Case Study of Ausgustin, a First Grade
Student
by Della Larimore
April 3, 1999
Teacher comments:
Augustin is my first grade classroom. He was retained in kindergarten and is now eight years old. I am concerned about his lack of progress in all areas of language arts: oral reading, phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension skills, spelling, and writing abilities. The assessments I used addressed most of these areas. They were: Concepts About Print, Word Test, Writing Words, Dictation of Sounds and Words, all from Marie Clay. Phonemic Awareness, Phonics Inventory, Francine Johnston’s Spelling Inventory, DRA oral reading level, and running records were also given. I felt each of the assessment tools were necessary in order to evaluate the difficulties Augustin was experiencing. The results were as follows:
Assessment Results:
Augustin tested 16/24 on Concepts of Print. He needs Specific instruction on word and letter order, he did not understand the us of comma, question mark, or quotation marks. On the Word Test, Augustin read seven of the 15 words, but he had to sound those words out and did not know them by sight. On the Writing Words in 10 minutes, Augustin wrote 26 words. On the Phoneme Awareness Tasks Augustin has shown very little growth since August when this assessment was first given to him. Explicit activities in these areas have been thought but not mastered. He needs direct instruction with hearing words in speech, hearing syllables, beginning sounds, final sounds, and final sound matching. The results of the Phonics Inventory were very predictable based on the phoneme awareness assessment. Most upper and lower case letter and sounds were correctly identified. All other areas were very difficult for Augustin. Digraphs, blends, short and long vowel patterns, vce and vowel teams, are all areas in which explicit teaching is needed. On the Francine Johnston Spelling assessment, Augustin did fine with the initial and final consonants and most of the short vowels, the other areas were very weak. When I assessed Augustin’s reading level he was reading at a level 4.