Language Kidwatching - Web viewI had Dan work on reading and writing during our sessions to examine which English language landmarks ... a word, which he self ... for teaching reading

RUNNING HEAD: KIDWATCHING LANGUAGE 1

Language Kidwatching

Christopher Eberhart

Education 345

March 14, 2014

KIDWATCHING LANGUAGE 2

The student, who will be referred to as Dan, is a Kindergarten student at an Early Learning Center

in Lawrence. He started Kindergarten at age four by testing into the class early (Hesch, 2014). I had Dan

work on reading and writing during our sessions to examine which English language landmarks had been

achieved. After the field experiences at the Early Learning center, his teacher informed me Dan was one

of the top students of the class (Hesch, 2014). I observed Dan reading a book first, and then asked him

questions regarding the text.

Dan was presented with a choice of three different Eric Carle books to read: Mr. Seahorse, The

Very Quiet Cricket, and The Very Busy Spider. He decided to read Mr. Seahorse. As a test before

starting, I handed Dan a book which was flipped around to the back cover and upside down. Without

hesitation, he oriented the book properly (Owocki & Goodman, 2002) immediately wanted to read. I

asked who the author and illustrator of the text were to see if he understood their roles per Common Core

standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.6 (NGA&CCSSO, 2010).To find out the information, he pointed to

the name Eric Carle on the front and began searching the preface for information about the illustrator.

After observing his pre-reading behavior, I told him to start reading the text when he was ready.

During the reading, Dan accidentally skipped a word, which he self-corrected after realizing

patterns were a feature of the text. He skipped over the word lionfish, asking “they didn’t include the

name of this fish?”. I chose to not answer his question to see how he would respond to the dilemma.

After realizing the pattern of the book by flipping the next page, followed by a previous page, he returned

and reread the sentence to find the word lionfish. Dan read the entire text without assistance and problem-

solved to answer his own questions. He demonstrated an understanding of return by “reaching the end of

the first line, then dropping down and starting over on the far left of next line” (Taberski, 2000, p.14).

Directionality was understood as he knew to start at the front cover, “the text reads from left to right and

to turn the pages from right to left” (Wood-Ray, 2004, p.4). He used voice print match (Nolan, 1996) and

kept track mentally without pointing to the individual words with a finger. He kept one to one

correspondence with the text (Nolan, 1996), reading each word correctly and knew the letters’ sound to


say the word. After observing his major landmarks while reading the text, I wanted to see his opinion of

the text.

Dan showed an understanding of multiple landmarks in reading and enjoyed Mr. Seahorse. I

asked him several questions after the reading to identify major parts of the text under standard

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.3 (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). “What was your favorite part about the book, what

was the book about and what he had learned from the text”? He responded “the transparencies!” for his

favorite feature of the book; the book had transparencies which would uncover additional text and the

picture of the animal. “The book was about a seahorse traveling with a family and meeting other fishes”

was his answer to what the book was about. Mr. Seahorse was a simple text and the summary was correct

on what happened in the book. Finally, “I never saw these fishes” was the answer to what was learned

from the text and he seemed interested in learning more about underwater life. We moved on to writing

and Dan showed an interest in baseball and outer space from his one page stories.

After the reading, I had Dan write out a few of his ideas on blank paper to create stories. I had

checked his in-class writing books beforehand, and he understood directionality (Wood-Ray, 2004, p.4)

but had written on the pages so the book would open left to right. He had several books which were

technically correct in his folder; it may just have been an afterthought after starting the writing or he tried

to align the directionality of text with the opening of the book. For the first story, “I Pay Basball” (see

appendix Page 11, image 1) was Dan’s way of writing I play baseball. After writing the text, he read the

story back to me to explain what he had written. From this writing, he understands letter-sound

correspondence by knowing that “letters have specific sounds and was able to associate the letter sounds

with the writing of the first letter of the word” (Taberski, 2000, p.14). He also knows strings of letters are

used to create words (Taberski, 2000, p. 14) and those words have meaning. He demonstrated an

understanding that there are capital and lowercase letters through his writing and capitalized words the

words at the beginning of a sentence (Taberksi, 2000, p. 128) and words he wanted to emphasize. When

he read back his story, he added extra emphasis when saying the words “I, Basball”. The same emphasis


on capitalized letters occurred when he read back his book Jup on the Mno and added the emphasis to

Moon. Dan had met other writing landmarks and utilized his in-class writing to demonstrate knowledge

of text features.

The spacing of the words may seem unusual but he self-corrected his work from “I basball” to “I

pay basball” after realizing he left out the verb, play. There was no space left to put pay so Dan just wrote

the word smaller in his original spacing. He understands the space between words is important (Taberski,

2010, p. 14) and had proper spacing in his in-class books. For his other book Jup on the Mno (See

appendix Page 9, Image 2), he decided to create the text with a text feature, stacking text, (Taberski,

2000, p. 180). The kindergarten class was working on an author study about Mem Fox and for part of his

class writings; he had to use a feature of the text in his work during class writing. After writing, Dan

illustrated his work and showed how pictures can be used to portray a moment of the story, showing an

example of meeting standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.7 (NGA & CCSSO, 2010). He wrote out his

story “I pay basball” and “Jump on the moon” before adding the pictures to illustrate what his story

meant. He explained his images in I pay Basball were of him playing baseball. The pictures below were

going to be another story describing football. Jup on the Mno was Dan’s understanding of space and

wanting to jump on the moon. His drawings were of various celestial objects he had knowledge of and

wanted to depict alongside the moon. Dan has shown an achievement of the major landmarks for

Kindergarten and I would introduce punctuation as the focus of his future learning.

For next steps, I would highlight punctuation using commas. Dan knew what the periods were

and they signaled the end of the sentence but did not acknowledge the commas in the text. Using what he

already knows about periods, I would introduce the comma as a way to separate ideas without ending

them. For an activity, he could make a list of his favorite things to do and have him read aloud the list

without commas. He may be able to hear how the list does not make since without slight pauses and may

try to figure out a way to separate the ideas. Another possibility is to write out the date and ask how the

current date would read without separating the day from the year. Understanding commas can be difficult


but a brief introduction on how they can slow down a sentence and separate thoughts would help expand

his writing further. Dan showed evidence of achieving multiple English Language landmarks. He stayed

on task, was always exuberant, and prepared to share what he understood.


References

Hesch, C. (2014, February 26). Interview by C Eberhart []. Field observation.

NGA&CCSSO. (2010). English language arts standards. Retrieved from

http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/K/

Nolan, L. (1996). Guided reading: Good first reading for all children. Ed Pro LLC.

Owocki, G., & Goodman, Y. (2002). Kidwatching: Documenting children's literacy development.

Taberski, S. (2000). On solid ground strategies for teaching reading k-3. (pp. 14-180).

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Wood-Ray, K. (2004). About the authors writing workshop with our youngest writers. (p. 4).

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.


Appendix





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Language Kidwatching - Web viewI had Dan work on reading and writing during our sessions to examine which English language landmarks ... a word, which he self ... for teaching reading