week 7 assignment #5

Assignment#5 Find a child to practice the above 4 types of assessment, report the child's assessment results, and suggest learning activities to reinforce the development in these 4 areas,  and suggest at least 3 online websites that could help the child with these 4 areas of development (i.e. Starfall.com and Sesame Street PBS).  

I found a second grader, Ming, for this assessment. One of his parents speaks English and one speaks Mandarin. He studies in normal public school and speaks Mandarin in school and English at home.

Print awareness

I chose " Miss Keen Needs Help" (by Timothy Prentiss, Benchmark) as my material to present Ming (pseudonym).

First, I asked him some questions about the book handling such as "where is the front of the book?", "where can you find the author's name". Then I just followed the questions mentioned on the website, "can you tell me....."

·         the title of the book

·         where you should begin reading

·         a letter (point a letter and sound it to me)

·         a word (point any word and sound it to me)

·         the first word of a sentence

·         the last word of a sentence

·         the first and last word on a page

·         punctuation marks (what does it mean when you see a period?)

·         a capital letter (point one for me, and why it is capital)

·         a lowercase letter (point one for me)

He performed very well in most questions except the punctuation mark, it seemed that he never thought of this before. 

Phonemic Awareness

I used "Segmenting syllables" for this assessment. Ming's result obviously showed that he was not familiar whit syllables. As a second grader in Taiwan, especially studying normal public school, English teachers' teaching varies and most of them don't spend lots of time on phonemic awareness.

Phonics

Based on the previous assessment, I changed my plan from segmenting syllables to "Do these words rhyme?", I applied the website "rhyme zone" to ask him which two words rhyme. Ming didn't respond very well to the first four questions, but he gradually got the rule and performed better in the last six ones.

Fluency

Before reading, I asked him some anticipation question and explain some vocabulary, and then read aloud to him and allowed hem to have a silent reading. After these processes, I had him read out to me. He read word by word most of the time and without expression(prosody), the situation was even worse when he encountered multi-syllable words. I assumed students here, in Taiwan, they didn't pay attention to the sound-to-letter correspondence very much, or textbooks just used single- or two-syllable words.

Websites

The following websites I would like to suggest him to apply at home,

1.  Construct a word.
2. Tumble book library.
3. Between the Lions.