Nicole Axe

Child Case Study

RUNNING RECORD SHEET

(Adapted from Clay, An Observation Survey & Shea, Taking Running Records)

STUDENT NAME: Lynn A. DATE: 02/15/2019

Age/Grade: First Grade (Age 6) Recorder: Nicole Axe

Type of Text: Expository Title: Best Friends

Readability: Level A # Running Words: 32

Familiar: Unfamiliar: X Genre: Fiction

Reading Rate (circle): Error-frequency Rate: Overall Self-correction

Accuracy Rate: Frequency:
Fast
9% 1:1
Average 91%

Slow
Difficulty Level of Text Cuing Strategies Used Cross-checking Other Comments:
for this child (circle Most Frequently (circle Behaviors Observed Lynn impressed me
one): which): (indicate if none): with her level of
Lynn frequently used reading for this text.
Independent Meaning the pictures to help her She has good strategies
better understand the in order to help her
Instructional Structure/Syntax words. She caught on identify unfamiliar
to the pattern/ words when she gets
Frustrational Visual/L-S repetition of the story suck.
as well.

SUMMARY ANALYSIS: TYPES OF ERRORS AND SELF-CORRECTIONS

ERROR ANALYSIS

Lynn’s errors did not affect her understanding or comprehension of the book. She was able to use the

pattern to help her when reading, however I could still tell she was reading every word because she

followed the words with her finger. She had trouble with identifying some words and changed the word

all together to something she was familiar with, but the meaning made sense in the context. She used the

pictures to help with understanding of the text in front of her. There was only one syntactical error

throughout the entire reading.

SELF-CORRECTION ANALYSIS

She made a few self-corrections throughout the story. She used the pictures to help with her self-

correction in every instance. I could tell she had an understanding of the story because of her awareness

of the self-corrections she made. However, there were a few words that she did not use the pictures to

read the words and in those instances she actually changed the word and the meaning completely. For

example, she said the word “run” when the text read “ride”, and this was especially interesting because

then when she drew about the story, she drew the two girl riding on bikes together. Even though she read

it incorrectly, that picture stuck with her, and she drew the girls riding bikes.

EE 324: Summary Table for Child Study: Lynn

RUNNING RECORD Accuracy Rate: 91% Types of Errors:

Type of text: Expository
Readability level of text: A level
3 meaning
1 syntactical
3 visual
This readability of text is written
at this student’s independent Types of Self-corrections:
level. All three of Lynn’s self-
corrections were visual.

COMPREHENSION Comprehension skills successfully used:

CONVERSATION Lynn does a great job of utilizing the pictures to help her decipher
SEGMENT what the text is saying. She also caught onto the pattern within the
ANALYSIS text quickly and proved she understood what the book, Best Friends
was all about. She was about to list many of the things that the girls
liked to do together, and I think that is because she enjoyed similar
activities. She understood within the text.

Comprehension skills in need of further instructional attention:

She had a more difficult time thinking beyond the text. She was
unsure how to give her answers validity by answering why the girls
enjoyed what they did. She was able to “write” about the reading but
only through drawings. She struggled to write out her thoughts and
preferred to draw them instead.

WRITING SEGMENT ANALYSIS WA/WI/WR/COMP concepts successfully applied:

She seemed to understand that the sounds and symbols connect. Half
of the words spelled incorrectly were very close to the spelling and
 the mistake came with the sort and long vowel sounds. She could
identify most of the beginning and ending sounds. She understands
most of the sounds. Her comprehension of the words seemed to be
there, she knew of the words.
Concepts in need of further instructional attention:
There are many concepts that need instructional attention. She has
very little understanding of all vowel sounds and does not appears to
understand blends and digraphs as well. It is difficult for her to
connect the sounds to the symbols in most cases. She mostly needs
further instruction of WA and WI so that she can have better
contextual knowledge of the words to help her writing.

DEVELOPMENTAL SPELLING Spelling/phonics patterns that are secure:

ASSESSMENT She spelled 11 words in total and spelled 2 of them correctly. I do not
see any patterns that she feels secure with.
Patterns ready to learn next:
She seemed to get very frustrated with spelling and did not have
confidence in what she was writing. I do not see any pattern she is
ready to learn next. I think she needs to go back to the basics of
understanding the sounds and how they connect to the symbols
before moving to something she is not prepared for.

PHONICS INVENTORY Subtests successfully completed: Subtests indicating further

Lynn was able to correctly tell me instructional attention:
a majority of the letter names. She struggled with some of the
consonant sounds. She had a lot
of frustration with both the
consonant digraphs and blends.
She took the letters and instead
of telling me the sounds she
thought of when she saw this,
she made up many words that
may have those letters in them.
The blends were especially tricky,
and she gave words instead of
sounds. For example, “str” was
read as “sorta”.
YOPP-SINGER PHONEMIC Phonemic concepts successfully applied:
AWARENESS She was able to tell me the names of the letters.
Phonemic concepts in need of further instructional attention:
Lynn needs further instruction in many of the other concepts of
phonics. She has some understanding of some sounds, however she is
not confident in her abilities and needs help strengthening her
confidence through practice with WA and WI. She needs to see that
she does have some understanding that she can build upon to
strengthen her confidence in reading and writing. Digraphs and
Blends need particular attention, but she must go over matching the
sounds to symbols prior to doing that.
 Final Observations and Recommendations

Running Record Analysis

I completed my child case study with the student Lynn. She is 6 years old, in a first grade

classroom with 26 other students. I was assigned her by my mentor teacher because she explained that

she is a struggling reader and wanted to get a better understanding of what we could do to help her

succeed. I tested her out in the hallway, it was quiet out there and there were actually minimal

distractions while she was reading and writing. The level A book I choose for her was, “Best Friends”. I

think the introduction to the story helped her understand what the story was about, and she even said, “I

have best friends” which made the story relatable to her which got her more interested in the text. The

story is 16 pages long, but only 8 of the pages have text on them, the others have large clear pictures of

the girls doing the activities that are explained. Lynn did a great job using the pictures to help her with

some of the words she was unsure of.

She did a great job in the beginning of the story, she did not make any mistakes on the first 4

pages. She did make a few pauses at some of the more difficult words like “swing” and “climb” but she

used the pictures to help her complete the sentence. I was really impressed to see her doing this because

it shows me that she understands books and how the pictures can describe what is happening in the text.

It is very promising that she is using a strategy like this at a level A, it’s a promising note that she can push

herself to try more challenging readings. She also showed that she noticed the pattern in the text, that it

repeated the same phrase, “We like to _____.” It was nice to see her pick up her fluency as the pages

went on while reading the repetitive piece. It showed me that she was recognizing those words and that

the spelling was the same. However, the second half of the pages had some meaning and visual mistakes.

For example, instead of the correct word “slide” she read “swing”, and instead of “ride” she read “run”. I

found this interesting because she appeared to be relaying on the pictures and for some reason the

pictures of sliding and riding did not help her see that she made a mistake. I think because it still sounded

like it could fit she did not even notice. Overall, she did a really nice job with the oral reading and I was

impressed with her relatively consistent pace while reading. After calculating her errors, she came to a

91% accuracy rate. In order for this rate to rise I feel I would have her slow down a little bit and really read
each word and check the pictures so that she did not have small mistakes like the ones she had this time. I

think she could have read the correct word had she taken her time and that would have given her a much

higher rate. She really only had one syntactically error and everything else I feel was due to her reading

too fast and not paying attention to the pictures on those pages.

For the second part, comprehension I was a bit nervous because I thought she read too quickly to

truly comprehend. However, she did a good job explaining orally what happened in the story. She was

able to give many examples, the only thing she could not describe was what the best friends favorite thing

it was and why. I think she was unable to identify this because on the page that gives that answer she

made a syntactical error and read “love” as “luve”, so she wasn’t able to understand the one thing the

girls loved to do instead of just liked to do. I would recommend that Lynn works on vowel sounds and the

differences between long and short and how to identify those, because she has consistent trouble with

those. That would help with the “love” “luve” issue. Finally, her writing portion was really cute because

she said that she liked to ride bikes with her friends and so she wanted to draw them riding their bikes like

the story. She drew the picture first and then I asked her to write the words that went along with it. She

used the book to write “Best Friends” and “climb” but I then directed her to not use the book for

whatever else she wanted to write. She then added “swing” and “bike” in her best spelling as you can see.

Overall I think she understood what the girls liked to do in the story, but she had trouble writing it out,

she defiantly was more comfortable describing the book orally than she was at putting her thoughts on

paper. Overall, I would recommend once again that she work on her basic word analysis more in order to

understand which sounds connect with which symbols. Once she has master and become more confident

with that I think we will see a big improvement in her spelling and ability to get thoughts out on paper. It’s

hard to write down your thoughts when you have to take a lot of time to think of how the words are

spelled. It was fun to do this test though, because she seemed to enjoy it and connect to the book.

Phonic Inventory

The next week I administered the phonics inventory test, after going over the reading record, I

was very interesting to see how this would go. Once again I administered this test out in the hallway and

while it was quiet, and not distracting Lynn did not seem to be having a good day and seemed a bit upset
today. I am not sure why she was upset she just was not her normal happy self, so that could have

affected a piece of this data, however I feel it is accurate to base off of my understanding of Lynn. I only

asked the first four questions, because as we moved more and more into it she seemed to get more and

more frustrated and I didn’t want her to get negative feelings toward reading. She did pretty well with

naming the alphabet letters. She made five mistakes, but I think it was in part to her moving through it

very quickly. I told her a couple times to slow down a little. I would also recommend that maybe the text

be separated more because she continually got mixed up where she was and that may have added to her

frustration and mistakes. I think with some more practice she could ace that portion.

Then the next three questions, consonant sounds, digraphs, and blends she had a really difficult

time. Although she didn’t get them all wrong she was frustrated and appeared to be guessing on some of

them. I recommend that she defiantly practices her sounds and which letter matches with which sound. I

would also recommend some sight word practice and maybe underlining the digraphs and blends within

her sight words, so that she can better understand them. She seemed confused with these, and wanted to

just say words rather than the sounds of them even though I explained to say the sound. These took some

time because she did not know them, at all and was getting frustrated with what she had to do. Since I

couldn’t really assist her during this test, I just told her to try her best and say they sounds she thought of

when she saw them. Unfortunately, that didn’t help, but I think more practice and a deeper lesson into

onsets and rimes she may be able to connect some dots with her prior knowledge that could make these

clearer to her. I just don’t think she has a strong foundation right now to build upon her knowledge so the

teacher needs to go back and fix the foundational knowledge so that Lynn has the confidence build up her

understanding of phonics and therefore reading and spelling. This was the most difficult of all the tests for

her.

Spelling Inventory

Lynn completed the spelling test after the phonics inventory, and because she was not feeling

great I had her get a drink of water before going right into this test to give her a small break. Once she

came back she seemed a little better and tried to make this one as low stress and straightforward as

possible. I just asked her to try her very best to spell the words I read off to her. She said she was bad at
spelling, but I encouraged her and said she would do a great job! She went through the words fairly

quickly, but I could hear that she was trying her best to sound out each letter in each word. Unfortunately,

as you can see in the example below she only spelled two of the eleven words correctly. However, she

really did try so that gives me hope. I would recommend that she really focuses on perfecting the

consonant sounds and connecting those to the symbols before moving on to the more difficult vowel

sounds. She still struggles with flipping letters like ‘d’ and ‘b’.

Some of the spellings really baffled me and I am not quite sure how to correct it. One of the

words was hope and she spelled it h-o-g. Which was interesting to me because on the phonics test she

seemed to understand g and the sound it made so I was confused as to how she heard the g sound in

hope. Wait is also a difficult word to decipher because she spelled it as, y-a-t. However, on her phonics

test she did show a confusion between the ‘w’ and ‘y’ sound, she was unsure on both and when she saw

‘y’ she said the ‘w’ sound. For that I would recommend practice with the sounds, and maybe read aloud

more with the teacher or a partner where she can follow along and hear the correct words and sounds

may help. I think more listening and repeating like choral reading could help Lynn improve on all her tests

and improve her reading level.

I really enjoyed completing this case study with Lynn because not only was I able to learn more

about her and how to help her succeed, it allowed me to better understand how to help all the students.

It showed me the power of taking the time to do these tests and that it does not just give us a score for a

student, but we can really hear and get an understanding for what each child really needs to grow. It also

shows us their strengths so that we can use those to help give confidence to grow the areas they are

struggling in. I think it would be great to use books that Lynn has a personal connect to and use repetition

of reading those books in order to strengthen her phonemic awareness and overall confidence in reading.