Reflection:
ELP Part I: Emergent Literacy Profile Report
Introduction
During the first day with Troy he told my partner and I that he liked different farm animals as he pulled out his book bag and pointed to the cows and pigs on the cover. He also mentioned that he like the color red which was evident by the red shirt he was wearing. When asked what he liked to do at home he said that he played with legos. Troy’s strengths when it come to reading and writing I noticed were reverse sweep, predictions based on the illustrations, using illustrations to help figure out words he didn't know, pointing to words as he read them, and following along with his eyes to the words when being read to.
Assessment Context
During the beginning of the assessment Troy seemed overwhelmed as his mouth was hanging open and his eyes kept roaming around the room. He become more engaged as we looked through the pictures to make predictions about what was going to happen as for his eyes stopped looking around the room at the other students and instead focused at the book in front of him. He did become restless towards the last retelling of the story as he was short with his words on saying the key events that happened: quote “boy wants the little puppy....said okay to having the big dog instead.”
Description and Analysis
1. Book Handling
When given the book upside down and backwards as the instructions told us to do; Troy displayed confusion as he pointed to the top part of the book saying it was the cover and the little words on the bottom of the backside of the book was the title. He did not flip over the book but instead left it lying on the table. After Oksana and I flipped over the book to continue the rest of the assessment Troy was able to turn the pages in order when asked to flip through the book and he was able to look at the illustrations and predict that the puppies would run off.
2. Concepts About Print
He pointed straight away to the first print that he saw which gave off the impression that he knows that text is read. However he did not point to the correct location as the book was still upside down. Once the book was flipped to the correct side by Oksana, we asked Troy to read us the first section of the book which is when he pointed at the print starting at the left side of the page and moved his finger along as he read towards the right side. At the end of the line he then moved his finger to the line below it on the left side of the line to continue reading. Both of those display that he knew how to reverse sweep and that print is read from left to right. After going over that we brought out the two notecards for the portion of asking Troy to identify a letter, word, and a sentence in the book. Troy was able to use those notecards to shows us letters and words however he was unable to figure out what a sentence was and when prompted by Oksana to look at a sentence and tell us what it was he instead read the sentence but did not call it a sentence.
3. Shared Reading/Constructing Meaning
During the reading Troy was following the print along with his eyes. When prompted to make predictions of what would happen he would based it off of the pictures shown on the page. On the second time through reading the story he would chime in on rhyming pairs and he would chime in on the predictable phrases. During the retelling portion of the story Troy talked about how the boy was losing the dogs however that the little boy did get to keep the big dog in the end. He pointed to pictures of the key events when he was talking about them. However he did not use print cues.
4. Phonemic Awareness
Troy was able to tell us about different words that rhymed together after being given an example. He was also able to identify the beginning sounds and was about to say another would with that same sound. He did have trouble on figuring out what rhymed with head, fan, and bee and he also had trouble finding the beginning sound for lion and children. He said that head rhymed with dad, and fan rhymed with ham, and bee rhymed with e. Also he told us that lion started with w and he passed on the children beginning sound.
5. Letter Recognition
Troy went speedily through this section with minor in-corrections. On the capitalized letters he only missed the S on the bottom row by calling it C and on the lowercase row he changed l to i in the second row from the bottom. He also pointed to each letter as he said them to us.
6. Emergent Writing/Drawing
We were unable to get a new sample of his writing after this test but by looking at the previous work he has shown us; I could see that he draws to match the story he has created and that he labels parts of the picture for clarification. He writes his story with letters and there were many consonant in it. I also noticed that he started the story with a capitalized letter and had punctuation at the end of the story and the words were evenly spaced out. On the top of the page he had also written his name.
Summary
Based off the chart in Templeton on page 50 I would say that Troy is about at the Middle Beginning stage of a 1st grader as he was able to predict based off of pictures, he labels his drawings, and he writes letters how they sound. Though I did not get to see his writing in action so I do not know if the majority of his effort goes to spelling. Also by looking at the figure in Templeton on page 216-217 it is about a students emergent stage and I would place Troy under the late category. He is a late emergent based on the fact he can tell what most of the upper and lowercase letters are, he labels pictures, and when prompted will retell the story using the book.
Reflection:
I found the activity to be hard to balance the instruction between my partner and I. I felt that the pictures and glueing them to the same page helped keep our student Troy engaged however having him cut the the images out was a bad idea as we ran out of time for him to finish the second paper. We also had to change the idea of having just the images to display the rhyming factor between each other as we adapted the plan to write out the word next to the image to help Troy visually see how the words rhymed by how the ending looked but more importantly of how they had the same ending sound. I was surprised by the fact that it took a while to cut the paper as I forgot to take into consideration that a kindergartner needs more time than an adult would. This lesson follows along with our course work for this past quarter as rarely everything goes as planned. I plan to take this lesson moving forward in my career as a learning lesson for myself that I should remember that kindergartners might need more time to cut things out of paper as well as going over how words are spelled in order to give a a different perspective on rhyming. When teaching I tend to accidentally place my own abilities and assumptions on the student for the lesson instead of what I have absorbed or have not absorbed from my student. For example I should have asked my student to show me how they cut an image out of paper before the activity as it would have told me that I had needed to pre-cut them beforehand as we didn't have enough time for them to cut and glue the images to a new piece of paper during the lesson. (pictures of activity below)