Amy Crawford

October 12, 2017

Classroom and ELL Student Information

Mia is a kindergarten student in Amy Perez’s classroom at Blue Ridge Primary Elementary School. She is
considered Level 1 according to the K-WAPT administered to her in August 2017. She is a newcomer
from Puerto Rico. Mia is in a class with 21 students, 2 others of whom are identified as ELLs (levels not
given because the K-WAPT doesn’t yield the same levels as ACCESS 2.0).

Classroom Context

For today’s writing lesson the children gathered on the carpet to hear the story Duckling Gets a
Cookie by Mo Willems. The students listened interactively to a read aloud by Mrs. Perez. She was
launching a study of author, Mo Willems. The teacher reminded the class that the reading students
would do today was to read the illustrations to help them understand the words better. They were free
to speak their thoughts and noticings as she read. Mrs. Perez did stop frequently throughout the story
to ask a question that sparked conversation. There were three opportunities for students to turn and
talk to a buddy about parts of the story. Following the read aloud, students got individual white boards
so they could do the writing portion of the story at the carpet today rather than writing in their writer’s
notebooks. In the assignment, the students were asked to think and write like Mo Willems, using
emotion on characters’ faces so the reader could understand how the characters feel. Through this
activity, all four domains, listening, speaking, reading and writing were addressed.

Classroom Reading and Writing

When I observed, Mrs. Perez was teaching a writing lesson. Students were learning to use the
pictures to help them read the story, and to try to show emotion in their own illustrations. Mia and the
other students were seated on the carpet in the whole group learning area by the easel. The objective
of the lesson was to show how characters feel in stories by changing the expression on their faces in the
illustrations. Students did quite a bit of speaking and listening since the work of the day was
interactive, but the primary domain covered today was writing. Students are learning to include
emotion in their writing by standing on the shoulders of Mo Willems.

As Mrs. Perez read the book, Duckling Gets a Cookie by Mo Willems, all of the students listened and
read the illustrations. She asked them to listen for how the characters, Pigeon and Duckling, felt in the
story. There were also opportunities throughout the story for turn and talk in which the students could
listen to, and comment upon, what their partner said. Mrs. Perez utilized a very simple fiction book in
which the illustrations and the manner in which print shows up on the page scaffold the understanding
of the plot. The sentence structures within the text were simple, mostly exclamatory sentences with a
lot of questions interspersed. It is an easy text to read expressively, and many facets of Mo Willem’s
work make it accessible and enjoyable for students of varying language levels. If students’ comments
didn’t seem to match what was really occurring, she quickly pointed out the faces of the characters or
how the author wrote large, red words to indicate how Pigeon felt.

The writing portion of today’s lesson was one that Mia and the other ELLs in the class could
participate in as well as the native English speakers. They practiced doing their writing on individual
white boards while sitting in the group. Mrs. Perez showed them a video of Mo Willems demonstrating
how to draw Pigeon. She let them try it out a few times. Noticing that Mia kept erasing and improving
her drawings, Mrs. Perez used Mia’s work as an example of how we can make the drawing over and
over, revising parts of it until we are happy with it. Mia seemed proud because the teacher used her
work and said good things about it. The students explored how changing the placement of the eyeball
and the size of different parts of the Pigeon helped show how the character felt. They were encouraged
to try this out in their own writing. Mrs. Perez told them she would be looking at the people and
animals they draw and write about to see if they could “write like Mo.”

I feel that Mrs. Perez had done an excellent job of structuring her lesson for maximum success for
her students. The low key way of practicing the skill on the white boards took some pressure off that
students sometimes feel when you give them paper and pencil since the whiteboard erases quickly and
easily. Errors don’t feel permanent. The opportunities she gave them to interact orally with the text,
with her, and with others as she read allowed them to express what they were learning and provided a
lot of background for when she asked them to do the writing work at the end. I did feel that the turn
and talk pieces might have been a bit unstructured, and wondered if it might be beneficial to assign
students to partnerships that allowed support for the lower language proficient students. I noticed that
some students didn’t stay focused on the topic they were asked to speak about, and some, like Mia,
were in pairs that didn’t speak at all. Partnering for success can be accomplished by creating a carpet
seating chart where talking buddies are placed in proximity of each other so that the turn and talk times
happen without lots of movement, and so students like Mia can be placed with a person who can
provide primary language support. Mia was joyful about the lesson today, and definitely remained more
engaged than I have seen her be before. The other students were talking about their work while they
drew, and Mia was not, but she did interact in Spanish with the teacher when the teacher took her
whiteboard to demonstrate to the class. The book they read will be placed in the classroom “Library of
Favorites” so students will have access to it if they wish to reread the text. Mrs. Perez reminded them
that they can always read the pictures if they can’t read the words.

Reading Assessments-Running Record and Analysis

Mia is a newcomer, and a kindergartener without a lot of print reading ability or experience. I
administered a running record and completed the Concepts About Print (CAP) assessment. I asked the
questions for the CAP in Spanish so I could determine if she understood the concept without having to
wonder if the language would be a barrier to her understanding the questions, and to me really knowing
if she did/didn’t know the concepts I was asking about. Mia demonstrated appropriate knowledge
about how to hold the book, find the front and back, and point to the title (both on the front and inside).
She could show where to begin reading and knew the concepts of first and last letter of a word. When
asked to point to the part of the page that told the story, Mia pointed to the words. She could point
demonstrating return sweep on pages that had more than one line of print. Mia was able to count
words, demonstrating one-to-one match, but when asked how many words were on the page, she
counted (in English) individual letters and stated (in Spanish) “veinte y uno.” She didn’t understand the
concept of upper and lower case letters, but did name several letters correctly (A, S, K, P, b, f, z, m, a, t)
She incorrectly named ‘e’ ‘h’ and ‘u’ by their Spanish names. Mia does demonstrate understanding that
the period meant “No hay mas palabras—no lee mas.” (There are no more words. Don’t read more.”
The responses indicate that Mia knows a lot about how print works, but still lacks some knowledge of
how letters differ from words. She also showed that there are some letters she isn’t able to identify.

Doing the running record helped me verify that Mia can use her knowledge of how print works in
reading independently. While her accuracy was very low, she utilized starting at the left and moving to
the right across the page. She pointed at one word at a time while reading. She used the picture to help
her predict the word at the end of some of the sentences, although she read the words as though they
were printed in Spanish. She knew she could appeal for help when she didn’t know the words, and
seemed very intent upon reading correctly and not just guessing. Again, I gave directions and asked the
questions both in English and in Spanish to make the task less intimidating for her, and because I know
she speaks extremely little English. Mia reads for meaning, and because she was reading a book printed
in English, but code switching to Spanish, she didn’t attend to the visual aspect of the words. For
example, when the sentence read, Dad y I correr bicicleta (Dad and I bike.). When Mia first began
reading she knew she could appeal, and she did. She didn’t recognize that the lines of print were nearly
identical except for the last word in each short page, and therefore made the same errors multiple times
even with my having provided the word at least once. Her overall percentage of accuracy was 40%, with
one self-correction. she was unable to respond at all to the inference question.

Writing Assessment—WIDA Writing Rubrics

I spent a few minutes with Mia doing a bit of writing. We wrote a bit more about the characters she
heard about in the story Mrs. Perez had read to her today (Duckling Gets a Cookie by Mo Willems). I
asked Mia to write about the story. I explained that she could use some pictures and some words. She
drew pictures of the pigeon and the duckling from the book. She labeled them with letters (p for
“pajaro” and p for “patito”). I asked her to write more. She said, “El pajaro estaba enojado porque el
patito tenia cookie.” (The bird is mad because the little duck had a cookie.) She paused and appealed by
looking at me. I asked her to try to write the words she had just said. She wrote some letters by saying
words slowly and writing down some sounds she knew. All of the letters were in a string, not separated
by spaces as though they were meant to be different words. Using the WIDA PreK-K rubric to assess her
writing, I would rate Mia’s writing as a 1 in Linguistic Complexity. She shows evidence of several letters
based on knowledge of sound letter correspondence even though the “words” she wrote in her piece
were in Spanish. The writing can’t quite be a 2 in this area, because level 2 specifically mentions that the
writing is in English. In the vocabulary usage portion of the rubric, Mia’s piece fits in level 2 because she
does use letters to represent beginning sounds and single letters represent whole words. I would rate
the Language Control in the piece as a 3 since there is quite a bit of influence of native language and the
invented spellings are limited, therefore limiting comprehensibility of the overall text. If I hadn’t been
there when she wrote it, I wouldn’t have known what she was attempting to write.

Reflections and Connections to Readings

In thinking about what I observed Mia doing as a reader and as a writer, I recall in Dr. Wright’s text
(2015, p. 223) that according to the NLP and CREDE, there is a close relationship between ELLs’ oral
proficiency and their ability to write in English. ELLs are unlikely to use words in their writing that they
don’t know orally. Their writing ability seemingly mirrors their English speaking ability. Mia does seem
to be benefitting from another finding by the NLP studies. Her writing ability in her home language is
influencing her writing ability in English. We have yet to determine what the context of her learning was
in Puerto Rico since kindergarten was reportedly more like a preschool, but the work I saw her do in her
piece about the pigeon and the duckling suggests that she might have had more exposure to literacy
instruction than we have previously believed.

Mia continues to be rather silent for long parts of her day at school (Wright, 2015 p. 155), but is
beginning to engage mentally more than she was during my first observation. She seems much more
content and comfortable in school now that the demands of first grade literacy have been removed.
She is in a classroom where there are many scaffolds present for her including a teacher who was
trained as a Literacy Coach in the balanced literacy framework. Mrs. Perez will be looking for
opportunities for gradual release of responsibility to Mia and the others. Within the next month they
will be moving into Guided Reading (Wright, 2015, p. 202) and Mia will have texts presented to her in
small groups where rich discussion of vocabulary and concepts will be present. We have placed books
that are written in Spanish in her classroom so that she may continue to develop literacy skills in her
home language. These are available to her during independent reading time. We continue to support
her with a bilingual paraprofessional who can provide primary language support to her during blocks of
time when she is working at literacy centers and in math exploration time. Mrs. Perez is monitoring
acquisition of letters and sounds, and is providing extra one-one time for Mia to practice this with the
paraprofessional. It would seem, from her writing, that she had a fair amount of knowledge of this prior
to coming here, and due to the similarity of most letter sounds in English and Spanish, that she will
probably pick this up fairly quickly.

Mia is in a pullout ELD group that meets four times per week. Our EL staff regularly debates the
efficacy of our programs, but always settles on the fact that pullout is the only realistic way we can serve
the large numbers of students we need to reach. I do see Mia learning in a safe environment during the
pullout time where her affective filter is lowered (Wright, 2015, p. 107). In that setting, where we learn
vocabulary and use our new words in simple sentence frames, she is only slightly behind the other
kindergarteners in her ability to produce meaningful sentences. She still requires some prompting, but
will successfully complete sentences. The predictability of our topics make it possible for her to answer
and speak with confidence, whereas in the classroom, the subject matter is less predictable to her and
she is less prepared to speak. We are beginning to implement some social play situations in the ELD
time, with the hopes that Mia and others will be able to speak more in social situations and develop
friendships at school.

I am grateful for the experience of observing my ELD students in their classroom settings. It helps me
stay in touch with the reality of what they need to be able to do at their grade levels. Many things I
have learned through this class have helped me have deeper conversations with teachers as we try to
figure out the best supports possible for our ELLs, and have helped me frame the problems my students
face in a more logical way based upon what I’ve learned about how second languages are learned. I’m
in awe of the way Mia and other ELLs face hard work every day. I see room for improvement in the way
our teachers approach scaffolding and supporting them, and I feel better equipped now to help them
learn, too.