Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Development
-What I learned from assessing the child's developing capacity to read - This
was where I pulled in info gathered from all the assessments - letter-sound,
running records (both word recognition (include his self-correction skills - or
the lack thereof - the child I used would substitute a word with the same
beginning letter for the word he didn't know which told me he was focusing
more on the graphophonic clues and not on the semantics or syntax) and
comprehension - be specific about how he answered questions about the
text - any inferences made, complete sentences or bare minimum words and
phrases?), phonemic awareness. I was specific about the pieces he read, the
level he landed at, the word recognition level and comprehension level.
-What I learned from assessing the child's developing capacity to write - This
was the first place I referenced any of the writing samples that are included
in the evidence for this entry and I only referred to the unassisted piece we
did early on that I used to determine his beginning writing level (using the
rubrics in the State Dept's Literacy Assessment guide - early
emergent/emergent, developing, early independent, and independent). I
analyzed his spelling errors (such as cunit for couldn't, coost for closet,
terher for teacher - which led me to conclude he was attending to the
beginning and ending letters and sounds but not the middle - I later
connected this to activities done in reading and writing to focus on vowel
patterns and word families.) I also pulled in the information gathered from
Richard Gentry's Spelling Grade Level Placement Tests (which are also part
of the SDPI lit assessment guide) to compare to what I'd found in his writing -
he showed up at the same level on both.
Question 5: fairness/equity/access
-I did one short paragraph that said our materials and daily routines
supported his lit dev in many ways and then proceeded to a long sentence
that listed all the activities from beginning to end of the day, concluding with
"___ has many opportunities to grow in reading, writing, speaking, and
listening."
Question 6: what ways did materials/daily routines support each
featured child’s literacy development
-Reading activities that support the child's lit dev - Be specific and follow the
order of your lead paragraph in what you describe - everything from how you
do your phonics activities to read to time, poetry charts, word family studies,
guided reading groups, visual aids like a "Helping Hand" or other list about
strategies to use to handle challenging words, etc. and how the child worked
within these activities. For example, my child had some negative self-esteem
problems about his reading from having been retained in first grade. When I
did a running record with him, I started a little too high and he bombed and
seemed anxious. So I started him out in a lower group to boost his self-
esteem, then worked him for awhile in both the lower and on level groups,
and then moved him up to the group that was on his level. Mention if you
borrowed any of your ideas from anyone (looks good for professional
collaboration). I focused quite a bit on working with word families in my
writing in this section, as this connected directly to Sean's problems with
focusing on the middle of a word for spelling and reading. At the end of this
section, I cited his most recent running record, what I'd found, growth he'd
made, his increased attention to clues in the text, etc.
-writing activities that support the child's lit dev - I worked my way through
the day (as this was how I'd listed my activities in the lead paragraph for this
section), citing what he wrote and the purposes of his writing - the phrase I
used was - ____ has many choices to make as he writes for many different
purposes. I explained how journals worked, how our personal dictionary
worked, how we use the writing process, how we do research, how we write
notes in our response logs and for what types of activities, citing the
evidence used for this entry all the way through. I also wrote about different
purposes - the response logs being for gathering thoughts, questions, and
ideas, the pen pal letters for beginning and continuing a relationship and
learning about a person in another place, etc. One rough draft had the
"marks" of our corrections made as we had conferenced so I explained our
process in working together to find mistakes, those he found independently,
those I guided him towards.