Week 7-Assignment 5

Reading Assessment on Tamar Z-first grade student

I conducted my reading assessment on my six year old niece over skype. She is in first grade and is considered to be an average reader. The book that she chose was “Teaching My Dog 100 Words”. The following are the results in the four different areas being discussed:

Print Awareness:

When Tamar took the book to read I asked her to show me the title of the book, where the author’s name is and the first page of the book. I also asked her to show me the page number on each page and the difference between the pictures and the text. She was able to answer me with total ease.

Speech Sounds:

For this assessment I had Tamar read me the first page of the book-“I can teach my dog 100 words”. I then took the word “dog” and asked her to say it over very slowly and tell me how many sounds (phonemes) were in the word. She answered correctly-3. I then asked her if she were to replace the d with an h what the word would say. She answered hog. Then I asked if she were to replace the g with a k what the word would say. She again answered correctly-dok.

Phonemic Awareness:

For this test I wished Tamar a “Happy Purim” in a very slow way making sure to enunciate each sound of the word. I then asked her if she was able to understand what I said and she said “yes”. I then asked her to tell me her name in a way that pronounces each sound and she was able to do so with ease. I then asked her to tell me different words that begin with the letter d and she told me dog, dig, daddy.

Phonics:

For this test I took the word dog and wrote it in the following ways for Tamar to read: dag, deg, dig, dog, dug. The purpose of this was for her to blend similar letters with different combinations. She was able to do so with ease.

Over all, Tamar proved to be a much stronger reader than I expected. I would have expected some difficulty in being able to read similar letter combinations with different vowels since my students in Israel struggle with that. To help students who this is an issue for I would suggest would to look at the website Pinterest. They have an array of adorable videos and resources teaching the vowel sounds that could help children remember and identify these sounds. Another website with helpful resources that I found was ReadWriteThink. This website had lesson plans using Dr. Seuss stories to teach phonemic sounds that I think students would really enjoy. Another helpful website that I found was the brainpop website. They have educational videos and interactive games for students to learn the vowel sounds. Students can identify phonemic sounds in the barn yard and can use a cute animated character named MOBY to spell out different words.