November 10. 2008 Week 5

Today we first met with the Vice Principal to discuss our progress in the observations. She gave each of us a Student Academic Profile of our individual students. The profile is very useful because it acknowledges not only the students strengths and weaknesses but it also addresses goals, strategies and materials. The students skills are rated 4-3-2-1 in different categories in both reading and math. A big thing I have talked about in the previous blogs is working on decoding with my student. On the profile she noted as partially meeting the standard (2). I strategy noted on the profile is the use of a graphic organizer to help her decipher information and note-taking. Today I did a summary with her and immediately thought that next week we would work with a graphic organizer to separate and organize her ideas because she has a hard time summarizing the book when writing. My goal is to haver her identify the main event of a story and then give me supporting details. I hope using a graphic organizer will help bring the ideas she says to writing. 

Today my student and I started out by reading the rest of the story, Lets Talk About Games. Last week we read only the first four pages when I did a running record. Kai-Ting was kind enough to type out the story for us on a running record form so we could keep track of errors and accuracy. I was pleasantly surprised out how well she did with the words. Although I took note of her errors I had her take her time and repeat words when she inserted other words based on only the first letter. I would say 90% of her errors in reading this book were due to guessing based on the first letter of a word. When I have her slow down tracking the words and repeating them she is better at self-correcting. When she does not know a word she guesses rather then trying to sound it out. Sometimes the words are simple and she knows them but still throws in a different word, such as they for the or no for on. After reading the book I had her answer comprehension questions that are actually on the last page of the book. The questions asked  what games were being played in the book and what she learned from the book. I also asked her to discuss the different games, which games she likes, and give reasons to why she likes them. She had no problem discussing how her brother plays football and her sister plays basketball. She said those were her favorite games and she explained the rules for me that weren't in the book. When I asked her what she learned from the book she had a harder time actually discussing what was said versus what she knew from experience. When I ask her to tell me about the book she seems to stall and not really answer. If I ask her specific questions she is better at answering in detail what was read. I asked her to tell me about hockey but she had a hard time getting started. I said what do they play on? Ice. What do they play with? A puck. What is the puck made out of? Rubber. 

After discussing the book I had her begin her summary of the book. We only had about 6-8 minutes for the summary. This was more challenging for her and she only wrote down the main topic and one sentence. She knows what the book is about but has a hard time organizing her thoughts into writing a paragraph. In class they use the idea of bullets before writing. Next week I am going to use a graphic organizer to help her gather her thoughts and the use of bullets this way she can see where her summary is going before she writes it. I also am going to pull out words that she skips in reading such as wear, heads, tries, either, leather and exciting and work on sounds. She has a hard time decoding vowel sounds, final sounds and word parts (prefixes, suffixes and word families).

After our one-on-one time the students worked on a writing sample where they picked a topic sentence from a list on the board and wrote detailed sentences. My student chose the topic sentence "My favorite class is..." and she wrote gym. I had her use scrap paper to bullet out points before writing them into a paragraph. She skips a lot of sounds in words so we had to sound out revolution, dance, popcorn, basketball, etc. Although we didn't get to the actual paragraph writing she did come up with 3 bullets and a closing sentence. I had to ask her a few times "what's missing in this sentence" and "what goes at the end of a sentence", to remind her of her punctuation. In her previous writing sample that I looked at it was noted that she has a hard time with past tense. She tends to skip the "ed" ending and just say the beginning word, as she does in writing. So as noted before we are going to have to work on ending sounds as well.