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Note, 4-16-22: For privacy, I removed the name of the student whose reading and writing

skills I observed.

Seated near a window toward the far end of the classroom, [redacted] sometimes thoughtfully

stares out of it, more absorbed in that than the workbook in front of her. On the first day of

school, she recorded on her teacher’s First Day Feelings chart that she was excited. She is more

reserved than her peers, but when she is intrigued, she will tuck her knees underneath her in her

chair and lean forward like a runner on a track. She is quiet and patient with her work and will

endeavor to understand it before she raises her hand and politely asks a question. She likes to talk

about animals and to draw, and she will light up at mention of either. She chooses books with

colorful and interesting covers and once selected several Junie B. Jones books, evidently drawn

in by their colorful allure, but was largely unable to read them. Reading is not her favorite

activity, so she will follow along with a whole-class book but remain quiet through it or

otherwise make brief remarks in response to a question directed at her. She often writes

minimally about the text itself on notice and wonder charts during reading lessons but takes care

to notice the illustrations or photographs in texts and will often point to them to underscore or

explain a point that she has difficulty verbalizing. With her own writing, she enjoys drawing her

own illustrations to go along with a story about dogs. She enjoys, too, all things colorful,

rainbows, and flowers. She will compare how rigorous her self-imposed drawing practice is

compared to another avid drawer in class and remark on the progress she has made on her three-

dimensional illustrations. She is less likely to raise her hand to participate in class but will

blossom during one-on-one instruction. She is a hesitant reader and currently views writing and

spelling as somewhat non-intersecting activities. When she started school this year, she spelled
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her name with a neat, backwards Z; so neat it almost looked like a deliberate artistic choice.

Without explicit instruction, she began to write [redacted] with a properly facing Z at some point

in September. She is a quiet but intentional learner and often makes progress without fanfare or

commotion.

When [redacted] reads, she will sometimes linger before she speaks, and often speak only

when she feels reasonably confident. With her, there is no arbitrarily substituting the word fly,

for example, with another three-letter word that starts with f just for the sake of moving on. She

places her finger under a line of text as she reads and sounds out words as she goes. In the

passage she read for the running record, she hesitated over the word areas and asked for my

help. But before she turned to me, I watched her as she haltingly whisper-sounded out each part

of the word to herself: ah - rrr - eeea - suh. She then made an attempt at pronunciation. It

sounded like aria, the opera solo. At [redacted]’s current experience with reading, she is at the

stage where she is “choppy and often word-by-word” (Bear, 1992) and could benefit from

having familiar knowledge with the content of a book in order to focus on stringing together

words with greater ease and speed. However, she has a strong understanding of the connection

between letters and sounds as well as the growing ability to think about context clues as she

reads. In her 105-word reading passage about autumn, she drew from her lived experiences of

living through several autumns to give validation to the placement of certain words, such as

cooler and chilly, and phrases like “fall bursts with color,” which I believe contributed to greater

comprehension of the text. As she read the word cooler, she initially read it as cool and then

corrected herself. That would make the sentence, “In some areas, the air gets cool in fall.” The

sentence still made perfect sense, but the word cooler made the sentence relative: the air is less

warm in the fall compared to spring or summer. I made note of the fact that [redacted] viewed
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cooler and saw cool in it. I also noted that she said cool because she appeared to understand cool

and cooler conveyed similar meanings in the same sentence. After she read that “fall bursts with

color,” she appeared to anticipate that the next line could list a series of colors in fall, and it did.

She read those colors — red, yellow, orange, and brown — with fluency. Fluency is key for

[redacted] as she often reads in a staccato fashion as she focuses intently on decoding each word.

She sometimes demonstrates the ability to scoop words, as evidenced by her smooth reading of

red, yellow, orange, and brown rather than what it could have been given her usual pattern of

reading, which sounds more like: Red. Yellow. Orange. And brown. I believe having [redacted]

read books with limited vocabulary and obvious syntactical patterns and then having her read

those books multiple times until she can read them fluently could be a useful next step. Drawing

on Bear’s knowledge that early readers read with disfluency “unless they have read the passage

before or are otherwise familiar with it” (1992), [redacted] could improve her fluency by reading

other short, relatable non-fiction texts, such as books about her favorite animals or nature

phenomena that incorporate a mixture of new and familiar words with illustrations that provide

strong contextual support. Context rooted in reality could be beneficial for [redacted] in terms of

comprehension, as with the case with the passage about fall. She was able to correctly identify

that the passage was non-fiction, and that some animals, like some birds, migrate when the

weather turns cold. The passage mentioned that geese migrate, so in order to observe her recall I

asked her which kinds of birds migrate, and she said she did not remember. Her recall of almost

all other parts of the passage was comprehensive and mostly linear: The weather gets colder,

people begin to wear thicker clothes as it gets chillier, leaves fall off the trees, the sun goes down

earlier, and some animals migrate. Her recollection of the passage aligned with the passage’s “J-

level” summary expectations established by Fountas and Pinnell in The Continuum of Literacy
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Learning. Namely, in alignment with the ability to “summarize ideas from a text and tell how

they are related” (Fountas and Pinnell, 2011), [redacted] was able to recount what happened in

the passage and explain that all of the phenomena listed in the text, such as trees shedding their

leaves and birds migrating, were all interconnected because of the fall season. [Redacted] was

also able to remember the key ideas of the text mostly in the order in which they were presented,

which fell in step with Fountas and Pinnell’s expectation that students be able to “report episodes

in a text in the order they happened.”

However, I am also mindful that although the passage about autumn appeared to align

with [redacted]’s abilities and she was able to recall a good deal of the text, reading about

autumn may not have been fully engaging. Selecting the right level book is just one part of

teaching and assessing literacy; there needs to be a “more rounded consideration of the many

other variables that can contribute to successful interaction with a text” (Glassman and Ford,

2011), who went on to say that the factors that play into the successful read of a text include

“reader interest, vocabulary, and background knowledge.” [Redacted] may like nature but not

care for reading about the changes in autumn. She may like dogs but prefer to only read fiction

featuring dogs rather than, for example, a non-fiction book about service dogs. A strategy to

combine [redacted]’s interests and current reading abilities would be for the teacher to have

[redacted] select Level J to K books that look interesting to her. From there, the teacher would

hold one-on-one sessions to take more running records, teach and review vocabulary, observe

aloud syntactical patterns, and practice reading faster and more fluently by having [redacted]

read a page, or the book, more than once.

[Redacted]’s relationship with phonics, reading, and writing is at an interesting juncture.

Recently, as she incorrectly spelled a word on her whiteboard during a phonics lesson, she
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defended her misspelling by stating, “I didn’t think this was a spelling test.” However, she has

consistently exhibited a robust knowledge of phonemic awareness as shown through her primary

spelling inventory. Although she correctly spelled five words out of 26, almost all of her answers

displayed a clear grasp of the sounds that individual letters and digraphs make. For example,

wait was wate. Stick was stic. Dream was dreme. Chewed was chood. Wishes was wishisis.

Shouted was showtid. Third was thrd. Camped was kempt. She knew the effect of -e on the end

of a word, and that c and k can make the same sound. She heard the long vowel sound of -ee and

-ea and invented the spelling of dreme around that sound. She knew blends because she knew the

ch- in chewed, for example, made the “cheuh” sound, and that th- in third made the “thuh”

sound. Her spelling inventory showed as much: She has a solid understanding of beginning

consonants, final consonants, short vowels, digraphs, blends, and long vowel patterns. However,

she is consistently tripped up by other vowel patterns. Her confusion is shown in her spelling of

krol instead of crawl, and spoyl for spoil, for instance. She displayed confusion with inflected

endings, too: tris instead of tries; claping for clapping. By most measures, [redacted] appears to

stand in the Within Word Pattern stage, although she often has troubles with long vowels.

However, [redacted] can think about “chunks of letter sequences and silent vowel markers like

final e” (Bear et. al, 2016). Specifically, based on her spelling inventory scoring sheet, she erred

when it came to other vowel patterns and inflected endings. A strategy to assist [redacted] here

may be to use a technique similar to “Making Words,” as developed by Patricia Cunningham and

Dorothy Hall. Under the Making Words strategy, students “are given six to eight different letters

on letter cards. Then, the teacher calls out words with two, three, four, and more letters that can

be formed using the students’ letters, with the teaching and students first making the words and
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then sorting words out based on their common spelling patterns or other orthographic features”

(Stahl, 1998).

To teach inflected endings, the teacher provides [redacted] with several index cards, each of

which has a different noun or adjective on it, such as finger, bench, walk, or run. These index

cards should contain a large variety of nouns and adjectives and all the cards should be one color

and distinctly different from the second set of index cards the teacher will then distribute

to[redacted]. The second set of index cards will have inflected endings such as -s, -es, -ing, and -

ed. [Redacted]then uses the cards to create words with inflected endings. Finger becomes

fingers, and bench becomes benches. The teacher then explains why, for example, the plural of

bench is benches and not benchs.

As a writer, [redacted] again displayed her strong knowledge of phonemic awareness. In

a recent story of self, she wrote about the time she went to a pet store with two other people to

pet a dog. As in the primary spelling inventory, most of her spelling was invented but displayed a

clear understanding of letter-to-sound correspondence. The story starts: “I Wuz Driving Too the

pet Stor! We wre [g]oing to [p]et a Dog! I Wuz sowixidid! I cuDint wat.” The brackets indicate

that [redacted] reversed the g in going and the p in pet. The most notable spelling on the first

page is sowixidid, or her spelling of so excited. Her spelling shows how she parsed apart so

excited syllabically and phonemically. She understood that so could only be represented through

the letters s and o, displaying comprehension of that digraph. Perhaps because she or others

around her had uttered so excited in a rush, she thought it was one word instead of two. Based on

that, she heard soexci, and drew on her knowledge of the sound w, or wuh, and knew if she

combined that with the vowel i and the consonant x she would get wix. Her spelling of sowixidid

also showed how she thought about the spelling in its syllables and aligned it perfectly to the
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actual spelling of so excited. So was one syllable, wix was the second, i was the third, and did

was the fourth. Her writing appears to have placed her in the transitional stage, where she shows

she understands the relationship between letters and words and sounds. In alignment with

Pennsylvania Writing Assessment standards, [redacted] excelled in focus and organization. She

had a clear and consistent theme to her story: going to the pet store to pet a dog. The organization

was linear and started with [redacted] and her family driving in a car to go to the store, arriving

at the store, and looking and eventually petting a dog. However, the content of her story could

have been stronger if she had provided more details about the trip to the store. Her drawings that

accompanied the text showed that she was with two other people who could ostensibly be a

parent and sibling, but the text itself did not say who [redacted] was with. Her illustrations also

showed that she had drawn five dogs in different kennels in the pet store but that level of detail

was absent in her words. Again, expressive detail is abundant in her illustrations. On the second

page, which shows [redacted] in the pet store, one person says, “hae locat this won,” presumably

“Hey, look at this one.” Another person says “wew,” and the third figure says “ooo.” It was clear

that [redacted] experienced a rich and memorable time at the pet store that she could have

amplified in her story with added detail, anecdotes, and opinions. While the story could have also

benefited from extra style, she wrote at the end of the second page, “So mene I saw,” a reference

to the number of dogs at the pet store. I thought this was interesting phrasing, especially since

most of her classmates would have written the sentence as, “I saw many dogs.” [Redacted’s

story struggled the most in conventions, but as mentioned previously, she displayed strong

knowledge of phonemic awareness that allowed her to cultivate her story and present it in an

engaging way, even if most of it did not align with conventional grammar, spelling, and

mechanics. A method that [redacted] could use to improve her writing would be if her teacher
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provided her with a series of illustrations, some of which show characters with empty speech

bubbles above their heads. [Redacted]’s task is to study the illustrations, invent a story in her

head based on the illustrations, and write that story in as much detail as possible. This would

combine [redacted]’s knowledge and attention to drawings as well with the necessity of

improved writing.

The analysis process was difficult, not only in the process itself of studying a child’s

spelling, reading, and writing, but in the discourse that surrounds the child’s literacy skills. The

dialogue is too often divorced from an asset-centered mindset. Because of this, I chose to not

include above a summary of the results of [redacted]’s Renaissance 360 Star assessment in

reading, which placed her below grade level and necessitated the help of an interventionist. The

results from my analysis were more illuminating. It showed, most of all to me, that [redacted]’s

invented spellings carry a tremendous amount of thought, effort, and understanding of

phonemics. She sees the value of illustrations not as a supplement to a text, but a partner to it,

and continually shows in ways subtle and not that she is a thoughtful, patient, and intentional

reader.

Artifacts
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