Room for Development: Her reading skills require further development, along with some other areas that were tested in the PAST that I will discuss in a moment. When we were working on the sentence strip, she recognized, when asked, what punctuation and a capital letter are and their placement within a sentence. The words in between she did not get in order, but she also did not even appear to be reading the word. The guess that she said was nowhere close to what the word was. She is lacking development within her ability to recognize sound-spelling correspondences and a slight lack of development in her ability to blend and segment to figure it out. I could not quite tell if this was due to laziness or inability. On the PAST, she did pretty well with recognizing basic syllables; she struggled more with removing the later part of the word than the beginning. She achieved 100% automatic accuracy on the onset-rime portion. She performed poorly on the basic phoneme portion. However, I did not do any of the Heggerty hand motions (I did not even know that was a thing until later in the day) so that may have affected her performance ability. All in all, she performed well and gave me a great perspective into the mind of a young non-proficient reader.
Identify Needs:
Strengths: The child demonstrated good listening skills, attention, and observation skills throughout the session. These skills were demonstrated and used effectively during the interest inventory, PAST, sentence strips, and the reading of Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin. The interest inventory taught me that she loves hearing the stories of books and flipping through the pages, she just cannot really read them for her personal enjoyment, but she is read to at home (woop-woop!). Specifically during the PAST, she attentively listened and answered automatically to all questions; correctly and incorrectly. Additionally, a prekindergarten class walked by and was incredibly noisy (as that age group is) and she continued to work hard. I had to repeat a few words due to the volume of noise in the hallway, but other than that she did stellar.
Reflective Journal #1 Con. Pt. 1
Propose A Strategy: Next week, I plan on using an activity where the student has an image and two puzzle pieces per picture; the first being the onset and the second being the rime. I plan on showing her an image and asking her to tell me what it is. After I will ask her what beginning sound she hears and what letter on the desk matches that. I will do the same for the rime. Once she has an onset and rime paired that match the sounds of the word used to describe the image, I will ask her to segment and blend. Then she will write the word she formed on a sheet of paper.
Provide A Rationale: This strategy is developmentally appropriate and instructionally sound because it is something that is explicitly taught in the first grade, it will support an area that she struggles in, and it is reinforcing the first three pillars of Phonological Awareness, in some form or fashion. Furthermore, it aligns with the following TEKS: ELA.1.2- Developing and sustaining foundational language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking--beginning reading and writing. The student develops word structure knowledge through phonological awareness, print concepts, phonics, and morphology to communicate, decode, and spell. The student is expected to: ELA.1.2.A- demonstrate phonological awareness by: ELA.1.2.A.v- blending spoken phoneme to form one-syllable words, including initial and/or final consonant blends;
Adjustments: In my next session I will really focus on how I pronounce my phonemes. During the PAST I mispronounced /d/. Not only as a future educator, but because I am working with a student who has a lack of development in reading skills, I need to be 110% sure I am pronouncing them correctly, so she has the absolute best opportunity of being as successful as possible.
Reflective Journal #1 Con. Pt. 2
Analyze Evidence:
She just needs some direction and slight intervention. :)
Reflective Journal #2
Strengths: This week, she again demonstrated strong attention and observation skills. When working on the phonological awareness activity described in my first reflection, she did well sounding out each sound once she identified the image. Once she segmented the first sound, she found the letter on the onset puzzle pieces and selected the piece that matched. Next, she sounded out the vowel sound and found a puzzle piece from the rime section. Once she found the vowel that matched, she had to sound out the final consonant sound to see which vowel/consonant rime pair puzzle piece was correct. After, she put them together, segmented each sound then blended. After she felt confident that the word matched the image (and I said it was correct), she wrote it on the piece of paper. Throughout this activity, her strengths included isolating the sound and identifying what letter the sound corresponded to. When working with the Elkonin sound boxes she did mostly well sounding out the word, with some guidance, and assigning the letter that corresponded. Throughout this activity she pulled a plastic animal figurine out of a ziploc bag for every individual sound she heard. With this visual, she did very well segmenting and blending when we pointed to the animals. While reading our book, she did well pointing out unique designs in the illustrations that supported the author’s story.
Identify Needs:
Room for Developmenet: When we did the phonological awareness activity, she struggled to differentiate between b/d and whether or not c/k was the appropriate letters when the /c/or /k/ sound was heard. With the Elkonin sound boxes, she struggled a little bit with breaking the word into the different boxes; the visuals were a big help. Also, I used skunk as my word for five phonemes and she said she had never seen one and it is kind of a tricky word. When we broke down ‘sheep’ on the whiteboard, she wrote the word incorrectly, had a hard time separating the phonemes, and forgot that two es make a long ‘e’ sound. Throughout both activities she struggled with letter spacing and how letters are to be written.
Reflective Journal #2 Con. Pt.1
Propose A Strategy: Based on the child’s needs, next week I will use an activity that causes her to segment, blend, recognize the double ee long vowel team and the sound it makes, and something that involves writing to help with her penmanship. Next week I will have an activity where she has to write the double ee long vowel team into empty spaces and find them in a word search. Afterwards, I will ask her to read each word and write it on a separate piece of paper (if time permits).
Provide A Rationale: This strategy is developmentally appropriate and instructionally sound because it assists her in continued sound-spelling correspondence, focuses on a vowel team that they have covered in class that she struggles to recall, and provides her with the opportunity to practice her penmanship. ELA.1.2.B- Demonstrate and apply phonetic knowledge ELA.1.2.B.iii-The student is expected to demonstrate and apply phonetic knowledge by: decoding words with closed syllables; open syllables; VCe syllables; vowel teams, including vowel digraphs and diphthongs; and r-controlled syllables;
Adjustments: In the next session, I will do better about correcting her letter knowledge and letter writing. I did not catch that she had written some of her letters incorrectly until I was analyzing her work after the session.
Reflective Journal #2 Con. Pt. 2
Analyze Evidence:
Tips For Success
This student is not drastically behind her peers, and she has an enjoyment for learning, which is very encouraging. The results from her PAST, her inability to put together the sentence strip without assistance, her lack of penmanship skills, and her weakness of sound-spelling correspondences is the data that I will be using to guide my instruction through the three remaining sessions. She is very attentive, bright, and always has a good attitude. She almost works harder with me than she does in the classroom sometimes (personally, I think she is fueled by the knowledge that she gets a reward at the end of our session, but I’ll take it). She has a natural curiosity, and she does not refuse to write, which I find to be a true blessing. The next steps include her refining her skills and applying all of them together. She needs to work on properly sounding out words, writing her letters correctly and with proper spacing, and identifying b/d and c/k more accurately. After session three I will see if the next activity I have planned was productive and will plan my next session more specifically based off that. I plan on basing the remaining sessions on sound-spelling correspondence and writing. The lessons will be specifically related to certain words, vowel teams, etc. based on what they are going over in class and what she continues to struggle with. She has a foundation of sounds and letters; she just needs help solidifying the glue that holds them together.
Book Buddy Checkpoint #1
Anna Rasberry
Created on October 10, 2025
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Transcript
Book Buddy Checkpoint #1
By: Anna Rasberry
Reflective Journal #1
Room for Development: Her reading skills require further development, along with some other areas that were tested in the PAST that I will discuss in a moment. When we were working on the sentence strip, she recognized, when asked, what punctuation and a capital letter are and their placement within a sentence. The words in between she did not get in order, but she also did not even appear to be reading the word. The guess that she said was nowhere close to what the word was. She is lacking development within her ability to recognize sound-spelling correspondences and a slight lack of development in her ability to blend and segment to figure it out. I could not quite tell if this was due to laziness or inability. On the PAST, she did pretty well with recognizing basic syllables; she struggled more with removing the later part of the word than the beginning. She achieved 100% automatic accuracy on the onset-rime portion. She performed poorly on the basic phoneme portion. However, I did not do any of the Heggerty hand motions (I did not even know that was a thing until later in the day) so that may have affected her performance ability. All in all, she performed well and gave me a great perspective into the mind of a young non-proficient reader.
Identify Needs:
Strengths: The child demonstrated good listening skills, attention, and observation skills throughout the session. These skills were demonstrated and used effectively during the interest inventory, PAST, sentence strips, and the reading of Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin. The interest inventory taught me that she loves hearing the stories of books and flipping through the pages, she just cannot really read them for her personal enjoyment, but she is read to at home (woop-woop!). Specifically during the PAST, she attentively listened and answered automatically to all questions; correctly and incorrectly. Additionally, a prekindergarten class walked by and was incredibly noisy (as that age group is) and she continued to work hard. I had to repeat a few words due to the volume of noise in the hallway, but other than that she did stellar.
Reflective Journal #1 Con. Pt. 1
Propose A Strategy: Next week, I plan on using an activity where the student has an image and two puzzle pieces per picture; the first being the onset and the second being the rime. I plan on showing her an image and asking her to tell me what it is. After I will ask her what beginning sound she hears and what letter on the desk matches that. I will do the same for the rime. Once she has an onset and rime paired that match the sounds of the word used to describe the image, I will ask her to segment and blend. Then she will write the word she formed on a sheet of paper.
Provide A Rationale: This strategy is developmentally appropriate and instructionally sound because it is something that is explicitly taught in the first grade, it will support an area that she struggles in, and it is reinforcing the first three pillars of Phonological Awareness, in some form or fashion. Furthermore, it aligns with the following TEKS: ELA.1.2- Developing and sustaining foundational language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking--beginning reading and writing. The student develops word structure knowledge through phonological awareness, print concepts, phonics, and morphology to communicate, decode, and spell. The student is expected to: ELA.1.2.A- demonstrate phonological awareness by: ELA.1.2.A.v- blending spoken phoneme to form one-syllable words, including initial and/or final consonant blends;
Adjustments: In my next session I will really focus on how I pronounce my phonemes. During the PAST I mispronounced /d/. Not only as a future educator, but because I am working with a student who has a lack of development in reading skills, I need to be 110% sure I am pronouncing them correctly, so she has the absolute best opportunity of being as successful as possible.
Reflective Journal #1 Con. Pt. 2
Analyze Evidence:
She just needs some direction and slight intervention. :)
Reflective Journal #2
Strengths: This week, she again demonstrated strong attention and observation skills. When working on the phonological awareness activity described in my first reflection, she did well sounding out each sound once she identified the image. Once she segmented the first sound, she found the letter on the onset puzzle pieces and selected the piece that matched. Next, she sounded out the vowel sound and found a puzzle piece from the rime section. Once she found the vowel that matched, she had to sound out the final consonant sound to see which vowel/consonant rime pair puzzle piece was correct. After, she put them together, segmented each sound then blended. After she felt confident that the word matched the image (and I said it was correct), she wrote it on the piece of paper. Throughout this activity, her strengths included isolating the sound and identifying what letter the sound corresponded to. When working with the Elkonin sound boxes she did mostly well sounding out the word, with some guidance, and assigning the letter that corresponded. Throughout this activity she pulled a plastic animal figurine out of a ziploc bag for every individual sound she heard. With this visual, she did very well segmenting and blending when we pointed to the animals. While reading our book, she did well pointing out unique designs in the illustrations that supported the author’s story.
Identify Needs:
Room for Developmenet: When we did the phonological awareness activity, she struggled to differentiate between b/d and whether or not c/k was the appropriate letters when the /c/or /k/ sound was heard. With the Elkonin sound boxes, she struggled a little bit with breaking the word into the different boxes; the visuals were a big help. Also, I used skunk as my word for five phonemes and she said she had never seen one and it is kind of a tricky word. When we broke down ‘sheep’ on the whiteboard, she wrote the word incorrectly, had a hard time separating the phonemes, and forgot that two es make a long ‘e’ sound. Throughout both activities she struggled with letter spacing and how letters are to be written.
Reflective Journal #2 Con. Pt.1
Propose A Strategy: Based on the child’s needs, next week I will use an activity that causes her to segment, blend, recognize the double ee long vowel team and the sound it makes, and something that involves writing to help with her penmanship. Next week I will have an activity where she has to write the double ee long vowel team into empty spaces and find them in a word search. Afterwards, I will ask her to read each word and write it on a separate piece of paper (if time permits).
Provide A Rationale: This strategy is developmentally appropriate and instructionally sound because it assists her in continued sound-spelling correspondence, focuses on a vowel team that they have covered in class that she struggles to recall, and provides her with the opportunity to practice her penmanship. ELA.1.2.B- Demonstrate and apply phonetic knowledge ELA.1.2.B.iii-The student is expected to demonstrate and apply phonetic knowledge by: decoding words with closed syllables; open syllables; VCe syllables; vowel teams, including vowel digraphs and diphthongs; and r-controlled syllables;
Adjustments: In the next session, I will do better about correcting her letter knowledge and letter writing. I did not catch that she had written some of her letters incorrectly until I was analyzing her work after the session.
Reflective Journal #2 Con. Pt. 2
Analyze Evidence:
Tips For Success
This student is not drastically behind her peers, and she has an enjoyment for learning, which is very encouraging. The results from her PAST, her inability to put together the sentence strip without assistance, her lack of penmanship skills, and her weakness of sound-spelling correspondences is the data that I will be using to guide my instruction through the three remaining sessions. She is very attentive, bright, and always has a good attitude. She almost works harder with me than she does in the classroom sometimes (personally, I think she is fueled by the knowledge that she gets a reward at the end of our session, but I’ll take it). She has a natural curiosity, and she does not refuse to write, which I find to be a true blessing. The next steps include her refining her skills and applying all of them together. She needs to work on properly sounding out words, writing her letters correctly and with proper spacing, and identifying b/d and c/k more accurately. After session three I will see if the next activity I have planned was productive and will plan my next session more specifically based off that. I plan on basing the remaining sessions on sound-spelling correspondence and writing. The lessons will be specifically related to certain words, vowel teams, etc. based on what they are going over in class and what she continues to struggle with. She has a foundation of sounds and letters; she just needs help solidifying the glue that holds them together.