November 26, 2019

To the Family of Adelyne,

Hello, my name is Mikayla Milburn, I am a senior Early Childhood Education major at the
University of Mount Union and I have been working with Adelyne, or as she preferred me to call
her, Addie in the RAC program at Rockhill. I wanted to begin by thanking you for allowing me to
have the opportunity to work with Addie. You are receiving this letter because I would like to
share with you what I have learned about Addie’s strengths and some areas of improvement in
reading and writing.
As you know, I have been working with Addie and I would like to share some of Addie’s
strengths with you. One of her biggest strengths was reciting details from a passage during oral
and silent reading. Another one of Addie’s strengths was her understanding of homophones
and compound words. For compound words, Addie was able to tell me, without any prompting,
what a compound word was. When I asked her to break down compound words into the two
words they are composed of, she did so without hesitation. With writing, Addie is very good at
organization. She was able to properly construct a paragraph when given a prompt of events,
all in correct order. The strengths mentioned above are just a few of Addie’s many strengths in
the subject area of reading and writing.
In addition to strengths, I also noticed Addie had some areas of improvement. One area
for improvement for Addie would be synonyms. I believe that Addie had mistaken synonyms for
antonyms, which is a very common mistake made by many students when learning synonyms.
Another area for improvement Addie displayed was in the areas of conventions and sentence
fluency. With conventions, Addie has difficulty with capitalizing words correctly and her
grammar when writing. Sentence Fluency in Addie’s writing also is an area for improvement. In
her writing, she was unable to correctly use periods, exclamation marks and question marks. In
addition to synonyms and writing conventions, reading orally is an area for improvement with
Addie as well. When I asked her to read orally, she would easily lose focus, lose her spot and get
a little confused with the plot of the story because the skills of recalling details, sequencing,
inferencing, cause and effect and main idea were difficult for her. Though Addie had areas for
improvement, she always maintained a positive mindset and was willing to try anything with
her best effort.
Now that I have shared with you some areas of improvement, I would like to share with
you some activities to approve and build upon Addie’s learning. For the topic of synonyms, an
activity that could be done with Addie is matching. She loved playing matching games when we
worked together. For this activity all you would need to do is make cards with different words
on them, keeping in mind that she is to pick pairs of synonyms, like “smile” and “grin”. For
writing, you could ask Addie to write about her day or something that happened at school in
paragraph form. Once she has written it, you can ask her to reread it and keep in mind her
punctuation marks and have her add her punctuation with a colored marker. For the area of
oral reading, I would suggest Addie reading orally to you, a sibling or even a pet or stuffed
animal. While she is reading, I would suggest that she have something to keep her place while
she is reading, like a bookmark so that she can follow the lines while she is reading, or even
have her trace her finger along the words that she is reading. This prevents her from losing her
spot when reading and will help her maintain her focus. When she is done reading, you could
 November 26, 2019

ask her to tell you what the story was about, or something she liked about the story. This is a
way to see if she retained what she had read.
I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity with Addie, she is an amazing,
smart and bright young girl. She was such a joy to work with and I am deeply saddened that our
time has come to an end of working together. If you have any questions about our lessons and
sessions we had these past couple of months, or anything at all, you may contact me at my
University of Mount Union email, milburma2020@mountunion.edu. Thank you again!

Respectfully,

Mikayla Milburn