Case Study of Augustine

Case Study of Augustin, 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 use of commas, question marks, 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, but the other areas were very weak.

When I assessed Augustin’s reading level he was reading at a level 4.

Lesson Plan:
Our school site has some Wright Group and Rigby Readers. Our current reading series is Silver Burdettewhich has some decodable texts but most are very quickly out of the range of the pre and emergent readers. When designing my lesson for Augustin I had to keep our resources in mind.

Reread a previous leveled book from the day before. A running record will by taken on this reread.

New book introduction using a predictable text. Augustin isn’t reading for meaning so I’m trying to connect meaning for him. The book introduction will leave some work for him to use his cueing systems.

Interactive writing for him based on the story we just read. He will choose the sentence. We will use sound boxes for the unknown words.

After he has written his sentence I will cut the sentence apart and he will put the sentence back together to work on word recognition and sequencing.

The phonics lesson will be a making words activity focusing on a short vowel pattern.

Other activities that need to worked on with Augustin will be to build his sight word vocabulary. We will start his own word wall building on it weekly as we meet together.