Week 4 of Observation

This past Wednesday, I came in after lunch (around 11:40 am) because I knew that Ms. C. would only have the students for about a half an hour anyway and there's no sense in me being there when I'm not working with the students.
Apparently, on this particular day, report cards were due and the school insists on using a complicated and detailed format that teachers barely know how to use and parents can't understand without asking twenty questions.  Needless to say, Ms. C. was stressed out because she was running out of time to turn these in.  On the plus side, the whole day was dedicated to students working on their piece of writing that they were going to publish (for the publishing party tomorrow) and when they were done, to read either independently, in pairs, or in small groups.  This gave me several hours of experience working with my target student and his classmates.
Jhon's piece that he was going to publish was the same piece that I helped him work on last week about his character, Ben, falling into a swimming pool with all of his clothes on.  This week, the piece was written, colored, and nearly ready to turn in.  I was extremely proud of him and this feeling only grew when he read the piece out loud for me.  As he read, he made corrections to areas of writing that didn't sound correct!  He originally forgot the word "to" in one sentence and he used a singular instead of a plural in another part of a sentence.  He corrected both of these after listening to his mistakes.  This is a huge step in Jhon's English literacy!  Ms. C. gave him a high five when I told her that he can make his own corrections by using reading out loud as a strategy.
After he turned in his writing, he read me three short books and he has made some strides in his reading as well.  I noticed that he uses contextual clues from pictures, but he also tries to sound out the words too not to assume that the picture is always correct.  He reads with more emotion and fluency especially when he is excited to share his reading with me.  He tends to read better when he suggests that he reads to me rather than when I suggest it to him.
We also tried two word lists:  Pre-Primer 1 and Pre-Primer 2/3.  Jhon zoomed through the pre-primer word list like it was nobody's business!  Out of the seventeen words, all but one was automatic and all but two were correct.  This was clearly independent level.  The pre-primer 2/3 list showed different results.  He got ten out of twenty correct and out of those all but one was automatic.  This was his frustration level.  From here, I asked him to read "I See" from QRI-5.  He only had two miscues and two self corrections which makes this his instructional level.  One miscue was instead of "an" he said "a" and the other miscue occurred when he said "jag" instead of "jig".  He self corrected on "rug" because he almost said "rag" and he said "car" instead of "truck" but when he realized that duck doesn't rhyme with car and it doesn't match the picture, he made the correction.