Week Seven Assignment Five

I tested a child who is in preschool on three out of the four assessments. I was unable to get material at the time that I was meeting with her for the fourth assessment but the results I gained from the three assessments performed helped me learn a lot about who she was as a reader. The first assessment that I gave her was called “Same or Different”. I would read two words to her and she would tell me if they were the same word or if they were different words. This young child excelled on this type of assessment as she scored 100% or 13/13 correct. Some of the tougher words that I read where she needed to tell me they were different were, “Shirt, Skirt”, “Glass, Grass”, and “Pants, Plants”. There were a few times in which she sat and stared at me seemingly confused but after I repeated the words a second or third time she felt confident.

The second assessment I used on this young girl was called “Oral Blending”. She seemed to have little experience with this type of instruction because she only scored 4/6 on the first part and 1/6 on the second part. The two that she got incorrect on the first part was “/l/…ock means ______” and “/b/…ox means _______” There were a few times that she got silly on me and I believe she knew the words but was trying to be funny. (This was my best friend’s daughter who I see all the time so she gets very silly when I visit them.) As for the second part of this assessment she was asked to tell me the entire word when I sounded out all of the phonemes. The ones that she got wrong were, “/m/ /e/ means ______, /s/ /a/ means _______, /s/ /u/ /n/ means ________, /m/ /a/ /k/ means _______, and /l/ /a/ /z/ /e/ means _______.” She was extremely close when she said that make means ake and lazy means zee.

            The third assessments that she tried was the “Show me…” part of a book. She was able to tell me 12/13 questions that I asked such as “Front of the book, back of the book, first word of a sentence, last word of a sentence…” The one question she struggled with was where to begin reading as she showed me the title page.

            I would like to work with her on listening to the different phonemes that there are and trying to blend them into a sound. Her father can work with her on using phonemes when she wants something such as, “Do you want your /c/ /u/ /p/?” and having her say “cup!” I also believe that her preschool teachers could set some time aside to practice the different sounds of words to get her more familiar with out the sounds work and how she can use these sounds everyday. She would also benefit from learning more about books and how they work. It is simply one thing to read to a child but it is another thing to show her the finer things of a book such as where you begin reading, show me the last word of this sentence, how should I begin reading and so on. It is only beneficial for the child to get as much experience with books and sound as she can at such a young age.

There are a ton of different websites that children can use to practice their reading skills. http://www.primarygames.com/reading.php has a variety of different games to help children put words together, guess a letter that belongs in a word and so forth.

http://www.funbrain.com/brain/ReadingBrain/ReadingBrain.html is also another website that helps students with their reading skills. There are fun games that let the child choose different levels so that they can push themselves to try harder words and increase their reading skills.

http://www.funenglishgames.com/readinggames.html is a lot of fun for children because the games are elementary and useful for reading. One of the games is like a giant parkway with different side roads to choose. Children like games that allows them to act like adults so a game like this would really help the students have fun while still learning at the same time.