SFA Summative Report #1

Student Name
Tutee:

Audrey Nord
Alice Walters

Date:

10-24-16

Assessment Results:
From the pre-assessment to her first re-assessment, Alice has improved in all
areas of her reading skills. Our tutoring sessions have been good opportunities to focus
on addressing Alices challenges, as well as giving her opportunities to practice with and
strengthen those challenge areas. In our tutoring sessions, we practiced separating sounds
and then blending the separated sounds in to words. For part 1 of the assessment,
phonemic awareness, Alice mastered objective PA(2): blending sounds into words. Thus,
she mastered this skill with the extra practice from our sessions. She also mastered the
last two aspects of concepts of print which she needed to, understanding what the title
meant to a story and reading the message from the print rather than from the pictures.
However, the greatest gains that Alice made was in her letter skills.
In the re-assessment, she corrected identify each letter sound including the sounds
for /ch/, /sh/, and /th/. The one sound which Alice continues to struggle with is the /u/
sound. For the second objective, writing letters for specific sounds, Alice successfully
completed the task for all the letters, except for two. This is a major accomplishment,
since during the pre-assessment Alice could only successfully match half of the thirty-one
sounds presented to the proper grapheme. Further, Alice has improved in her knowledge
of letter names. During the re-assessment, she only missed three letters, rather than the
eight she had missed in the pre-assessment. Alice has also increased in her knowledge of
sight words, as well as in reading words and spelling them.
Alice read three times as many sight words in her re-assessment as she could
during the pre-assessment. Her ability at identifying and reading sight words continues to
grow rapidly throughout our tutoring sessions. In addition to sight words, Alice
demonstrate an improved ability to read words through blending. However, the
improvement in this area have been slight and sounding out words continues to be a
challenge for her. Yet, in the re-assessment, Alice mastered her first set of spelling words
by breaking them down into their separate sounds. Her improved knowledge of letter

sounds has undoubtedly helped her in this area. Overall, Alice has made increases in
every area of the assessment and demonstrated great improvements in several skill sets.
However, she has yet to achieve mastery in sight words, blending sounds to read words,
and in spelling words. Therefore, we will continue to work within tutoring plan 2 for the
next set of our tutoring sessions.
Reflection of Overall Lesson:
Of the methods that were used in the tutoring sessions, I found that say-it-fast,
identifying letter sounds, and reading red words strategies were the most effective.
Particularly with the say-it-fast and letter sounds strategies, Alice was able to make
significant gains in her phonological skills. However, the magic pencil strategy did not
prove to be as helpful to Alice. While she enjoyed our exercises with this strategy, it did
not seem to reinforce her letter skills. Also, the activity would frequently get out of hand
as her energy with it escalated, which would the cause transition problems when we
switch activities. These challenges with the magic pencil strategy could also have been
exacerbated by my own inexperience with the strategy. Even with practice on my part, I
could not seem to implement it effectively with Alice. Therefore, I think that a different
strategy will better meet Alices learning needs and should be implemented in the future.
In terms of her weekly goals, Alice quickly met each and successfully learned
those letter sounds we were focusing on. When we set the weekly goals, I allowed Alice
to choose what she would receive as a prize if she met the goals. For these self-selected
prizes Alice choose to play a game with me. Therefore, at the end of every week, if her
goals are met, the two of us play a game such as go fish for the last couple minutes of
our tutoring session. This has proven to be a very effective motivator for Alice, especially
if she is getting distracted during a strategy. I simply remind her about being able to play
a game together at the end of the week and she refocuses on the lesson. Therefore, I will
carry this motivator over into future tutoring lessons.
For future lessons, I will be shifting the focus from improving Alices phonemic
awareness and letter skills to a stronger focus on improving her range of sight words, as
well as blending sounds into words. Therefore, we will continue to review and work with
the sounds of letters, but more time will be devoted to practicing reading whole words.

Furthermore, we will work on spelling and the spelling rule associated with certain
words. I am excited to begin our next set of tutoring sessions and I hope that Alice will
make even greater improvements in her reading abilities.
Other Issues and Comments:
Alice remains very confident in herself, however there are times when she will
say things like, I cant do that, Im not smart enough. When she does say these negative
things about herself, I reminder about how much we have already learned and how much
progress she has made. I let her know that I have confidence in her and that she does can
do whatever the task is if she puts in the hard work.
Alice lives with her grandparents currently and she told me one day that her
mother lives far away. I think that this does affect her motivation some days, because she
will insist on talking about doing things with her mother, such as having a birthday party
for her younger brother with her mother there. This can get the session off topic with the
activity we are working on. However, I know her situation is not easy and that she must
miss her mother a great deal. Therefore, I generally let her tell me about her plans for a
minute, before genteelly redirecting her back to our work. This living situation can also
affect our tutoring sessions at times, because her grandfather comes to pick her up and
sometimes he comes early. When this happens, our tutoring lesson is either cut short or
we are not able to have a tutoring lesson at all that day.