knew word boundaries. Finally, when it came to word terminology he was able to identify the top and bottom of a page, point to a specific word, a specific letter, a lower case letter and an upper case letter. The three questions he had a problem with was pointing to a letter, pointing to a word, and identifying different punctuation marks.
I think that it’s perfectly okay that Rabel wasn’t able to identify different punctuation because exclamation marks is not something you learn in kindergarten. However, I was surprised when I asked him to point to a letter and he pointed to the whole word. I think that he just the two tasks confused. Also, when I was asking this from him, he was a little distracted because he stood up to look at what his friends were doing. During Rabel’s “Assessment for Phonological Awareness” in Section 3 Assessment 2, I was able to uncover more about the skills that Rabel possessed and the skill that he needed further instruction in.
The skill that I think Rabel could benefit from learning is rhyming. I could tell that Rabel had never been taught this before because he had a very confused face, which let me know this was the first time he was seeing this. I know that his teacher does nursery rhymes with the students, but from what I have noticed she only does them in Spanish. However, I don’t believe that she has devoted any time to teaching students about rhyme explicitly. Another thing that Rabel did, which allowed me to support my prediction was that he kept on saying words that did not have the same ending of the words in the assessment.
One example of this was when he the word was dog and he said “mom. ” I now think that not only had he never seen this before, but that he was focusing on the middle sound instead of the ending sound. As I continued this assessment I was also able to learn more about Rabel’s literacy strengths. In the following assessment Rabel quickly caught on and was able to match the beginning sound to the word. I was very impressed by the way he was able to blend sounds together. For Ms. Tatis blending is key to getting kindergarteners to learn how to read.
I could tell that this was one of the assessments that he enjoyed the most because at one point he was blurting out the answers without me even finishing demonstrating the assessment. In the same assessment, but with the focus now on Phonological Awareness: Segmenting Onset-Rimes, Rabel proved that he knew how to segment onset rimes by getting a perfect score. Not only did he get a perfect score, but Rabel didn’t seem to pause to think about the answer. I noticed that at the beginning of the assessment when he was having a hard time thinking of a rhyming word he would say, “I’m going to think.
For both assessments on blending onset rhymes and segmenting onset rhymes Rabel did not have any problems, but for the next two assessments Rabel either made one or two mistakes. When blending phonemes, Rabel attempted to say word “times” several times. At first he said rime, then he said trime and finally he said train. I found this very interesting because he completely switched the word and tried to match it to one that he was familiar with. I found that Rabel had a harder time segmenting phonemes. This was a challenging task, but he didn’t give up and attempted to tell me each sound in each word.
When we came across the word “deer” Rabel said that he didn’t know how to spell deer. I think that he was confusing dear with deer because as part of a school assignment the kids were learning how to write a letter for mother’s day. Therefore, I think that Rabel knew the word “deer,” but since he had just learned the word “dear” he was confused. When I pointed to the word “deer” and said that is how you spell deer, Rabel said “deer an animal. ” By making this association between the word and the meaning of the word Rabel was immediately able to tell me the sound that each letter(s) made.
As we finished the assessment, I was able to notice a pattern in the words that Rabel was getting wrong. He was either getting the word wrong because it had a letter that he had problems identifying and pronouncing like the letter u (in the case of the word bus) or the word ended with an “e. ” I don’t think that Rabel was familiar with words that had a CVCe pattern because he kept on pronouncing the e instead of silencing it. The running record assessment helped me understand even more about Rabel’s literacy strengths. I gave him a Level C running record assignment because that was the one that the teacher used for the month of April.
Since the teacher had just assessed the kids a week ago, I decided that I was going to use a different running record for the same level. I originally wanted to give Rabel a running record for Level D because I felt that the books he had chosen and read to me out loud were a little more difficult than Level C and he had read those texts with minor problems. The benchmark book titled “Mom Is a Painter,” had five words on almost every page. I could tell that his teacher had done a few of these before by the way he was sitting with his hands together on the desk waiting for me to introduce the book.
However, he didn’t stay that way for long. I was intrigued by the way his demeanor changed when it was time for him to read. I found myself telling Rabel to slow down when he was reading because he was racing through the words so I asked him to make sure to pause after each page. Rabel made only one mistake, which made it clear to me that his independent reading level is really D. The one mistake that he did make was that he said “leave” instead of “leaf. ” He did not look at the picture or react to the lack of meaning in what he said.
