Jackie Jenkins

Comparative Case Study

10/19/10

For my comparative case study I am comparing two of my kindergarten students, Jacob and Reece. Both are in their first years of kindergarten and experiencing their first year of public school. Both students are white, non-Hispanic males and five years old. They differ drastically in their knowledge of alphabet and literary concepts.

Jacob was born in California but was in NC for his preschool years. He attended preschool at Brighten Academy in Sherrills Ford, NC. He went full day while his parents worked. He lives with both of his parents and one older brother who is in the fifth grade at our school and based on what I know is a bright student. His mother completed high school and words for a software company. His father has a graduate school degree. He was laid off at the beginning of the school year but is now working full time. Jacob attends afterschool care at our school. He does not receive free or reduced lunch. Jacob has Celiac disease and cannot have any oats, barley, wheat or Rye products but is healthy otherwise. He is very aware of his condition and is able to manage what he eats pretty well. Jacob is a very bright child but is sometimes a behavior problem. He is very talkative and always wants the last word. He sometimes has temper tantrums if he does not get his way and is easily frustrated. He is very likable and playful.

Current functioning for Jacob: Jacob shows many strengths on the assessments that he has been given thus far and in daily classroom work and activities. He is able to sound-spell words when writing and include a beginning sound, ending sound and a vowel. He has strong phonological abilities and is able to hear rhyming words and match beginning sounds in words with the correct letters. His math skills are good as well. He has appropriate number sense, patterning skills and knowledge of shapes and colors.

Assessment / Results
1. Dial Screening (Administered in the spring before entering kindergarten) / 34/39 and 81st percentile for his age.
-Showed strengths in rapid color naming, verbal skills and alphabet knowledge. He did not show any prominent weaknesses.
2. Initial alphabet assessment (given on the first day of kindergarten) / Knew 26 capital letters and 24 lowercase. On a recheck in October he knew all 26 lowercase.
3. Letter Sound Assessment (part of the county K-2 assessment) / October 2010. 24/26 sounds.
4. Book Print Awareness Assessment (part of the county K-2 assessment) / October 2010 16/20. This tests the child’s knowledge of parts of the book, tracking, return sweep when reading, punctuation marks, and the difference between a letter and a word.
5. AIMSweb Fall Benchmarking / Letter Naming: 60 in one minute. The target for this benchmark was 16.
6. Schlagel Spelling Inventory / On the level one list, he correctly spelled one word (bed). However, he consistently showed correct beginning and ending sounds as well as a correct vowel.
7. IRI passage Emergent / Passage was Look at Me. He read with 88% accuracy and made one self-corrected error. This was on his frustration level.
8. ASU word Recognition Test / Preprimer- Flash 60%
Untimed 90%
Primer- Flash 10%
Untimed 15%

When looking at Jacob’s current performance I would place him in the Phonetic Cue phase of Spear-Swerling and Sternberg’s stages of reading development. Jacob has alphabetic insight and knows his letter/sound correspondence but I do not think he is completely phonemically aware. He is moving towards the controlled word recognition stage but I do not think he is quite there yet. He is aware of vowels when writing but this information is not established enough that he uses it consistently when reading text. I think that doing some word study activities, including practice sounding out CVCs and reading predictable texts will help get Jacob to the controlled word recognition stage fairly quickly and help him be able to perform better on oral reading passages. To be honest I was surprised that he did not do better on the oral reading passages based on his word recognition abilities. I think he needs more book experience to make his word recognition skills show in text reading.

Reece also comes from a two parent household and was born in this area. Until recently both of his parents worked full-time and he attended a full-time preschool. At the beginning of this school year, Reece’s mother was laid off and is now staying at home with the children and volunteering at school. He has one older brother who is in second grade. I taught his older brother in kindergarten and he showed many of the same weaknesses that Reece shows now. He was slow learning his alphabet and seemed behind in peer relationships and common sense/reasoning skills. By the time he left kindergarten the “light bulb” had come on and he had average literacy skills. He did require one-on-one help from me and my assistant over the course of the year to acquire these skills. According to his second grade teacher, Reece’s brother is now on grade-level. Reece’s mother said that he has been a relatively healthy child but had ear tubes put in three times due to many ear infections. Reece has hyperactivity problems. He is able to focus on a task, especially written tasks, but he gets very over-excited during group/movement activities. He is very stubborn and becomes frustrated easily. He needs choices to help with his behavior. He is also very lovable and does aim to please. Reece does not receive free or reduced lunch.

Current functioning for Reece: Reece is slowing acquiring knowledge of the letters of the alphabet and their sounds. He has made progress but is skill lagging behind many of his peers in this area. He is showing the ability to remember the Letterland character names for the letters but having some trouble remembering the letter name. He has great handwriting and motor control. He cannot consistently identify rhyming words but he can complete beginning sound sorts independently. His math skills are average and when writing he can consistently include a logical beginning sound.

Assessment / Results
1. Dial Screening (Administered in the spring before entering kindergarten) / 29/39. 50% for his age group. Showed strengths in copying and visual representation and weakness in rapid color naming and alphabet skills.
2. Initial alphabet assessment (given on the first day of kindergarten.) / Knew 5 capital letters and 0 lowercase. On a recheck in October he could name 10 capital and 12 lowercase.
3. Letter Sound Assessment (part of the county K-2 assessment) / October 2010. 13/26 sounds.
4. Book Print Awareness Assessment (part of the county K-2 assessment) / October 2010 10/20. This tests the child’s knowledge of parts of the book, tracking, return sweep when reading, punctuation marks, and the difference between a letter and a word.
5. AIMSweb Fall Benchmarking / Letter Naming: 11 in one minute. The target for this benchmark was 16.
6. Schlagel Spelling Inventory / On the level one list he did not spell any words correctly. On most words he put only the beginning sound. This sound was logical in most cases.
7. IRI passage Emergent / Passage was Look at Me. He read with 85% accuracy and had no self-corrected errors. This was on his frustration level.
8. ASU word Recognition Test / Reece did not know any words on the PP list.

Based on the results of his assessment and classroom observations I would place Reece at the very beginning of the Phonetic- Cue stage. While he does not know all the letters of the alphabet he is aware that there is a code and he is able to use beginning sounds to help him with words, particularly when writing. The more alphabetic insight he is able to acquire, the further into this stage he will be able to go and then continue forward to the next stage. He cannot rhyme consistently yet he can do alliteration tasks. In order for him to stay on track, he has to learn the remainder of the alphabetic code.

These two students seem to have a lot of similarities prior to entering my classroom. Both come from two-parent, working families and neither have economic disadvantages. They both attended full day preschool programs and are the youngest siblings in two son families. However, when entering kindergarten they had very different alphabetic knowledge. Jacob came in with almost complete knowledge of the alphabet. Now, less than two months into the school year he knows almost all letter sounds, many sight words and is able to write words with a correct beginning, ending and vowel sound. He scored well above target for the AIMSweb goal of rapid letter naming. Reece entered kindergarten with almost zero knowledge of the alphabet and is acquiring them slowly. He was not able to identify any words and writes words with only a correct beginning sound. He scored below the target for AIMSweb rapid letter naming. It is very interesting that these two boys would perform so differently when their background appears similar on the surface.

As a teacher I am curious as to what may have led to these differences. Since I am familiar with Reece’s brother and noticed many of the same problems with him, I wonder if the boys had many experiences with books or with conversation at home. Their parents seem like they would converse and read to their children but the lack of literacy knowledge would suggest otherwise. Perhaps Jacob was read to a great deal as a child and had lots of rich, literary experiences at home. I also wonder about the quality of the preschool experiences each boy had and if that led to the discrepancy. One interesting fact I learned through was the large number or ear infections Reece had as a young child and that he had to have tubes three times. Perhaps this led to a delay in his alphabet abilities. Despite their similarities, these two boys have started their school experience at very different places and need different types of literacy experiences to stay on track with their reading development.