Name: Student A Grade: 5 Age: 11

Examiner: Lindsey Vande Wall Date of Testing: February 28-May8 School: Greenwood Elementary

Background Information
Student A is in fifth grade and enjoys reading and math. She is considered as an ELL student at Greenwood. Student A is always eager to read and learn from week to week. Throughout her work during the semester it became apparent that Student A is very good at reading with expression and has good fluency with good rate. She practices good reading habits and reads each day in her free time. Some of her favorite types of books include mystery or books with suspense. Student A monitors herself well while she reads by slowing down or rereading hard sections of a text or what she doesnt understand.

Determination of Needs and Strengths

Student A really likes to read. She really wants to give the right answer and will give the one that she thinks you want to hear. She likes to please her teachers. Since working with her, I have had the opportunity to see her grow in comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary. She is very strong in comprehension and after reading a story can almost retell it word for word. Over the course of the semester, Student As fluency and expression have improved. When reading she pays attention to how she reads aloud and if she doesnt like the way something sounds, she will go back and read it again. She seemed to really like the activities that we did and what we worked on. I tried to make sure at least something we did each week was based on an idea or recommendation of hers. I noticed as we worked our way up to more difficult words with synonym and antonym work, that Student A had trouble understanding what these words meant even when given in context. With continued work, I would focus on increasing vocabulary with her.

Rationale
At the beginning of the semester I decided to work on comprehension strategies with Student A based on the suggestion of her ELL teacher. We worked on visualizing, questioning, predicting, and inferring. By using different texts the lent themselves to these strategies, Student A really grasped the concept of these and started to use different ones when appropriate while reading. To check this, I asked Student A about the sequence of events, setting, with main characters and she was able to retell stories almost word for word. We also focused on fluency and expression while reading because that is something she felt she needed to work on based on our discussion at the beginning of the semester when we first met. We worked on this with shared readings, readers theater, and practicing reading dialogues. By the end of our time together I thought she really improved on expression and when she thought it wasnt good enough she would reread the part and change the way she read it. Another concept that we worked on was synonyms and antonyms to increase vocabulary. To practice this, Student A did a variety of word sorts with increasing difficulty from week to week. We had discussions about what words meant and how to use them. After discussion, she found words that were a match with the word and explained why, we almost made it game like. At the end of our

tutoring sessions this semester, we worked on writing by predicting and responding to text. Writing continues to improve with more exposure and practice so I decided to work on this with Student A to help her improve her writing. Throughout the semester, I also tried to include both fiction and nonfiction texts. I did this because as students get older they increase the reading and use of nonfiction texts in school. To prepare Student A for this she learned about different text features and content information in nonfiction text.

Assessments
Elementary Reading Attitude Survey Recreational: 31 points/ 65th percentile Academic: 36 points/ 96th percentile Full Raw Score: 67 points/ 89th percentile San Diego Quick Assessment Grade 2 Grade 3 Grade 4 Grade 5 Grade 6 Independent Independent Independent Independent Frustration

Words Their Way Elementary Spelling Inventory Initial Consonants Final Consonants Short Vowels Diagraphs & Blends Long Vowel Patterns Other Vowel Patterns Inflected Endings Derivational Relations Words Spelled Correctly Total Ortho Points Stage Running Records Book: Your Muscles on the Move Level: R Words/Errors: 100/1 Self Correct: 0:1 2/2 6/6 5/5 13/13 5/5 6/6 20/24 3/5 20/25 60/66 Syllables and Affixes

Accuracy: 99% Rate: 158 WPM Book: Treasure Hunt Level: T Words/Errors: 120/4 Self Correct: 0:4 Accuracy: 97% Rate: 120 WPM Book: Wild Weather Level: V Words/Errors: 122/1 Self Correction: 0:1 Accuracy: 99%

Assessment Observations
The first assessment given to Student A was the Elementary Attitude Reading Survey. This showed me that Student A is excited about reading in school ranking in the 96th percentile and not as excited about reading outside of school ranking in the 65th percentile. Overall based on her answers, she does enjoy reading both in and out of school and likes learning from them. I administered the San Diego Quick Assessment to Student A. This test measures the recognition of words out of context. Proficient readers read these words well both in and out of text, while weak readers rely on context to help them. Each grade level has its own set of words in which Student A was independent through grade 5, only missing one word total, which was in grade 4. She reached frustration level at grade 6 where she missed 3 words. I continued to grade 7 just to see if it was the certain words in the grade 6 that she did not know, but Student A really struggled with the grade 7 words too and did not even try to read some of them. I stopped the test at this point, and this assessment shows that Student A is at grade level for reading words. I also administered the Words Their Way Elementary Spelling Inventory to Student A. According to this assessment she is in the syllables and affixes stage of spelling. Student A was proficient in the initial consonants, final consonants, short vowels, digraphs and blends, and vowel patterns. When given this assessment Student A spelled 20/25 words correctly. This assessment shows that she needs instruction on the category of inflected endings, syllable junctures, consonant doubling, prefixes, and suffixes where she scored 20/24. She could use instruction on bases and roots of words as well where she scored 3/5. When performing running records on Student A she read a Level R book at 99%, a Level T book at 97%, and a Level V book at 99%. When reading, she made very few errors but made no attempts to self-correct, even though there were a few instances where she repeated phrases that she did not think sounded right. I used these levels for the running record because I had no idea at what level Student A was at. With these assessments it is clear that she is ready to increase in reading levels.

Reflection On Student Progress

Student A is very consistent from week to week and is always eager to read and learn. She was very engaged in lessons and made sure to ask questions if she didnt understand something. At the beginning of each session, we always talked about how school was going on and what was going on in her life she really opened up as the semester progressed. I really enjoyed working with Student A from week to week and looked forward to tutoring. With the completion of each lesson, Student A could tell me what we worked on for the day and really seemed to get a lot out of the lesson. After we got our reading lessons done, she really enjoyed working on math using the I Pad. Throughout our time together, she made sure she used a variety of different comprehension strategies we worked on especially the questioning and predicting each time she read a text. With this work and focus, her ability to comprehend and retell events in the story increased. In the beginning, Student A wanted to work on fluency with an emphasis on expression. She grew in that from beginning to end and made sure to focus on that each time she read. When she didnt like the way something she read sounded, she would always read it again. The only time she really got frustrated in our time together is when we were working on synonyms/antonyms and I brought words that were too high of a level for her. Other than that, she was very cooperative and engaged during our time together.

Reflection On Teaching
I think that my teaching improved greatly from this semester compared to last semesters tutoring. Last semester, I wasnt sure of what I wanted to do or how to present it to my student. I think I had a better idea of what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go with my student this semester along with my teaching and delivery were better too. I would attribute this to the variety of classes I have taken this semester and what we have been learning in those. In these classes I learned a variety of things including teaching different comprehension strategies, different ways to do shared reading along with other ways to work on fluency, and the importance of using nonfiction texts which I used throughout the semester as well. With an older student this semester, I was also able to learn more about and use a variety of assessments. I gave them to my student and was also able to analyze them so I could learn what they meant and where to go from there. I think that this experience will help me a great deal in the future as I continue to work with a variety of students. Work with tutoring, preparing lessons, and doing a variety of assessments will help me prepare to do the same with students in my own classroom someday. I think that Student A has really grown in her reading this semester. She was eager to work, read, and learn each week and come on a consistent basis. She has become a much more fluent reader especially when it comes to expression, she has learned and used a variety of comprehension strategies, and has also increased her vocabulary in working with synonyms and antonyms. Student A was a good reader to begin with, but with her constant work and willingness to learn I think she is an even better reader. Her improvement can also be attributed to all of her extra work and time spent reading outside of class and tutoring in her own free time.