Emma Oliver

Overview of Student

This literacy assessment summary will cover the assessments I conducted on my student,

Grace. She is a 5 year old girl currently placed in a Pre-K classroom for at risk children. She is

one of the oldest students in her classroom. She is a bright student but struggles with emotional

regulation and often gets upset by very small things.

Assessment One: Picture and Name Task

The purpose of this assessment was to see if the student can write their name and if they

understand that pictures have meaning. Grace drew a picture of Earth, as shown below. I noticed

my student was writing her name correctly during this assessment and she has an understanding

that pictures and marks on a page, mean something. The following statement is what she told me

about her drawing, “The picture is our solar system. Blue is the sea, black is outer space, Earth is

center, Earth is her planet. The purple is the gas and dust in space. Green is the continents of

Earth. Blue is the water. Black, blue, purple are different colors. I used green and blue to make

the Earth.” Grace showed advanced understanding overall in this assessment by legibly writing

her name and knowing her picture has meaning. She only lacked organizational details within

her picture. Moving forward, I would suggest that Grace work on thinking about her drawing

before actually starting her drawing. Referring to the Virginia’s Foundation Blocks for Early

Learning (2007) for four year olds, Grace has clearly met the Virginia Literacy Foundation

Block 2: Vocabulary, based on the results of this assessment. The overall goal of the standard is

“The child will develop an understanding of words and word meanings through the use of

appropriate vocabulary” (p. 12). She has met the following substandards: “use single words to
label objects, listen with increasing understanding to conversations and directions, follow one-

step oral directions, use new vocabulary with increasing frequency to express and describe

feelings and ideas” (p. 12). According to Vukelich (2018), “Each portfolio captures a child’s

learning overtime. Teacher study each child’s portfolio overtime so that they know how to adjust

their instruction and the kinds of experiences each child needs” (p. 181). We could use Grace’s

drawing to start a portfolio for her and to keep track of how her skills progress during the school

year.

Assessment Two: Concepts about Print Task

The purpose of this assessment is to test their concept of print awareness. According to

Vukelich (2018), “Basically concepts of print are the understanding of how print and text work”

(p. 47) Grace was able to score an 11/12 for the concept about print assessment, as shown below.

She understood and was able to answer every question, except one, without struggle. She lacked

the skill to name a period when I pointed to and asked “what is this?”, after answering

incorrectly I did tell her that it was a period and Grace said “Oh yeah, I knew that it’s at the end
of a word”. So, Grace has some familiarity with a period but did not know what it was without

prompting. Referring to the Virginia’s Foundation Blocks for Early Learning (2007), Grace

checked off all of the concepts under Virginia Literacy Foundations Block 5: Print and Book

Awareness. The overall goal of the standard is, “The child will demonstrate knowledge of print

concepts” (p. 15). She met the following standards: “identify the front of a book, identify the

location of the title of a book, identify where reading begins on a page, demonstrate

directionality of reading left to right on a page, and identify part of a book that “tells the story””

(p. 15). Moving forward, I would work with Grace to understand what a sentence is and the role

of punctuation, along with different types of punctuation.

Assessment Three: Alphabet Recognition

I conducted the PALS quick check letter recognition, shown below. I conducted this

assessment not only on Grace, but on each child in my practicum class. This assessment was

suggested to me by my corresponding teacher. I pulled each child out individually to complete

this assessment. The goal of this assessment was to see where each child was with their letter

recognition skills and concept of letter sounds. Grace was able to name every upper and

lowercase letter of the alphabet. She was able to recognize more than half of the letters’

corresponding sound. According to Virginia’s Foundation Blocks for Early Learning (2007),

Grace completed all the standards under Virginia Literacy Foundation Block 4: Letter

Knowledge and Early Word Recognition. The goal of the standard is “the child will demonstrate

basic knowledge of the alphabetic principle” (p. 14). Grace is able to “correctly identify 10-18

alphabet (uppercase) letters by name in random order, select a letter to represent a sound (8-10

letters), correctly provide that most common sound for 5-8 letters, read simple/familiar high

frequency words, including his or her name” (p. 14). Moving on, I would work with Grace to

recognize all letters’ corresponding sounds and to continue practicing letter recognition within

words and eventually whole sentences.

Summary

Based off the assessments I conducted, Grace is in a great spot for her age. She is

completing and surpassing Virginia’s Foundation Blocks for Early Learning (2007), specially

within the Literacy Foundation Blocks. Moving forward, I hope to work with Grace on the early
stages of reading and recognizing different sight words that we use weekly in our read aloud

books. Grace can successfully spell her name as well so I’d like to work with her on spelling the

sight words if they do not acced 3-4 letters. According to Vukelich (2018), “early writing plays a

major role in children’s overall early literacy development as a cornerstone of early reading

development” (p. 132) I think it would be very beneficial for Grace to start working with

spelling more than just her name and playing around with everyday words as it will help greatly

when she starts her early reading as Pre-K ends and kindergarten begins

References

Virginia Department of Education. (2007). Virginia’s Foundation Blocks for Early Learning:

Comprehensive Standards for Four-Year-Olds[PDF]. Office of

Elementary Instructional Services Virginia Department of Education.

Vukelich, Carol. Helping Young Children Learn Language and Literacy: Birth through

Kindergarten. 4th ed., Pearson, 2018.