Clair Butcher Language Development and Emergent Literacy November 25, 2013

Written/Dictated Story and Assessments

I met with a four year old preschool student named Kyleigh for about an hour every Wednesday for 8 weeks. In those eight weeks I had many assessments to do with her. The first 2 weeks I just took the time getting to know the student so I knew how to go about doing the assessments with her. The first day that I tried one of the assessments was on Wednesday October 9, 2013, the third visit at the elementary school. The first assessment I chose to do was the Yopp-Singer Test of Phonemic Segmentation. I tried asking her to segment the words for me and gave her examples of how to do it but she could not get the concept so I altered the test and segmented the words for her and asked her to tell me what words I was saying. On the test she got 9 out of 22 correct. Many of the mistakes she made were not big mistakes. I could see how she would misunderstand what I was saying. One of the words I segmented for her was the word me. She understood what I said but her response was Kyleigh. I asked her why she said that and she said because me is Kyleigh. So even though she did not answer correctly, she understood what I said. The majority of the words that she got wrong were not far off. They were very close in pronunciation and sound. The mistakes were common mistakes that I would expect any four year old to make. The fourth week that I was there was the week of October 16, 2013. I conducted two tests in the short time that I was there that week. The first test that I did that day with Kyleigh was the concepts of print test. For that test I had to ask her a series of questions regarding many of the

common concepts about print that children should have in order to read a book. For example, she had to know the front and back of the book. She also had to know the difference between pictures and words in a book. Kyleigh actually scored really high for a preschooler. She scored 11 out of 13 which is even higher than a kindergartener is supposed to at the beginning of the school year. There were only two things that she did not get right. The first thing that she did not get was how to open the book to where the story begins. When I asked her to show me that she opened it to the middle of the book and said that was where I should start reading. The second thing that she did not understand was what punctuation was. She did not know what a period was at the end of a sentence. That is completely understandable for a preschooler. They have not gone over any of that yet. I was surprised that she knew what she knew about books. The second test of the day that I administered was the Writing Vocabulary Observation Test. For this test she had five minutes to write down every word or letter that she knew how to write. I gave her the sheet and gave her five minutes to write down every word that she knew. The first thing she did when I gave her the paper was drew a flower on it. So I started to prompt her to see if I could get her to write some words. I asked her if she knew how to write her name, mom, dad, any of her siblings names, anything and she said no. So then I asked if she knew how to write the letter A. She said she did and then wrote it. I asked her to write all of the letters that she knew and the only four that she wrote down were A, B, C, and D. The more I asked her to write down words the more she did not want to. So I ended the test early. The fifth week that I went to the elementary school was Wednesday, October 23, 2013. During that visit I started the written dictated story with Kyleigh. It took a lot of prompting but eventually I got her to talk about something that she liked. I asked her about her favorite animal

and she told me she loved bunnies. So I told her to tell me a story about bunnies. She told me a story about Clover the bunny and Princess Sophia. Princess Sophia can talk to animals because she has a magical amulet. When she was done telling me the story I looked it up online because it sounded familiar and it was already a story. I decided that the next week I was there I would try again. I started the Letter Identification test next. For this test she had to name the letter, make the sound it makes, and then tell me a word that started with that letter. It was separated into upper and lower case letters. I started with the uppercase and showed her the letters one by one. She was great at naming the letters and the sounds that each letter made. The only letter that she did not get right was an upper case i. She said it was an L. She was not able to name many words for that section. She only named eight out of 26 words. For the majority of the letters she said I dont know every time I asked if she knew a word that started with that letter. I could tell she was tired of doing the test so I ended it after the upper case letters. Wednesday, October 30, 2013 was the next day that I was there and the sixth visit. That was a very busy week and it was hard to find some time to pull her aside. She was very excited to play with her classmates and very excited about Halloween so I was not able to get much done. I tried to finish the Letter Recognition Test with her. I got through half of the lower case letters and she wanted to go play. So I let her and just played in centers with her. Later on I got a little bit of time to pull her aside and work on the written dictated story. I asked her if she had ever gone on vacation and she said yes and right away started telling me about her sister Veronica and how much she wanted to get this egg shaped rock. So I wrote down everything that she said and made it into a story for her.

The seventh visit to the elementary school was Wednesday, November 13th, 2013. This day I got a lot accomplished with her. First I finished up the Letter Identification Test. She did not seem to know many of her lower case letters at all. She knew 17 out of 28 letters and even fewer words and sounds. She made a lot of mistakes that were understandable. The teacher said that they did not cover lower case letters at all yet. Kyleigh thought that a lowercase q was a p which makes sense because it looks like a backwards p. She also mixed up her lowercase b and d. She really struggled with her lower case letters but since they did not learn them yet she did not do too badly. She still knew more than half of them. That week I also had her draw the pictures for her written dictated story. I wrote the story and left all of the pages blank for her to draw on. I brought in some princess and fairy crayons for her to make it more fun and interesting for her and also to reward her for what she has done. While coloring she asked me what each page said so she knew what to draw. All of her pictures went along with her story. The eighth and final week that I was there I did not try to do any tests with her. I just observed her playing. I gave her the final story that I had laminated and bound and she asked me to read it to her. She recognized the story and started telling me more about it that day. I put the story in her backpack and she said thank you. Kyleigh was very smart for her age. She only just turned four in September, but knew more than kindergarteners should on the concepts about print test. She knew everything about a book except how to read it. She knew all of her upper case letters and many of her lower case letters. She was able to name all of the sounds that each letter made and many words that started with those letters. She was able to tell me a story with a beginning, middle and end and that is very important for a preschooler to be able to do. Lastly, she was able to understand some of the

words that I segmented for her in the Yopp-Singer test. The only thing that she could not do was right any words or her name but she is working on that and by the end of the year I believe she will be able to do it. For a four year old, she was very smart and right where she needs to be developmentally.