Final Reflection

Purpose:

The purpose of this semester was to learn how to teach different strategies to help students become better readers. I had to learn what my students needs are through different types of assessment and help my student become stronger in the areas he struggles in. The first week I did an interest inventory with Leonard along with a motivational survey. From these two surveys I learned that he enjoys free reading, especially books about science, but he does not like reading aloud or answering question after a reading. I was able to determine that my student needed instructional help with fluency, unaccented final syllables, and some comprehension. The assessments I used to determine his needs for fluency were two running records, listening to him read aloud, and rating him on two oral fluency rubrics. He mostly struggles with pace and smoothness. The assessment I used to determine his instructional needs for spelling was a spelling inventory and that showed that we needed to first work on unaccented final syllables. He can easily recognize the different ending syllables when he sees the words and has to sort them but he struggles with recognizing the different endings when he has to spell the words. The assessments I used to determine his instructional needs for comprehension were asking questions after he read aloud and a close read. He was able to comprehend some key details about a text but had difficulty with deeper questions that required him to go beyond what information the text gave him.

Recommendations:

After meeting with my student and determining his instructions need I came up with some recommendations of what he can work on in the classroom and at home to better his reading skills. At home Leonard would benefit from practicing reading aloud so he can get more comfortable with reading aloud so he will not hate reading aloud as much in the classroom. Leonard would also benefit from working on an appropriate reading pace. While Leonard reads, move the piece of paper along the sentence so that it moves his eyes faster to get him reading at a faster pace. For Leonard’s classroom teacher, I would recommend working on comprehension. The teacher could do this by teaching one different comprehension strategy each week to the class or a small group. Let the students practice the strategy each day, continue to model them throughout the year, and make an anchor chart of the different strategies. Another skill the teacher can focus on with Leonard is vocabulary. If Leonard had more vocabulary terms he is familiar with it will be easier for him to decode words while reading, leading smoother reading and a faster pace. There is a variety of ways to enhance vocabulary in the classroom like, providing vocabulary flash cards, while reading aloud point out a few vocabulary words and describe the meaning, have a graphic organizer for students new vocabulary words that they can reference back to, etc.

What I learned:

From this mini case study, I learned that there are many different ways to assess different reading skills. I also learned how important word studies can be for students and how much it can benefit them. There are many different ways to do word studies with the same set of words so a kid doesn’t get burnt out with working with the words. You can play games with the words, do a closed sort, an open sort, a blind sort. I also learned to not assume how a student reads only based on the first read aloud they do. I was very impressed with my students first read aloud, but after doing different activities and assessments I learned that his reading has a lot of room for improvement. As a teacher I learned to use my time wisely, really get down to the nitty gritty in the amount of time you have with a student. Plan more than you have time for because you will likely get through it all and have extra time for something. Also, if you do not get to it, it can already be planned for the next meeting. Another important thing I learned is to teach students prompts the can use to decode words when they are reading individually and do not have someone to ask what a word is. It is important for students to be able to allows students time to decode words and not just tell them the word, give them different ways to figure the word out. Make an anchor chart of prompts to use while reading. As a teacher I will make the time to have students complete an interest inventory and motivational survey to see where they stand as a person and a reader. This information can be very beneficial to know as a teacher to keep the student as engage and interested as possible. This was a great learning experience and I am excited to keep learning and use what I have learned in real life situations.