For this project, we worked with Eloise Leatham. She is a kindergartener, 5 years old, from St. Paul. She attends Saint Paul Academy, a secular private school in St. Paul. She is exposed to books on a regular basis, as she has an 8-year-old sister who loves to read. Her parents, who are both working professionals with a relatively high income, read to Eloise and her sister every night before bed. Both parents enjoy reading, and have instilled a value for reading in their girls. Eloise attended preschool for 3 years, and was exposed to reading and writing there as well. She speaks fondly of her preschool experience, and continues to enjoy going to school now that she is in kindergarten.
Assessment 1
The first time we met with Eloise, she was very excited. Lauren is a regular nanny of the Leathams, and Eloise was excited for Michaela to come over so that she could meet one of Lauren’s friends. In order to make Eloise feel comfortable with Michaela, we all went out for frozen yogurt beforehand. This excitement affected the assessment positively, because Eloise was eager to impress Michaela. We began with a Pre-Primer assessment from the Quantitative Reading Inventory- 5 by Lauren Leslie and JoAnne Schudt Caldwell. Eloise was asked to read “I See” aloud. Before reading, Micheala asked Eloise a series of questions that would pertain to the story. Then Eloise read the story, with help from Lauren as needed, and Micheala followed along documenting errors. Then, Michaela asked a series of follow-up questions to ensure comprehension and recollection of the story. These same questions were asked twice, once without any aid and then again with the help of the pictures from the story. All of the results from this process are included below.
(Assessment 1 data)
From this assessment, we found that Eloise had an 85% accuracy rate when reading aloud. She has a very good understanding of the content, as she easily answered the pre-reading questions in detail. When reading aloud, Eloise did very well with sight words, though she struggled sounding out words that she had not seen before. She used the pictures as references in order to make an educated guess on what the words might say. While this did result in a change of meaning (dancing instead of doing), we found Eloise to be very resourceful when she was stuck on a word. The only other problem we recognized with Eloise’s reading was her tendency towards insertion. More than once, she said ‘I can see’ rather than ‘I see’, which was what the text said. After reading, Eloise remembered about 60% of the story without any reference, and then 100% of the story with aid from the pictures. She was also able to easily answer the recall questions that were asked of her afterwards. She was able to add implicit content from the pictures to her answers. For example, the ant of the plant was outside, though that was never explicitly stated. This told us that she was at a level of comprehension that implied she was ready...
