Emmy Costantino

4/28/14
Paper #3
Information about the Lesson and Your Formative Assessment
In completion of the time spent in my fourth grade spring placement, I needed to
create a lesson based on the prior fluency formative assessment I completed on a student
in order to see if gains could be made in a certain area of her learning. The student I was
working with, lets call her Abby, does have an IEP in a specific reading disability
needing aid in fluency as well as comprehension. Based on the prior assessment I noticed
that Abby struggled to identify words that utilize the soft g sound, the words in which
the g could reasonably be replaced by a j. In the creation of this lesson I revisited the
easycbm.com website given to me by my cooperating teacher and reworked a fun reading
about the zoo to fit her needs. We then did the same type of assessment as the first except
read the text twice this time in order to see if the rereading tactic is in fact a helpful one.
There is considerable evidence that repeated reading of the same text leads to
automaticity- fast accurate, and effortless word recognition (Dowhower, 191; National
Reading Panel, 2000; Manning, Lewis & Lewis, 2010) (Reutzal & Cooter, 2012, p.193).
It was with this learning strategy in mind that prior to this activity I went over how to
recognize these words and then had her begin the lesson on fluency with my goal being to
have her complete more of the reading the second time she did so, a result which I am
happy to report was in fact observed!
For my initial assessment, I had Abby read a page and a half long story to see how
far on it she could get in a minute and identify what words caused her to struggle. With
this information I went back to the same website to find another same level reading.
Using my knowledge of how far she got in a minute I was able to gauge how much

shorter the next reading had to be, making it just shy of a page in case she accelerated
through it, I did not want her to complete the reading with extra time but I also did not
want it to be an intimidating length (original text is attached as well). Next, I used my
information of the words she struggled with to see if there were any outstanding patterns,
this method in mind I selected the soft g sound noticing her trouble with gigantic. I
inserted words with soft g like gigantic George Georgia etc and by using what
we learned about bolding words, highlighting keywords and main points will help
students as well (Gargiulo and Metcalf, 2013, p.278). Knowing this I made all soft g
words bold just to give her a bit of a tip in order to help her identify some of these. I
hoped that subconsciously she would notice some rules they have in common as well, for
example there is often a vowel after etc. I then gave her the reading and told her for fun
we would play a game to see how far she could read in a minuteher exclamation of
Oh noIm no good at this was a sure sign to me that not only were we having reading
fluency struggles but low confidence in her abilities as well.
This exclamation of inherent worry was unfortunately, exactly the response I had
expected. In always being pulled out of class for RTII and being in the lower reading
groups as well as having an IEP it has been put on Abbys radar that she is a struggling
reader, an idea I find sad. She may not be the best reader in the class but acknowledging
that she cannot do something before she even tries it is awful! She is too young to feel
that she cannot succeed in something she puts her mind to and it is this feeling of
discouragement that I think contributes to disdain for a subject. Based on my knowledge
of Kirsten Olsons book, Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School
Culture it is most definitely referenced as wounds of underestimation in the Wounds of

Schooling theory, which we discussed in class as well. Being given the expectation that
she cannot do something prior to trying (Green, 2010) gives Abby the notion of failure
before being given the opportunity to even try! How can a student really do their best
when they dont even feel that their best is good enough for success?
We then continued onto the reading, in the first 60 seconds I noticed that she
struggled greatly with a few of the soft g words and she stopped at the word headed.
I then, as before, let her finish the text so that she did not feel cut off and we continued to
read it again. As expressed previously in the Teaching Children to Read textbook I read
for Professor Smollecks Education 341 class, rereading is vital to the fluency
improvement process, a concept which I employed heavily in this lesson. In rereading the
second time she made it even further to the word branches and barely stumbled on the
soft g words as she reread them showing to me that practice does make perfect, and
rereading is a very impactful method of improving fluency! Once automaticity is
achieved students fluency moves from automaticity to comprehension (Kuhn, 2005;
Kuhn & Woo, 2008) (Reutzal and Cooter, 2012, p.193) a fact that rang true in this
lesson as well. The second time she read it she seemed to grasp more confidently what
the words were based on the context she saw them in. She read that a baby kangaroo was
called a joey and when initially seeing this word she started to sound it out but I
watched her reread the sentence again, taking context clues in and say Oh! Baby
kangaroo, that a joey! Right? This realization showed to me that in rereading the
sentence she comprehended what it was about, the context clues enabled her to know
what the word meant and thus allowed her to connect prior knowledge to current reading.
By the end of the lesson through rereading text her ability to recognize and read soft g

sounds as well as utilize text comprehension to figure out what words were, had
significantly improved which made me incredibly proud of the short lesson we had just
completed.
As Abby reread the text her confidence improved with it. Upon first seeing the
text her exclamation of worry showed to me that she was incredibly uncomfortable
reading aloud and even a shortened text elicited fear. She read quietly the first time and
her volume reached even softer decibels when she neared words she did not recognize
frequently looking to me for help. The second time reading the text though she perked up,
her posture became straighter and her volume increased, she breezed over the words she
previously struggled and did not need my aid nearly as much. This shows that the more
she read the text the more confident she became. Since she had tackled it once before she
knew she could do it again and because it was not going to change she felt more certain
that she could do it! As her confidence built and her knowledge of the text increased she
read with greater ease successfully completing my lesson with the outcomes I had hoped
to see her achieve. I am incredible proud of Abby and the work she did in this lesson; I
am also thrilled with the success of it and the strides she made in reading soft g words.