Film Clips from Reading Rocks!

The whole episode of Reading Rocks! was very good, but my focus is on the portion about the student named Maricely.  Maricely is a Puerto Rico born fifth grade student with troubles reading in English.  Like my target student, Jhon, Maricely's family speaks solely Spanish at home and Spanish is the primary language of her Massachusetts neighborhood.  Luckily for Maricely, her mother speaks minimal Spanish and her older sister helps her with reading at home.
I thought her case was interesting because she was having so much trouble with reading and spelling in English that she was held back in the fifth grade when she should have graduated into the sixth grade.  She said that she was very upset and angry, but she didn't want to give up.  Her main troubles were with how there can be more than one way to make the same sound in English, such as f and ph or rhyming words like though and show.  In order to combat this, her focus has been on learning spelling patterns and reading by analogy like in this week's chapters for our leadership discussion.  Once a student learns a spelling pattern such as air, they can use this to help them decode words with the same spelling pattern such as hair, chair, pair, and even multisyllabic words such as debonair.