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Daphnie Peterson EDSE 442 Dr. Lorna Idol March 14, 2013

Case Study Part One

3rd grade 9 year old female DOB 10/21/04 Disabilities: Traumatic brain injury/ learning disabled due to Grand Mal Seizure disorder

Jo (*name changed to protect identity) is a 3rd grade young lady whom has a warm hello and a welcoming smile every day. She is polite and well-liked by her teacher and peers. Jo enjoys being at school, loves art and PE and is sure to let everyone know what a huge Justin Berber fan she is. The amount of time spent in the general education classroom for her is approximately 80% and receives support services in the Integrated Learning Classroom (ILC) 20% of the time. Although Jo is in the general education classroom while math and literacy is being taught, she is pulled out generally 15 minutes into those instruction times to the ILC where she receives 1 on 1 instruction focused on those specific areas. Although Jo loves books and the pictures in books, she has a very hard time reading any text above a late 1st grade early 2nd grade level. While giving her the Burkes interest inventory I learned a great many things about her. She is one of 5 children in the home and is one of the middle children. She appreciates the older siblings allowing her to hang out with them, enjoys playing with the younger ones and strongly dislikes when she has to change diapers (can you blame her). Her home life seems to be happy and supportive, however at home she let me know that there is little time for mom or dad to read to her or for her to read to them because of the busy household. Jo also informed me that sometimes at school she has a hard time understanding all the words, the problems and the stuff in the classroom. She wants to get better at reading so she isnt always looking at baby books as she stated and wants to be a teacher when she grows up. Jos challenges in literacy exist in the areas of decoding, comprehension, story retail and phonemic awareness. While in writing she needs support from the teacher and a

visual structure to write a complete sentence and form a short paragraph. As I was looking at her IEP I found that the school uses the Developmental Reading Assessment 2nd Addition (DRA2+). I was not able to give her this assessment myself I was able to look at the results. The results show that Jo is independent at the 1st grade level (DRA Level A) and is developing at level 3 placing her two grade levels below her same age peers. Decoding seems to be one of the largest areas of concern for Jo. She will often sound out unfamiliar words when prompted by staff, but sometimes it becomes very laborious and she often forgets the beginning sounds before reaching the end of the word. We are currently working to increase her sight word base with the hopes that this will make decoding easier for her. In February of last year Jo received a score of 34/40 on the pre-primer Dolch sight word list. This was the most current assessment of her sight word base available. I am currently in the process of re assessing her in this area. Comprehension is yet another large area of concern for Jo; she needs staff support to retell a story. Structures are in place to help her achieve a goal of 80% retell on her current reading levels and she is working hard to reach that goal. Academic and classroom accommodations: Directions broken-down Change in location Small group Modified test format Post and repeat directions

Abbreviated assignments and directions

Although I was not allowed to give Jo any formal assessments, I was able to look at the ones teachers have given her recently and do my own informal assessments based from their results. What I found was not at all too different from the original data. Jo still is struggling in the same areas in math and literacy. Decoding and retell are still major areas of concern for her. Her decoding skills carry over into her work in the math group and she needs all if not more of the supports she is currently receiving in both focus areas. In all of my observations of Jo I see that she is struggling in all areas of reading. Something else I noticed in my time working with her is that she is having issues with some letter names and sounds; this could be a precursor to some of the problems in her decoding. When I compare her to what the current reading standards are is she well below in standards 1&2 and sometimes she meets what is needed in standards 3&4. I have set up with her teacher to work with Jo and a couple other students who have similar struggles in these areas to increase their sight word base, letter names and letter sounds, and to help work on decoding. I plan to use the Dibels- nonsense word fluency to help in the area of letter sound and blending, along with the DRA2+. I believe something else that needs to be done to help with Jos reading and math is som e independent work with less teacher influence. This would allow her to experiment, construct her own learning, and make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes. When doing this independent learning there will always be teacher and staff support to help guide her just not do the work for her. I hope I am able to help her in obtaining her goals.