Zaniyah and I must be kindred spirits, we both love Tacky the Penguin! (for class)

11/19/12

After missing Friday with Zaniyah, I really enjoyed today. We started by sitting in an area off to the side of the lunchroom, which was perfect because neither of us were distracted by other student pairs. Today we both chose penguin stickers, and at least I actually remembered to take off my sticker before going to my flute lesson later! I’ve been known to forget on practicum days…

MAZE

We began with yet another maze, which excited Zaniyah because she really enjoys the challenge of finding out which word belongs. She has done perfectly on the 2A and 3A activities, so today we did a 4A maze. She still did perfectly, only making a few errors and self-correcting without me even prompting correction. She stumbled over many of the words that weren’t the optional maze words, but I helped her through some of them. Her ability to use context to determine the correct word is amazing.

FLUENCY

After the maze, we did a 60 second fluency passage check. I told her that I was timing, but that I didn’t want her to try to read fast, but to rather focus on reading at a comfortable speed, trying to understand the passage and sound out each word. She wasn’t worried about it at first, but she definitely read differently knowing it was timed. She read without inflection, and made many errors. She said “trying” instead of “tired” and “eating” instead of “eaten.” She also wrestled with the word “children’s.” It was very apparent that she wanted to skip the word, but knew she should work through it. She read 48 words per minute with 6 errors, not including self-corrections (accuracy 87.5%).

CHECKLISTS

Zaniyah always loves to answer questions, so we finished the sample checklist, C1, about the multiple intelligences. It seems like she is definitely not naturalistic, except that she loves animals, but otherwise she is fairly well split between the majority of them. She is talkative, but prefers to work alone. Very much split between intra and inter personal skills. She is musical and also active bodily-kinesthetic and artsy (spatial). I think that it is often hard to identify strengths in children who do a little bit of everything.

TIME TO READ ABOUT PENGUINS! J

Disclaimer: I hope you don’t all think that all I want to do is force my own obsessions on 2^nd graders. I just realized early on that she found my interest in penguins funny, and took advantage of that. I think it was useful for this short-term relationship focused all on testing, which can be boring if there isn’t something specifically fun about it.

Tacky the Penguin!

After all this testing, I gave her a few options and she chose to read a book. I happened to bring 3 penguin books with me, and she saw Tacky and immediately said she knew that story and wanted to read it. So she read me the whole thing (not wanting me to read any of it!) and jumped in to tell me things about the plot long before we reached that point. It was interesting to hear her read a story that she recognized. She picked up on the words because she remembered them in the story, rather than decoding them through phonics or syntax clues (example: companions). We also read a story called Talent Night that is about a penguin and is filled with rhymes and other useful phonics-focused things. It was interesting to see some of the sounds that she really struggles with isolated and repeated in this book, which at first glance looks much easier than Tacky (example: -ung as in ‘rung’ and ‘swung’). One interesting thing about our time together was that she repeated multiple times that she was a good reader, even though her fluency isn’t great. She is confident, and willing to practice lots, so I have faith that she will be a very fluent reader in time.  Also, although her fluency passage went poorly today, her reading of Tacky, especially, was filled with perfect inflection. She clearly enjoyed the story’s text, and she was capable of reading with strong fluency (qualitatively, anyway).

I really enjoyed working with Zaniyah, and will honestly miss our afternoons together!