Tuchek Reflection #1

My first lesson went really well, and I was surprised at how well both C and E participated in the CORE Phonics Survey. At first I was worried that they wouldn’t want to spend their Reading Workshop time doing extra reading exercises, but both of their lessons were very helpful in showing me what areas these two students struggle in. Both C and E got a perfect score (26 out of 26) when it came to identifying uppercase and lowercase letter names in Part A and B, which wasn’t very surprising, but when I asked C and E to tell me the sound each letter makes in Part C, they both struggled. C got a score of 17 out of 21 and E got a score of 18 out of 21. This showed me right away that these two below-average readers’ problems lie in the sound-letter relationship area. Both focus students did well identifying the long and short vowel sounds (long vowel sound came easier than short for both), and my prediction was correct that they would both find the pseudowords the most challenging. C and E could easily identify the familiar, benchmark words such as: “sip”, “quit”, “chop”, “dirt”, “key”, “hawk”, “ghost”, etc. probably because they’ve seen these words numerous times in their books and whatnot, but when it came to the made-up words like: “nop”, “dilt”, “shom”, “murd”, “hine”, “voot”, “bice”, etc. they seemed very lost and weren’t confident with any of their answers. Finally when we got to Part L, E did much better than C did and correctly read 5 out of the 8 words in the first column (missed “competes”, “further”, and “locate”) so he got to move onto the second column, but since he only correctly read 3 out of the 8 words he didn’t move onto the pseudowords. On the other hand, C only got 4 out of 8 words correct in the first column of Part L so he didn’t move on. Overall, as a teacher I learned that a little bit goes a long way; just by setting aside a little extra one-on-one time with a student can reveal things that you didn’t notice before. The things you uncover with this student can change how you approach this student with new material and/or show you what specific areas the student needs some extra practice with.