Samantha Lane

READ 366-0003

11/8/16

Literacy Assessment Write-Up

Background

Normally, teachers have an entire year to get to know a student and their learning

style, and how they can help that student reach their full literacy potential. The objective of the

literacy assessment write-up is to use a series of reading and writing based assessments to get a

snapshot of where our student is at this point in time. This information can then be used to create

a plan, or reader diet, to further their literacy skills and increase their understanding of reading

and writing. For this literacy assessment in particular, I used a phonemic awareness and phonics

assessment, took a writing sample, and did a story retelling with my student to gather data. My

students name is Gabby, and she is a girl in first grade. She is typically more quiet, and has

trouble communicating verbally because her speech isnt as developed yet. She has trouble

enunciating words and her speech isnt as clear when she talks. She has a very positive

disposition and smiles a lot. She is eager to work on assessments with me, but does grow tired

after working for a while. Gabby doesnt spend a lot of extra time reading, and while she can get

distracted when working, she does put her full effort into every task she does and wants to show

you when she is done.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Skills

The phonemic awareness and phonics skills assessments were given on two

different days. The phonemic awareness skills assessment was given first. It was done at a

private table during the morning before school. I told Gabby that I was going to read a word and
she was going to tell me what sound it started with, not letter. I practiced with her first by asking

her what sound dog would start with. At first she said the letter d, but after I reminded her of the

sound rule she said duh. Gabby did not get any of the initial sound identification words correct.

She was able to identify the letter correctly almost every time (the only one she missed was she

said hot started with l), but even though I reminded her to tell me the sound she still

continued to say the letter. Gabby got 3/5 of the final sound identification words correct. On the

two she missed, she also said the word rather than the sound. In total, she received a 3/10 for

identifying initial and final sounds in words. Gabby received a 2/10 for identifying medial

sounds in words because she continued to say the letter rather than the sound it made. However,

on the blending phonemes and segmenting words sections, she received perfect scores in both of

those areas. This demonstrates that Gabby has great understanding of what sounds make up

words and how you put together sounds to make a word. She is able to not only blend words

together based on sound, but also separate them based on what she hears. Gabby is still

developing her ability to separate the meaning of a letter from the meaning of its sound. It is

possible she doesnt know the difference between a letter and a sound, or that she didnt fully

understand the directions of the task even when they were repeated to her. In addition to this,

Gabby is still developing her understanding of some letters and the sound they make, as

demonstrated by her saying the beginning sound in hot is l.

The phonics assessment was done on a different day. The circumstances were the

same, except that I had Gabby do her retelling assessment right before this. Gabby received a

score of 5/10 on the reading words with short vowel sounds section. Gabby was able to say 4/5

of the real words, and 1/5 of the nonsense words. The word she got wrong in the real words was

lip when she said ip. This is interesting considering she identified L with the wrong sound
in her previous assessment; this could mean that she doesnt have a solid understanding of what

sound the letter L makes. Gabby received a score of 0/10 on reading words with consonant

digraphs. As an example, instead of thin she said tin and instead of sith she said sit. This

demonstrates that she doesnt have an understanding of digraphs or what sounds they make.

They have either not received instruction on these words in class, or she is struggling to

understand how a digraph words. Finally, Gabby received a 2/10 on reading words with

consonant blends. As an example, instead of flug she said ug, instead of crab she said

cat, and instead of grin she said in. This shows that Gabby is still developing her ability to

combine sounds together and her knowledge of what sounds some of the letters make. It appears

that when she doesnt know how to read a word, she omits the sounds she doesnt know or she

says a word she does know that looks like it. This shows that Gabby is still developing her

understanding of consonant sounds, but is able to reach back into her base knowledge of reading

and guess at what the words might be, which is a strategy any good reader uses.

Writing Sample

For the writing sample, I chose to take a sample from an activity they were already

doing in class. My cooperating teacher (CT) has started doing writing workshop, where the

students write about anything they want and edit it and add pictures until they are satisfied with

it. On this particular day, they were writing about what they did the weekend beforehand. Gabby

was distracted during the writing workshop, so she had to be redirected a few times. But she did

write a full sentence and draw a big picture. Her sentence said, I Wit to The Has to Suim Cuz A

Tsb Cum. I am not sure what the Tsb was supposed to say, but the rest of the sentence

translates to, I went to the house to swim because a ___ come. She drew two people in her

picture, so this could mean that her sister came. She also labeled parts of her picture, such as the
pool which was labeled as PlU and another part of the picture as AlST. While she was

working, Gabby had trouble staying focused on her assignment. She started off struggling to

writer certain words such as with and the, but the rest of her sentence she wrote with more

ease. She wrote her letters fairly large so she only had room to write one sentence, and she didnt

always follow the lines on the paper for many of her letters. She shows a basic understanding of

the beginning sounds of words, but middle sounds in words are a harder area for her. In addition,

she also doesnt always properly capitalize letters and did not use proper punctuation in her

sentence as she did not put a period at the end. Along with more spelling and reading instruction,

review of grammar might be beneficial for her literacy development.

Retelling Assessment

For the retelling assessment, we had three main tasks to complete with our student.

First, we had to read the story to our child and then go through the pictures and talk about what

happened in the story. Next, we had to use the story figures to model retelling the story to our

student. Finally, we had to have the child retell the story with figures and write down or record

what they said. My childs name was Gabby, and the retelling assessment was done in the

morning before school started at a private table with us and one parent working separately from

us.

My child usually doesnt speak very much, so she was fairly quiet as I asked her to

come sit with me and explained the directions to her. I explained what we were going to do

during the assessment and showed her the book. She didnt say anything, so I asked her if she

understood what we were doing and she said yes. As I read her the book, she seemed to be a bit

distracted by what was happening around her since Mondays are usually really busy in her

classroom. She had to be redirected a few times to listen to the story, but overall she was fairly
attentive. Afterwards we went through the pictures together and she was asked what was

happening in each picture. She gave a minimal description of what she remembered from the

story and didnt go into much detail. After doing this, she was shown the figure drawings and I

modeled how to use them to retell the story. After showing her, I could tell Gabby was hesitant

to start and even when she began, she did not tell the story in order. She only talked about what

she remembered the most, which happened towards the end of the story when the big Billy goat

pushes the troll off the bridge. Therefore, I decided to give her more assistance and ask her more

guiding questions to help her tell the story in sequential order. While she was actually doing the

retelling, she wasnt as responsive to questions such as Tell me about the problem in the story

or What was the setting of the story. Reflecting on this, first graders might not have as much

experience answering these types of questions about stories. Therefore, I had to ask more

specifically aimed questions, such as Why did the three Billy goats have trouble crossing the

bridge?. After asking more guiding questions, she was more confident in her ability to talk

about what happened at that specific part in the story.

Gabby received an overall score of 12 out of 15, which is in the developing retelling

stage. In the story element for setting and characters, she received a score of 2/3. When she was

asked who the characters in the story were, she said Little Billy, Large Billy, and Big Billy, so

she didnt fully get all the characters correct. When she was asked what the setting was, or where

the story took place, she said tall grass. Although this is technically correct, it is rather limited

in terms of where the story takes place, such as a long time ago, or on a bridge as well. She

received a score of 2/3 in the story problem category. She said that the problem in the story was

that there was a troll under the bridge, but didnt say why this was a problem or what the goats

were trying to do by crossing the bridge. Since she didnt get to the core issue of the story, she
missed one point in that category. For the sequence of major events, she received a 2/3 as well.

She was able to recall that at the beginning of the story the little goat tells the troll not to eat him.

However, when she was asked her who he told the troll to eat instead of him, she said the grass

rather than his older brother. This seems to show that she remembered what the goats wanted,

but not necessarily how they were trying to get it. When she was asked who crossed the bridge

next, she pointed to the middle goat, and then when she was asked what he said to the troll, she

said My brother is bigger. This shows that she is able to recall the dialogue between the two

characters that she wasnt able to the first time. She was then asked what happened after this, and

she pointed to the big goat crossing the bridge. However, she was not able to tell me what else

happened during this episode, which was that the big goat made a plan to get the troll off the

bridge. For the resolution, she received a 3/3. This seemed to be the part of the story she was best

able to recall, because when I asked her what happened after the big goat got to the bridge, she

immediately said He pushed the troll out of the way and goes across the bridge. This probably

stuck out to her the most because it is the climax of the story. Finally, she got a 3/3 for the

resolution because she was able to recall that the goats eat grass together at the end of the story.

Overall, Gabby has a fairly good ability to retell stories and remember important

details. She is skilled in remembering key events that happen in the story, and how they lead to a

resolution at the end. However, she has trouble remembering small details from stories such as

characters names and dialogues. She also was unable to recall the story without me giving her

more guiding questions than just the characters. That being said, she was able to use the figures

given to her to accurately recall the story, which shows a strength in using visual representations

to her advantage. In terms of implication of instructions, I would recommend spending more

time building story boards with her to help her gain strategies on how to build the natural
progression of a story in her head. I would start off with simpler stories with fewer plot points

and moving towards longer more involved stories. This will allow her to focus on the process of

building a story from memory rather than trying to remember smaller details. I would also spend

more time developing her ability to recall stories without visual representations. While this is a

good skill to have, she will not always have these representations to help her remember a story.

This could look like reading a story to her multiple times, and then having her read the story a

few times, and then asking her to recall what she remembers from the story. You could then give

her less and less exposure to different stories and ask her to do the same task. This could slowly

teach her to get better at choosing which details to remember and how to put these events into

logical progression in her head. Overall, Gabby shows a lot of good retelling skills. What will be

beneficial for her is to learn which details to focus on and how they fit together to make one

cohesive plot line.

Recommendations for Teaching

Based on my assessments of Gabbys literacy development, I am classifying her as an

Emergent reader. She does have concept of word because she understands how to separate words

with space and knows how to put together letters to make a word. She knows what a word is and

is developing her ability to sound out words. However, she is still developing her ability to

recognize letters and what sound they make. She has not fully mastered the difference between a

sound and a letter, and she is not yet able to blend consonants together. She has some knowledge

of sight words, and can write some such as the word the, but she doesnt have any knowledge

of digraphs. She seems to read based on her previous knowledge more than sounding out letters,

as she did better on real words that she recognized rather than nonsense words that relied solely

on sound.
 Since Gabby is an emergent reader, her diet will be as follows: 20% of time spent on

concept of word, 20% of time spent on concept of print, 20% of time spent on alphabet, 20% of

time spent on language play and phonological awareness, and 20% of time on writing and letter

formation. In other words, she needs equal parts instruction on all of her instructional goals. For

concept of word, her CT could focus on finger-point reading to help her guide her own reading

better so she is able to understand the plots of stories better. For concept of print, using more

retelling and story illustrations will help her make more connections between the printed word

and real life experiences. For alphabet instruction, alphabet games and activities and picture sorts

for letter and sounds will help fill the gaps in her knowledge of where she does not fully grasp

the connection between letters and sounds. Finally, for writing, more writing workshops and

grammar checks on her writing will help her review the rules of grammar that she has been

taught in class and teach her to be more consistently use them in her writing. Overall, Gabby is a

developing reader with good background knowledge and base skills. With more attention to all

of the subject areas she needs help in, she will become a more proficient leader with consistent

skills in reading and writing.