Reader Case Study Corrective Reading Heather Wohlford December 12, 2008
Phase I: Reader Background Assessments to use Assessment Database Phase II: Interpretation of Assessments Session Plans Kidspiration Activity Phase III: Student Work Session Reflection Phase IV: About the reader s growth About the researcher s growth Table of Contents
Phase I: A. Reader Background The Reader for the case study is a male kindergartner. His family is in the low socioeconomic class and his teacher believes that he receives Free and Reduced Lunches. His parents are divorced and he lives with his mother. She is going to college and works at a place that rehabilitates drug and alcohol addicts. He visits his father every other weekend. He works at Jimmy Johns. Before kindergarten, he went to three years of preschool. The Reader attended two years of preschool at a Methodist church and one year at a Lutheran Preschool. All he remembers from those years is watching TV in the library and that they had a day that they were able to look at fake hospital supplies. He doesn t remember having a letter of the day or working on the alphabet. The reader enjoys many hobbies. When asked he listed softball, soccer, horses, cheetahs, outside, electric scooters, buildings, and Curious George. He also has a good attitude towards literacy. He is really excited about reading and says that he is already good at it. He is also excited about learning how to write and says that he is good at that was well. That positive attitude will be very beneficial. B. Assessments to use: When the researcher talked to his teacher, she was able to name a couple of strengths and weaknesses of the Reader. She had already performed DIBELS and her own screening test. She says that he does already write his name, can look and copy things, and can recite his alphabet. He is also very good about following directions. The weakness that she can see right now is that he did not come in to kindergarten with
reading readiness. While he can recite his alphabet he struggles when they are mixed up and with upper and lower case. She has also noticed that he has trouble following the text when somebody else is reading. There are a couple of tests that the researcher will need to perform to learn more about the Reader. Since the student has already performed a DIBELS assessment and teacher made screening assessment the researcher can use those results to guide her. These tests identified the student for the study. They also showed that the student still needed to work on his knowledge of the alphabet. He only knew 8 of the capital letters, so that was the first priority. The researcher will start by conducting the Core Phonic Survey. He has been in school for almost two months so the test that she gave will not be completely up to date. To get a more accurate test the researcher will conduct this test so that she can focus the lesson on the letters that he needs more help with. The test focuses first on naming the capital letters then on lowercase letters. After that, it tests letter sound knowledge. This is going to be the diagnostic test During the sessions, the researcher is going to use ABC flashcards to work with the student. His ability to name the letters on both the upper and lower case cards should increase during this time. By using these cards the researcher can monitor the student s progress. The researcher can also use the cards that the student can correctly identify to start making one syllable words. The third assessment that the researcher is going to use is a teacher created Letter/Sound knowledge assessment. This assessment is the one that the teacher uses at the beginning of the year as a screening assessment. This test uses flashcard so that the
letters are in random order. It also separates them into capital and lower case letters. The next section has a consonant sound knowledge assessment that uses the same flashcards. It finishes with a short reading assessment that has two parts. The first part is a list of sight words and the second part is a sentence that has a picture to help them read it. This makes it a steady type of assessment, but it is not the same order that the teacher would have used. This is going to be the outcome based assessment for this study. By the end of the sessions the researcher wants the student to be able to name all of the letters upper and lower case, and identify the sounds of at least half of the letters in the alphabet.
C. Assessment Database NAME GRADE HOW TO USE WHEN TO USE IT INFORMATION PROVIDED Core Phonics Survey K-12 Student reads from the Student Material and test giver records on own Record Form AIMSweb K-1 Students read visually presented items, then say phonemes in orally presented items or they write down orally presented items. Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Learning Skills K-6 Four pictures the student orally states the beginning sound, then the child has to state the beginning sound of an orally pronounced word that matches one of the pictures EdCheckup K-8 Has oral reading passages, letter sound probes and word lists A to Z Benchmarks K-8 Student reads for book and teacher marks on separate page, then asks comprehension Quick Check Questions Alphabet knowledge, decoding, and phonemic awareness To monitor progress To assess reading readiness at the beginning and middle of Kindergarten The is used for screen and progress monitoring This can be used to identify students reading level Shows mastery of elements, but more specific elements can be pinpointed Diagnostic Provides scores to show improvement of specific elements of reading Progress At or below grade level. More specific elements can be seen Can Identify at risk students and their RTI Consistency in errors tells the teacher weaknesses REFERENCE INFORMATION Published by: Consortium on Reading Excellence Copyright:1999, then again in 2008 Author: N/A Published by:aimswab Copyright: 2001 Author: Susan Middleton Authors: Deno and Colleges Published by: Dynamics Measurement Group Written in the 1980 s Authors: Drs. Stanley Deno and Douglas Marston Published by: EdCheckup Copyright: 2005 Published by: Voyager Expanded Learner Copyright: 2002 Several Authors
Phase II: E. In the assessment that the researcher has given, the CORE Phonic Survey, the researcher was able to determine what the main focus should be and what a reasonable goal would be for the reader. The reader only knew 8 capital letters at the beginning of the year. When I performed this assessment he was able to identify 18 capital letters. He did label all of the letters that he had labeled previously and 10 new letters. The lowercase letters were different however. He had labeled 6 letters in the beginning of the year and similarly he labeled 6 letters during this assessment. The difference was that the only letter that was the same between the assessments was the letter j. That reveals that he is not quite where we initially thought with his lowercase letters. During the assessment one of the lowercase letters that he identified was through the use of looking at the capital letter in the section above it. That showed the researcher that he is able to make the connection between the capital and lowercase letters. Also, since he is making such good process, the researcher will be able to start working on letters sounds sooner and the goal will be to start making words by the last one maybe two sessions. F. Plan of Action: The sessions will be done in the morning, preferably right after he finishes his seatwork at the beginning of the day. a. The first session: i. The researcher will start the sessions by introducing the cards that they will be using in a fun, but productive way. First, they will go through them. If he names them correctly then he gets to keep the
card. If he doesn t the researcher does. After that the researcher sorts out the matching lowercase letters to the ones that the student identified correctly. The research and student will then play memory matching the upper and lower case letters. The researcher will demonstrate by doing a think aloud. She will do one normal turn, Okay this is a capital C, now I need to find a lowercase c. It looks the same, but it is smaller. Then she will demonstrate a how another turn would look like, This is a lowercase f, I need to find the capital F. It looks the almost the same, but it has all straight lines. I think that I flipped it over somewhere in the top row earlier. If he gets a match he has to say the name of the letter to keep the match. If he doesn t the cards go back down. Since the reader knows a lot of his capital letters they can use that to work on his lowercase letters. b. The second session: i. The researcher will start this session by playing an alphabet go fish game in which the pairs are capital and lower case letters. In order to get a match the player would need to get the capital and one lowercase letter. After playing that game a couple of times, the researcher is going to start working on letter sounds. To do this we are going to start making a sound chart. We will not be able to get to work on it a lot with the time left but I am going to have him get it started but writing a few letters on it. Since he does know his
alphabet well, but he doesn t make the connection from the name to the symbol, we are going to put the letters in the order that they appear going through the flashcards. The researcher will also give the student his alphabet cards to work with. The cards have the whole alphabet in capital and lower case letters. It is going to be his take home resource. He can work on what we have been working on with one of his parents or get use to the symbols more for writing. c. The third session: i. The research wants to see what kind of progress is being made and what sound he knows. They are going to start this by going through all of the flashcards. This is the progress monitoring assessment. While they are doing this she is going to separate them into piles: letters that he knows name and sound, letters that he knows the name, but not the sound, and letters that he doesn t know. Then they are going to write the letters that he didn t know on a bingo board and use the flashcards to play bingo. After going through bingo a couple of times we are going to work on the writing the rest of the alphabet on the sound chart. Depending on what letters he does not know the research can do a think aloud about identifying those letters from each other. d. The fourth session:
i. The researcher is going to start this session by reading the book The Alphabet Tree by Leo Lionni. After reading the book, they are going to use the flashcards to start making words. They will start by using words families such as an words. The researcher will do a think aloud about changing the beginning sound and how to make a new word using that beginning letter. They are going to make these words using the flashcards and write them on the Kidspiration graphic organizer. When they are done with this they will work on starting the pictures for their sound chart. They are going to go through the sound chart and he is going to come up with words that start with the letter in each box and draw that object. e. The fifth session: i. The researcher will start this session by reading Curious George From ABC to XYZ. During this session the research is going to put some shaving cream on the table. The student is going to write things in the shaving cream. Using the letters that the student is struggling with the researcher will do a think aloud on how to write them and try to relate any that can be connected. The researcher will look at the things that the student was struggling with to pick what the student will write. They will work on this for a while, then they will get the area and the student s hands cleaned up.
After have the area is cleaned up they will work on finishing the drawings on the sound chart. f. The sixth session: i. The researcher is going to give the Letter/Sound knowledge assessment to see how much the student improve during the sessions. This is the outcome based assessment. Then as a reward the researcher is going to let he student pick one of the activities that they did during the sessions and they will play it once before he goes back into the classroom. G. Kidspiration Activity a. Title of the book: The Alphabet Tree b. In this book there are letters that live in the top of a tree. There is a strong wind that comes and blows a lot of the letters away forcing the remaining letters to hide by the trunk in fear. One day a Word-bug comes and tells them that they don t need to hide from the wind. They can form words and that will make them heavier and stronger against the wind so that it can t blow them away. Soon after that a caterpillar comes and tells then that those words would be even better if they were put together in a sentence. When they form sentences the caterpillar helps them make a really important sentence and the carries the sentence away to the President. c. I created the Kidspiration page in the form of tree so that the student can take the letters and sounds that he knows to create words. This web is
meant to show the importance and give purpose to learning his letters and sounds. He is creating the words to save the letters from blowing away.
Dear Mrs. R My name is Heather Wohlford. About a month ago you received a letter asking your permission for J to be part of a Reader Case Study. While we have talked briefly, I wanted to take the time to inform you what it is that I am going to be working with J on and ways that you can help. At the beginning of the year Mrs. did two assessments to see where he was in his knowledge of letters and their sounds. Your son was in the middle section of the test scores, which is good. Why was he picked for the case study? He was not identified as a struggling student, but just as a student that could benefit from some one-on-one work on his alphabet. He knows most of his capital letters, so focus is going to be on learning lowercase letters and then letter sounds. Once he can consistently identify the sounds of a few letters, we are going to start putting them together to make words. While most of the work that we are going to be doing will be done in the meetings, I have made a set of alphabet flashcards that includes the lower case and capital letters. If you do have some time at home, you can go through them with him or you can ask him what we
have done with the cards. If you do go through the cards, I encourage you to go through them in a random order, not alphabetical order. He knows his alphabet very well, but we want him to make the letter-name connection. You do not have to go through the cards at home though. It is definitely not required, but the extra reinforcement of the things we are working on could only benefit J. I do want to thank you for allowing me to work with your son. I believe that this will be good for both of us. It is an assignment that I need to do for one of my classes, but more importantly it is an opportunity to make sure that J has a good foundation to start reading. If you do have any questions about what J and I are working on please feel free to contact me at (260) 672-3638 or at halahr@spartans.manchester.edu. Thankfully Yours, Heather Wohlford
Phase III: Student Work
Session Reflections: First Session: During this session the researcher went through the flashcards and then played a memory game using the letters that he didn t know. This went okay except the student missed more than the researcher expected. Their memory board ended up being bigger than she had originally planned so the game took longer than expected. If she does this again she will separate the cards into a couple different games so that the board is not so large. Second Session: The go fish game went really well. The student was able to ask for the correct letter the entire time. There is a picture on the card of an animal that starts with the letter so those provided a good visual aid for the students. They started the sound chart, but were only able to fill in half of the letters so far. He got the b and d mixed up so they spent a little time looking at the differences in the two letters. Third Session: The researcher did the progress monitoring assessment at the beginning of this session. The student did very well on it he has made some great progress especially with his lowercase letters. He started out only knowing six letters and this time he was able to name all but nine of them. The bingo game went pretty well to practice identifying the letters that he struggles with and it gave them time to focus on the letters that he has difficulty with. They did get the rest of the letters on the sound chart. Fourth Session: The researcher started the session by reading The Alphabet Tree. This went really well in fact they took some time while she was reading to look at a few of the words that the letters were making. Then they tried to make some of their own words using the an family. This started pretty rocky. It seemed like the student kind of shut down when he the an was put in front of him. They had to start by the researcher making the first word and working with him to sound it out. Individually the student could say the sounds of the letters, but he could not blend them. After a few words, he was starting to pick up on it a little and he did the last two words by himself. The researcher had to point out that the words rhymed and say the words that they had already created before he could do the last two. Fifth Session: The researcher started by reading Curious George from ABC to XYZ. This read aloud went really well. They go through the ABC s and have a word or phrase that goes with each letter. The student did really well naming the letters and even named some of the corresponding words. They did a shaving cream activity in which the student was writing in the shaving cream. They focused this time on b, d, p, and q. He mixes those letters up so she started by having him write his name. His name ends with a b and the research has never seen him write it wrong when spelling his name. After he wrote his name she erased all of the letters except the b and had him write a d. He was able to use
the b that he had already written to write the d correctly. Then with those two present she had him write a p and then a q. This seemed to work really well. Having him start by writing his name gave him a point of reference for the other letters and he was able to do really well. Sixth Session: The researcher did the outcome based assessment. He was able to name all of his capital letter but one, H, he named all of his lower case letters but six of them, and he was able to say 12 of the consonant sounds. After the test he really wanted to know had he did. The researcher had him look at the H after the test and he named it perfectly then. He did really well. The researcher let him pick which activity they would do again and he picked the shaving cream activity. They focused again on the b, d, p, and q and had him start with his name, but they also did the h and n that he mixed up on the test and the w and m that he had mixed up. The activity went really well. After the activity he finished his sound drawing and the research was able to make a copy and give him his
sound chart at the end.
Phase IV: H. The Reader a. Assessments: The screening assessment revealed that the reader needed to work on his letter knowledge first. He knew most of his capital letters but he only knew 6 of his lowercase letters. One of those he identified by looking up at the capital letter in the section above. That told her two things. First he can make the association between upper and lower case letters. Second, it told the researcher that she needed to cover the box above even though the test did not tell her to do that. Since he could make the correlation between capital and lowercase letters the researcher planned the first two session doing activities where he could match them. He was able to do that pretty well. The progress monitoring assessment revealed that the interventions were working, but there were still some letters that he still needed to work on. The letters that the researcher needed to focus on were b, d, p, q, n, l, w, v, and y. I noticed that he struggled with mixing up b, d, p, and q. He also mixed up the v and the y, he thought the l was a capital I, the w was an m, and the n he called an h. The researcher had him write all of them on a 3 x 3 bingo board. They played bingo a couple of times to work on the recognition of those words. Then the researcher planned the
activities to work on those letters, especially b, d, q, and p. When they did the shaving cream activity, the researches had him start by writing his name. It ended with a b and she had never observed him writing it wrong while writing his name. Then she wiped out his name except the b and told him to write a d. Then she had him write a p, and then a q. This gave him a base to start from and he was able to look at that first one to make the rest. It was helpful to have that point of reference. They were grouped because he mixes up not only which side the stick goes on but whether it goes up or down. This time however he really understood and was able to write the letters at least with the others present. The outcome assessment revealed that he had made significant progress during the sessions. While he did not get to the goals of knowing all of his letters, he did improve a lot. He knew all but one capital letter. That one was H and this was one he hadn t missed in the past during the sessions. He also labeled 20 of the lowercase letters. The letters that he was not able to identify were b, h, l, q, w, and y. He did meet the goal of knowing half of his letter sounds. He was able to correctly identify 12 of the consonants. He was only able to read 4 of the sight words. He should have been able to read a few more since they have covered a few on their word wall. He was able to read most of the sentence. The sentence is, I go to a school. He was able to make
the 1 to 1 relationship pointing to the words, but he read, I go to a house. This means that he is reading the words and looking at the pictures, but he is not focusing on the first letter of the words that he does not know. b. Student work samples: During the sessions he has really progressed, but the next thing to work on would be blending. He knows a lot of his letters and letters sounds and that should still be worked on, but he can not put the letters together to form a word yet. The words that he knew were sight words that he had covered. If he was given a word that had not been covered in class he didn t know what to do with it. The researcher tried to work on that a little during the sessions, but the main focus was on getting the sounds right, because when he sees something that he is unsure of he doubts himself on other things, such as letter sounds, and starts making random guesses. He can look at the letters c, a, and t individually, but once you put them together in a word he can not verbally put them together to make a word. He starts to question the sounds and makes them a different letter instead of blending them together. At the end of each session the researcher would tell the reader how well he was doing. She would also tell him what they were going to do the next time she came. She did this for two
reasons. It gave him something to look forward to for the next time and it told him what she wanted him to accomplish the next time they were together. She did not share the goals with the student for the entire intervention, just for the next time. She wanted to encourage him and especially towards the middle, she thought that it might cause him to worry or doubt himself if she shared the long term goals. c. Observed changed reading behavior: The reader s attitude has changed a little towards reading. At the beginning, he told the researcher that he loved reading and that he had read a chapter book the night before. While the research knew that was not all true it was encouraging that he was excited to read. He started out wanted to read everything. When we were going through the flashcards the first time he wanted to find the letters everywhere. There was student work on the wall in front of our table and he liked to point out letters in those as we were going through the cards. During the sessions she noticed a slight curve in attitude towards the middle. He doubted himself more and would not even try to read words. Once they worked on making words using the same ending he started to improve. That may have been from encouragement and excitement that he was reading according to the researcher or from himself. Either way
the rest of the time he was excited to go out in the hallway with the researcher and asked as soon as he saw her in the morning. I. Professional Growth: a. Observed Changes in you as a reading teacher i. Teaching Behaviors: 1. One thing that I noticed was that I learned to be flexible. There were some things that he needed some more time on and that was okay. While we were first going through the flashcards he really wanted to find them in his surrounding. That was not part of my lesson plan, but it did provide an authentic source for the letters, so we looked for them in the student work. We only got to do the matching activity that I had planned once, but he got more practice associating the letter symbol by letting him search his environment. I know that this will not always work, but in this situation it worked pretty well to give him extra practice in a way that interested him. 2. I have always heard the phrase assessment should drive your instruction, but I had never gotten a chance to implement it or really see it in action. This gave me that opportunity to look at the results and say, Okay he is struggle with mixing up these four letters so I should concentrate and activity on those to reinforce his letter
knowledge. Then I got to do it and see how it helped. In the outcome he did not get all four correct, but he did get 2 out of 4 correct so he had made some progress. He also noticed when he saw one of the letters that he had said already to the incorrect symbol that he had mixed them up and stuck to his answer that this one was the p and he was right. 3. I thought that I would have trouble with this part. I scared me to think that I would misinterpret what he needed and focus on the wrong things, but I was able to look at the data and see patterns. As I was doing the assessments I was already starting to see what things he needed some more work on and at the end I knew where I needed to go. 4. Once I had looked at the data from the assessment I believe that I appropriately used it to focus the next lesson. When I saw a need or two, I would make sure that we took time during the lesson to concentrate and really practice that skill so that he could understand it better. 5. The work samples were done in activity form so that I can quickly see a need and address it. We went through the flashcards and took those to make our bingo card. The first activity determined the second activity. When he was struggling identifying a b I would put a d next to it to give
him reference. Then I determine that we could use his name and that seemed to help. I could ask him to write a d and if he wrote a b I could write his name in front of it so that he could see that it was a b. 6. I believe that the reading instruction that I was able to provide was effective. He improved immensely and while some of that was his class work; however, that much of an improvement over this short of a period shows that the instruction that I was provide was effective and appropriate for him. 7. This reader case study was not the normal one. I had trouble finding ways to do all of the same kinds of think at his grade level. Since I did work with a younger student I do wish that I could have gotten a chance to work with an older student to not only get practice at both levels, but to make the comparison of what each grade needs. I did not get a chance to really practice comprehension other than with read alouds or fluency. One goal that I have would be to talk with a student that did an upper grade to get an idea of the things that they did. While I would not be able to practice it myself, I can still learn from them. Another goal is to learn during student teaching how to focus the reading instruction for 22 students instead of one student.