Introduction

Tutor: Audrey Nord

Name of Tutee: Alice Walters
Grade: 1st

Strengths:
Alice is a spunky and talkative first grader who loves dancing, signing, and swimming.
She is extremely confident in more than her ability to dance the whip and nae nae. Before we had
even begun the assessment Alice took one of the reading books sitting on the table and asked,
Can I read this to you? I was surprise at Alices eagerness to demonstrate her reading skills and
allowed her to try and read the story to me. Even though she was not actually able to read any of
the words within the book, she did not show discouragement. Rather Alice made up her own
words and told her own version of the story. Had I not stopped her in order to start the actual
assessment, Alice would have kept telling me the story, not ever admitting that she could not read
the storys words.
As the assessment itself began, Alice demonstrated mastery in two of the three of the
sections on Phonemic Awareness. She was able to hear initial sounds and to break a word down
into its separate sounds. From this I deduced that Alice has a strong foundation in her Phonemic
Awareness, because she is aware that words are made up of separate units of sounds and she is
able to distinguish between various letter sounds.
Further, Alice displayed sufficient understanding of Concepts of Print. She had mastered
most of the concepts, such as what the title of a book is, how to correctly hold a book, and how
to find the first page. She was able to accurately identify where one word ended and another
began. Therefore, Alice is familiar with what words look like, that they hold specific meaning,
and that reading materials must be handled in a certain way in order to view the words properly.
With slight prompts she was able to demonstrate a developing understanding of what a title
means to the story and the story should be read through the printed words rather than the
pictures.

Challenges:
The second Phonemic Awareness section was where I began to see Alices principle
challenge with reading. When she is orally presented with letter sounds, which she must then
blend into a word, Alice tended to add or omit sound and therefore come up with a different word
entirely. For example, when presented with the sounds /s/ /t/ /o/ /p/, Alice would repeat the
sounds softly to herself and they would be correct. However, when she would blend them
together and tell me what the word was she would omit the first sound, therefore telling me top
instead of stop. With other words she also showed a tendency to leave off the ending sound as
well. However, her tendency to forget sounds seems to be founded on her main challenge, which
is with Letter Skills.
Alices Letter Skills is the area which concerns me most, because she seems to be lacking
a generous amount of basic letter-sound knowledge. Within the first LS section, Alice missed
roughly a third of the basic letters sounds. Meaning that she could not identify what sounds went
with a third of the printed letters, such as what sound the u, the f, the e, or the sh makes.
In the next section, writing letters for specific sounds, Alice missed half of the sounds presented.
When a sound was presented that she did not know, she would write a letter she had already
previously written down. Such as writing an s for the /s/, /u/, and /k/ sounds. When it was time
to name the letters, Alice was able to name only 2/3 correctly, missing such letters such as u,
e, i, j, and y. Due to the challenges Alice has in her Letter Skills, she also had great
challenges in her Sight Words and Word Skills sections of the assessment.
Within the Sight Words section Alice was able to read the words: a, is, like, and
no. While within the first Letter Skills section she was able to read mad, mop, and Sam
by using blending. In this section she again struggled with blending all of the sounds together
accurately without forgetting any of the sounds. She was unable to read the word ant, because
although she said each sound separately, when the sounds were blended she dropped the /t/
sounds. In the second Letter Skills section Alice spelled mat and top correctly. By the end of
this second part of the assessment Alice was noticeably quieter, as well as becoming board with
the word tasks and therefore became more distractible.

Goals:
My main goals for Alice center around improving her Letter Skills, while also focusing
on her ability to blend sounds into words and her familiarity with sight words. By the end of our
tutoring sessions I would like Alice to know all of the letter names, at least the basic letter
sounds, including being able to write the correct letter for each sound. In terms of Sight Words, I
want Alice to be able to identify the first three sets of sight words, as well as being able to
distinguish between similar ones such as on and no without prompting from me. For her
Word Skills, I would like to see her ability to blend words accurately improved. Part of
correcting her tenancy to omit sounds when blending may be to simply slow down the pace of
her blending, as well as teaching herself to double check that all sounds in the words letters are
accounted for. In terms of Word Skills related to spelling, I would like to first build up her basic
Letter Skills, before spending much time in this area. Therefore, the spelling section of Word
Skills may gain attention as the tutoring sessions progress and Alices other skills are improved,
but will not be given great amounts of attention at this time.