Oliur Rahman

Honors 3000

Student Profile

March 5, 2017

Xavier Johnson

Of the five students that I tutor at Bunche Elementary school, Xavier Johnson would be

the one that I feel has great potential. Not to say that the other 6 have bright futures, but Xavier

just has a motor that will not allow him to give up. The very first day I met Xavier Johnson I

knew I was going to have my hands full with him because of his playful behavior. As I sat with

him for the first time I realized he always tucked his shirt in, and always had a large smile on his

face. Asking about his family and whereabouts, I found out that he has two other siblings. I asked

him about his favorite colors and he said he loved the colors blue and black. Prior to us sitting

down for our first tutoring session, Ms. Steward (Xaviers second grade teacher) told me that

Xavier was supposed to be retained and was supposed to be in the first grade all over again.

Another interesting fact was that Xaviers last name was not Johnson last year, but I do not know

what it was or, why it was changed.

During our first session, Xavier was able to identify twenty-four of the twenty-six letters

of the alphabet. He scored eighteen out of twenty-one of t he consonants, and four out of five on

the vowels. Moreover, he satisfied the requirements for task one of the pre-test, but could not

identify any of the words from task two. Afterwards I read our very first book aloud to him,
which was One Fish, Two Fish, Blue Fish, Red Fish by, Dr. Seuss. When introducing Unit One

(short a) I had difficulty having him stay focused on the word list. He continuously dazed off,

and talked about irrelevant topics. To fix this I showed him the dry erase board, and quickly

began to focus more because it was more hands on. Throughout our first four sessions Xavier

was struggling with Unit One. He moved on to Unit Two by our fifth class session. He did not

know how the word the was spelled, so I had to continue to make him repeat and write the word

down, until it was part of his long term memory. The learning problem he has was spelling out

and putting the sounds together. The strategy used to overcome this problem was having him

stick his arm out and sounding the letters off his shoulder down to his forearm. He loved using

this strategy and helped him very much.

On February 15, 2017 Xavier completely shocked me because he ended up completing

two units in one day! He went from Unit Three, all the way to Unit Five! For remembrance sake,

I used flashcards that were given in tutoring. In addition, he had a hard time remembering which

way the letter b and d pointed. To help him clarify this problem I drew a cat on the board and

wrote the letter b facing the face of the cat, and the letter d facing the tail of the cat. The B/D

Reversal Cue Cards were used as well. Xavier is now on Unit Seven, and is having difficulty the

letter w, and the letter y. It makes perfect sense because he did not know what sound the

letter y made, nor could he identify the letter w. Xavier will indeed get through this obstacle

because of that motor I mentioned earlier. He will look at you and see that he made a mistake and

try his outmost hardest to get the spelling right. He always asks if he is ahead of the other

students, and I always tell him that he is doing a tremendous job because I believe giving him

compliments helps build his confidence level, and makes him strive to do better.