Bringing back confidence

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Bringing back confidence

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      One of the first students I started working with at Green Bay Trinity was GA. Once you meet GA, you cannot help but like GA. She is an energetic, bright and competitive girl. GA had started at this school late, at the end of the third week, so she had already missed quite a bit in those first weeks of school. She also had been home schooled the year before without any formal curriculum. During her first week at her new school, she was confident and proud that she knew her letter names. However, GA’s classroom teacher quickly had growing concerns and referred her to me for LSEM services. She and I both noticed that GA’s confidence was starting to fade. GA was beginning to realize that she was further behind than her peers, so she stopped raising her hand and volunteering to sound out new words introduced to the class. 

     I first met with GA and assessed her reading with 1st grade Acadience Benchmarks. Within minutes, I adjusted to the kindergarten booklet and found that even though she knew many of the letter names, she had almost no knowledge of the sounds the letters made. Of course, this prevented her from reading at the grade level material this school uses.  I started using SOR vowel valley cards and mouth pictures with mirrors as well as the consonant cards to get familiar with the letter sounds. After a couple of weeks of working with her to collect data, her classroom teacher and I met her mom to share what GA was learning, the progress she had already made, and to share what she had missed starting late. We worked with her mom to come up with a plan to help GA progress closer to where the class was.  I provided her mom with copies of words with color coded Elkonin boxes as a tool to practice with at home. GA’s teacher explained that the class was using Wilson Reading and shared what the class was working on. Her teacher loaned her reading books to practice with at home, and I loaned her a set of letter articulation cards.  

     This turned out to be a great example of wrap-around support with her mom working with her at home, reading intervention one on one and push-in small group reading class support gave GA the opportunity to make fantastic strides! Entering this Fourth Quarter, GA loves to read first grade books and now she loves to practice nonsense words that she successfully decodes. She also loves to build sentences, and she writes them out with neat printing. She organizes her work and keeps her Wilson magnetic letters in perfect order. This is part of her competitive plan; to quickly find the correct letters and spell the word of the day so she can be called on before everyone else!