Retrograde motion

Today a few of my students appeared to have regressed rather than progressed.  Their results on the progress monitoring of Initial Sound Fluency (ISF) were worse than on the official September assessment.  At first I was frustrated and quite dismayed.  But upon further reflection I have decided that this assessment is not going to be an accurate reflection of what these students are learning in my classroom.  I need to look at the big picture.

For example, I have seen one of me ELL (English Language Learner) students try to sound out words on a page during writing.  He does a fairly decent job of hearing the consonant sounds.  During the (ISF) he struggles to find the picture that begins with a specific sound.  The most likely explanation for this is that his English vocabulary is not very extensive.  He is trying to remember the individual words and is not able to simultaneously separate the initial sound.

For my few students who struggle so much to learn letter names, I have begun to realize that they have made some pretty lucky guesses.  However, the assessment shows me that they do not understand the letter-sound connection.  It makes absolutely no sense to them yet.  The child who scored a 3 in September, scored a 0 today.  There is progress in that regression.  I believe he guessed correctly for those 3 right answers in September.  The students have a one in four chance of selecting the right answer, statistically his odds were good.  Today he remained silent during the test.  He didn't answer a single question until the very end.   Perhaps, he knew he didn't know and didn't want to guess?  On the very last answer he was able to give me the correct letter even though he was supposed to provide the sound.  Again, that shows some progress.  He knew that lollipop begins with l!

This year my job as a teacher requires me to dust off those long lost skills of data analysis.  Being a good data analyst requires figuring out the why behind the numbers.  Just like the planets that appear to be in retrograde motion, it's all a matter of perspective (well and some physics).  My students are moving forward in the same way that Mars follows an elliptical orbit around the sun even though the data points show otherwise.

A no brainer

Recently I read an article about the four stages of sight word reading.  As I read through the article, one of the major points I gleaned is that learning to read sight words is developmental.  Well yeah.  Learning to read and write are developmental.  Kids learn when they are ready.  

But I can have TWO cookies!

According to Wikipedia, subitizing "refers to the rapid, accurate, and confident judgments of number performed for small numbers of items."  If you look at a picture of three stars, you don't have to count the stars because you know there are three stars just by looking at them.  Your speed and accuracy decrease as the number of stars increases.  

Today I had a little girl hold up three fingers, but when I asked her how many she paused to count them.  Curious, I asked her to show me two fingers.  She had to count, "1 2" before she could show me two fingers.  She had to count for 4 and 5 as well.  

Learning to count objects is part of Kindergarten.  When a child is unable to count objects at the Kindergarten screening, I'm not too concerned.  But I have never had a student who had to count in order to show me a certain number of fingers.  Now I'm curious to know what is the typical age to subitize fingers?  I think of two and three year olds who are able to show how old they are with fingers.  Do they truly understand that those fingers represent 2 or 3?  Some do.

When my nephew was a toddler he was allowed to have two cookies for dessert.  He would eat one quickly and then demand another cookie because he was allowed to have two cookies and now he only had one!  

What does it mean that this little girl still has to count her fingers in Kindergarten?  Is it truly a concern or is it developmental?  I just don't know.  I'm going to find some cookies.

 

Iamgintobeodms.

Having trouble pronouncing the title?  Well, it says "I am going to be Optimus."  You're giggling, "Oh I see it now!" or you're saying, "What is she talking about!"  One of my students wrote that sentence on Friday because he was going to be Optimus Prime for Halloween.  Apparently, Optimus Prime is a Transformer.

Watching a child acquire language is fascinating.  Those cute baby sounds become word approximations (baba for bottle).  Then approximations become whole words and short sentences.  Almost overnight it seems as if the toddler is speaking in complete sentences!  Now at the ripe old age of five, I'm asking students to go backwards.  Take your sentence, separate each individual word, and then break those words down into their individual sounds.  Holy cow!  That is hard work for these little guys!

Learning to read and write is very similar to learning how to speak according to Brian Cambourne in his book Whole Story: Natural Learning and the Acquisition of Literacy.  During writing I can observe student approximations as they put their thoughts on paper - not so much in whole sentences - but in the sounds and words they write.  Someone else might look at my students' writing and see all the cute mistakes.  To me they are not mistakes, they are approximations.  I learn more about my students from their approximations than what they get right.

My little Optimus Prime knows the words I and am and was able to put down sounds he heard for the other words, but he has difficulty understanding that each word needs it's own space.  I know that he hears /ing/ at the end of going, but doesn't know it is spelled -ing.  He heard the /pt/ as a /d/, which are similar.  When we write on Monday, I will remind him to use his Spaceman to put spaces between his words and possibly assist him with one or two sounds in his writing.

Another student in my class wrote "I see the yee g dfoo," the other day.  His sentence is really, "I see the leaves falling down."  This little one understands how to write the sight words we have learned including the spaces between the words, but is having difficulty sounding out words on his own.  He has the ee for leaves but the rest is confusing.  He hears the d and f as he says his sentence but he doesn't understand where they go.  When we write on Monday, I will sit down to help him stretch out his words so he can hear the individual sounds.  I might find out that he is able to stretch out the words into sounds, but he doesn't know which letters make those sounds.  See how confusing writing is for five year olds!

As they write, I tell my students to take risks and sound out words on their own.  Generally speaking, I can decode (yes it takes some heavy duty decoding skills to decipher some of my students' writing), but to be on the safe side I always have them read what they wrote to me.  This is good reading practice as well, but I'm only addressing writing right now.  I celebrate each student's successes no matter how small,  knowing that tomorrow those words of praise will encourage my students to take more risks and make more approximations.  Those approximations will guide my instruction for individual students as well as for the whole class.