Wednesday, March 16th, I arrived at the school at about 11:45 am, right after the students ate lunch. We began with their math lesson where they had to complete three pages of word problems from their workbooks. They had to show their work for questions like, "I have 9 shapes. Some are circles. Some are triangles. There are more circles than triangles. How many different combinations can we make?" I spent much of this time having students read the problem to me aloud and asking them what they understood about the problem. Many times, I had to ask probing questions like, "So, how many shapes are we supposed to end up with all together?", "Is there a clue in here that is supposed to help us narrow down the combinations?", and "What does the word more mean to you?". Most students did fairly well with the guidance I helped provide. Jhon did very well, too. Once he understood the concept of more than, he grasped that there couldn't be less triangles than circles, nor could they be equal. After the first problem like this, he was on a roll. He didn't quite finish the entire assignment, but he did well. There was one student at Jhon's table, I will call him Jake, that did not seem to grasp this type of equation at all. I tried using the coaching that worked for other students, but he could only come up with one solution. I tried referring to my fingers and we counted out loud. This helped him verbalize an answer, but he didn't remember it long enough (or didn't understand it well enough) to write it down. I then tried referring to the number line on his desk (that he said he understood how to use), but that didn't seem to help either. I felt more stumped than he did.
In between math and writing, I was able to squeeze a quick assessment with Jhon. I gave him the choice of reading either "I Can" (Preprimer 1) or "Just Like Mom" (Preprimer 2). He chose to read "I Can" after looking through both. During our last assessment, he scored at Instructional level, but it was borderline. He could have gotten one more word correct and he would have been at Independent level. I went ahead and gave him this assessment and he scored at the Independent level. He knew what all the concept questions were and he gave me a logical prediction of the story before we began, "I can do things. They do things.". During the running record, he had one miscue on the word lunch, he said food instead which tells me that he relies much on visual cues from the pictures. He stuttered on the first dream, he repeated it and self-corrected. The second dream was correct. I believe that he knew to say dream partially because I asked him a concept question about the word dream and from the visual cues of the picture. He also scored at the Independent level in comprehension. Both of these assessments tell me that Jhon needs to work on his sight word vocabulary so that he is less reliant on picture cues. Maybe I could create a mini-lesson with common rhyming words using Dr. Seuss and another lesson on common spelling combinations.
If I have the opportunity to do another assessment with Jhon, I would either give him "People at Work" (Preprimer 2) or "Lost and Found" (Preprimer 3). I am considering skipping preprimer 2 only because I am curious to know how Jhon will do on a piece of short poetry with no pictures. Plus, I know that Jhon understands the words and concepts of lost, under, outside, dog, and cat because we have discussed many of these things previously during reading and writing time.
During the writing portion of the day, the students were working on writing letters to people in their lives. Jhon chose to write to his father in Ecuador. After his salutations and his request for a new toy, he became stumped about what to write next. I made a few suggestions like talking about when they last saw each other and I asked Jhon if he missed his dad, but he just nodded his head yes. I don't think that Jhon understands "missing someone" using English vocabulary because when I came back to him, he seemed to continue a little further with his request for a new toy and didn't touch at all about missing his father.
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