During the first meeting with my student we completed benchmarking using the Fountas and Pinnelle benchmarking program. The student ended up completing level “R” with 96% accuracy. This became his instructional level for the beginning of this term. During reading, I noticed that he needed to work on reading more fluently. He spoke in phrases of 2-3 words. He also had difficulties answering questions that were asked to him to respond to. I attributed the difficulties of answering questions to his lack of reading fluency. At the second meeting, we completed the Elementary Spelling Inventory. Through this assessment it became clear that the student needed to work on inflected endings. Reading fluency and word work with inflected endings became the focus of our time together based off of the information these assessments provided for me.
Because I will no longer be working with this student, I feel that it is important to suggest ideas to continue to build fluency as well as furthering the inflected endings instruction that I began. I would recommend that the teacher continue to work with the child on inflected ending word sorts. There are many rules to the English language that are difficult for children to comprehend and many of us do not learn them in school as children. It will immensely help our children to build their knowledge of how our language works therefore I believe this is an area that the student would benefit from teacher instruction. I would also recommend that the teacher continue to discuss how punctuation affects how we read and continue to reinforce pausing at periods and using expression while reading. For parents, I would suggest that they work on reading aloud together on a regular basis. Children that need to build fluency need to read and reread. Therefore, repeated readings would be beneficial for the student. Another activity I would have the parent do with their child is echo reading. He responded to this activity well one on one with me and took what he learned into our next meetings.
In completing this case study, I became more comfortable with the benchmarking process. Prior to this experience, I was extremely nervous to benchmark children and was not confident in doing this. Benchmarking and running records is truly a task that you need to simply jump into in order to build the skill. Over the time we spent together, I noticed that the student had a difficult time paying attention in class or individually with me. The only time I could get him to pay attention was when we were doing running records. Because I could not get his attention, I choose a book that was a couple levels above his instructional level. I found that choosing a book that was challenging for him helped him to be more engaged. He was also extremely excited to read a book about soccer. He loved the book “Tangerine” by Edward Bloor and the book independently. He had always made progress in the book when I had returned to work with him again. I learned that at times, it is more important to allow children the ability to work with content that is interesting to them so that they may become invested in their learning. In the end, the student jumped two reading levels in the short time we spent together and that this was a great success for the both of us.
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