Pam is at school. She plays a new game called “Red Light Green Light.” A girl tells her how to play the game. First, Pam has to run as fast as she can. She likes to run. When she runs fast she can feel the wind on her face.

Video Resources

●      Common strategies for meeting the needs of all learners

Concepts of Print (Not one of the Five Pillars)

Shared Book Experience

Use the information below to complete the exercise that follows.

When Lori arrives at school the first day of kindergarten, she goes over to the reading corner and picks up the wordless picture book, Good Dog, Carl.  Sitting down on the rug, she begins to look at the book.  You notice that she holds it upside down at first, and skips around, looking at the pictures from back to front.  When you ask her to tell you about the story, she says very little except that the book is about a dog and a baby.  When you ask Lori to write her name, she writes a letter that resembles “L” and then draws circles on the rest of the page.

       Write a response in which you:

1. Identify one area of need demonstrated by Lori.

2. Describe an instructional strategy or activity that you can implement to address this need.

3. Explain why the strategy or activity you describe would be effective.

Phonemic Awareness

Use the following information to complete the given exercise.

The role of phonemic awareness in beginning reading has been well researched.  Phonemic awareness is related to reading achievement.  Study the following example of a phonemic awareness task.

Sample Phonemic Awareness Task

Students listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes.  They then combine the phonemes to form a word.  They then say the word.

Teacher:       What word is /c/-/a/-/t/?

Students:      /c/-/a/-/t/ is cat.

Teacher:       Good.  Now try this word -- /s/-/oa/-/p/.

Students:      /s/-/oa/-/p/ is soap.

Teacher:        Very good.  Let’s try one more -- /f/-/l/-/igh/-/t/.

Students:      /f/-/l/-/igh/-/t/ is flight.

Based on the information given above, write a response in which you:

Phonics

Use the information below to complete the exercise that follows.

A first-grade teacher notices that Alida is struggling with reading grade-level text that is largely decodable text. She can read most CVC words and knows many sight words but seems confused when encountering some words with long vowel patterns. The teacher administers the CORE Phonics Survey. Alida passes the assessments that test words with short vowels (i.e. CVC, consonant blends, digraphs) with 100% accuracy. On the subtest for long vowels she made the following errors:

tap (tape)     dom (dome)     hid (hide)     lik (like)     bak (bake)     pal (pale)  

       Using your knowledge of reading, write a response in which you:

1. Identify the specific decoding need of the student.

Based on the phonics survey, Alida reads with 100% accuracy, all the words with short vowels. 

When given a list of words with long vowels, she did not notice that the spellings a_e, i_e, and o_e represent the long vowel sounds.

Alida needs more direct instruction with the VCe pattern.

2. Describe an instructional strategy and student activity to address the identified need.

3. Explain why the identified process would be effective in                         addressing the problem.

Fluency

Use the information below to complete the exercise that follows.

For the mid-year assessment, Sammy, a first- grade student, was asked to take an oral “cold” reading of a passage.  As Sammy reads, the teacher marks a copy to note mispronunciations, self-corrections, and insertions.  Sammy read 38 WCPM.  The errors are subtracted from the total number of words read and recorded as the Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) score. 

Sammy’s Miscue Analysis

Based on the miscue analysis of Sammy’s reading performance, write a response in which you:

1. Identify one need as demonstrated by this assessment.

Based on the miscue analysis of this first-grade student, Sammy is still learning to identify basic sight words.

Six of the nine miscues were sight words, including “’of”, “some”, and

“the”.

There is a need for Sammy to gain automaticity with sight words to improve his fluency.

2. Describe one instructional strategy the teacher should use to support this student in improving his fluency.

3. Explain why the strategy you described would be effective for increasing Sammy's rate.

Vocabulary

Use the information below to complete the exercise that follows.

Prior to having students read a textbook chapter on tree classification, a fifth-grade teacher divides students into small groups and gives each group a set of labeled photographs and diagrams of a particular type of tree (e.g., pines), with each group focusing on a different type of tree. The students examine their photographs and diagrams, write down as many characteristics as they can about their assigned tree, and then present their findings to the whole class. As students share their ideas, the teacher writes key words and phrases on the board (e.g., pine trees = have cones, have needles, the needles grow in clusters, the needles are green in both the summer and winter photographs) and also introduces new terminology (e.g., trees that have cones are called conifers). The teacher then conducts a guided whole-class discussion during which students identify characteristics shared by more than one type of tree (e.g., having cones) and sort the trees by these characteristics (e.g., conifers = pines, firs, hemlocks, spruces, cedars, and larches). 

     Using your knowledge of reading instruction, write a response in which you:

1. Describe how the teacher can effectively differentiate instruction with respect to this activity to address the needs of students in the class who are English Learners.

Since the activity and textbook chapter require knowledge of vocabulary that’s

not often used in everyday speech (e.g., cones, needles, clustered) and will

likely be unfamiliar to English Learners, the teacher should…

Explain why the instructional strategy you described would be effective in addressing the needs of these students and promoting their development of vocabulary, academic language, and/or background knowledge.

Comprehension

Use the information below to complete the exercise that follows.

A first-grade teacher is assessing a student’s reading comprehension of a story that he reads fluently and accurately by having the student retell the story. The story is printed below.

After the student reads the story, the teacher asks him to “tell me the story in your own words.” Printed below is the student’s oral response.

The teacher then asks a targeted question to try to prompt the student to elaborate on his response. Below is the student’s response to the question, “How do you know that Pam needs to learn about crossing the street? Tell me as much as you can remember.”

The teacher completes the assessment by asking the student, “What else do you think Pam will do?” The student responds:

   Using you knowledge of reading comprehension, write a response in which you:

Identify one reading comprehension need demonstrated by this student

The student demonstrated difficulty with literal comprehension, which led to his making incorrect inferences.

Since the student read the story aloud “fluently and accurately,” his difficulty is probably not caused by inaccurate decoding or lack of fluency but rather by a lack of attention to what he was reading.

Describe an instructional strategy or activity to help address this need.

Explain why the strategy or activity you described would be effective for this purpose.