Name of student:
Annie L.
Age:
7
Grade:
First
School:
Erica Bree Elementary

Description

Annie L., a first-grade student, is very creative, sociable, and popular among her peers. She is a hard worker and always tries to please her teacher and parents. Annie is an only student and grew up in a stable family environment. Her parents are actively involved in her school activities. Annie's overall language development is impressive for her age. She loves to listen to books read to her, knows many authors of student's literature and is familiar with many titles. At school, Annie is always involved in reading and writing activities and she is great at illustrating stories for her writing group. Annie showed good literacy development at the beginning of the year. She knew all the alphabet letters and their sounds and recognized most of the print in the classroom along with a few common sight words. However, her performance in reading is not always satisfactory and she does not seem to be making adequate progress. For example, her invented spelling is still very immature, showing that she has not yet mastered letter-to-sound correspondences. For this reason, she has been placed in the lower reading group in her class even though she is in the top group for math. Lately she seems to be more and more withdrawn and she has been found copying class work from classmates. Her mother reports that she is not as interested in book reading and seems frustrated when asked to sound out words. Annie prefers to read predictable books where she has memorized all the text and takes a lot of pride in her "reading."

Score Interpretation

According to the results of the TPRI screen, Annie needs more evaluation to set instructional objectives. Her scores in the inventory section verify this hypothesis by showing a rather typical pattern of a student with difficulties in phonological awareness. She had difficulty identifying rhymes and performs poorly at blending speech sounds both at the phoneme and the onset rime level (see Screening Task 3, Inventory, Phonemic Awareness Task 1). Her difficulty in distinguishing among the different sounds in words did not allow her to perform simple word building activities included in the "Graphophonemic Knowledge" section of the TPRI, despite her letter sound knowledge (see results of screening 1). She was able to form seven simple words (mad, had, tad, dad, pan, pal, pap) by substituting initial and final consonants placed in front of her in the Graphophonemic Knowledge Tasks 1 and 2. However, her performance was not adequate according to the amount of instruction she has received so far and the time of the school year. Annie was not able to read any of the words given in the Word List (for placement into an instructional level text) accurately, and for this reason she listened as her teacher read story 1 to her. Her listening comprehension skills were excellent, and she answered without any problems both the explicit and implicit questions from the passage.

Instructional Implications

Annie needs help in developing her phonemic awareness skills and applying these skills to word decoding. She will benefit the most if she receives individualized explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondences. Based on her overall classroom performance, she seems to be an intelligent student with many book-related experiences from her home and school environment. Her difficulties with reading should not be considered a simple delay in development. Rather, she is showing specific deficits that can be remediated with appropriate instruction. The instruction should be systematic and sequential, providing many opportunities for immediate corrective feedback and modeling. Annie should receive phonemic awareness instruction at least 4 times a week for approximately 20 minutes each time. During this time she should work in listening activities that aim to help her distinguish different sounds in words. In addition, she should practice orally to blend and segment word parts and speech sounds to form words. Both blending and segmentation tasks should be presented to her. She may use a mirror to help her locate parts of her mouth while she is producing different speech sounds. These activities may take approximately 10 minutes in each session. In the remaining time, she should practice letter-sound correspondences and the formation of single-syllable (CVC) words. Common confusion among letters should be treated with practice writing and identifying letters. As she progresses in phonemic awareness, more time should be devoted to word building activities, by first working on oral blending and segmentation tasks, then on forming the target word with letters she can manipulate, and finally on reading the word. Finally, as she becomes more proficient in distinguishing sounds in CVC words and representing these sounds with letters, she should work with initial and final blends. Annie should continue receiving individualized tutoring through the summer by working with phonics rules and by practicing reading with simple decodable text. By the beginning of the second grade she should be able to decode first grade material and instruction should focus on developing fast and efficient word recognition skills.

TPRI scores

Screening 1 (Beginning of the Year Evaluation)

Task 1: Letter Sound	10 of 10	Developed
Task 2: Word Reading	0 of 8	Still Developing
Task 3: Blending Phonemes	1 of 6	Still Developing

Inventory (Middle of the Year Evaluation)

Task 4: Phonemic Awareness (Blending word parts)	0 of 5	Still Developing
Task 5: Graphophonemic Knowledge (Initial Consonants)	4 of 5	Developed
Task 6: Graphophonemic Knowledge (Final Consonants)	3 of 5	Still Developing
Word List	0 of 15
Reading Accuracy		Frustrational Level
Listening Comprehension	5 of 5	Developed

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