Notes
Rebecca finished the end-of-the-year literacy assessments with her students. Her goal was for her fourth-grade ELL students to score 80% or above on the phonics portion of the Really Great Reading, as evidenced by the end of the unit spelling, heart word, and dictation sentences. She had 5 fourth-grade students and now only has 2. (The others have moved out of the country.) One student met the goal, but the other did not; she struggled with encoding and vowel teams. She is a Spanish speaker and had particular difficulty with sounds like /p/ and /b/ due to language differences, though she showed significant growth over time.
Rebecca has completed all of the coursework, except for the application assignment for morphology. She has observed the lesson; however, she has not written up the assignment. She is waiting to see if, by submitting it later, this course will count towards her movement on the salary scale in a way that would benefit her more. She is meeting with district people to determine the best time for her to complete the course.
Rebecca said she learned a lot from the course. She had a strong background in phonemic awareness and phonics from her previous work as an ELL teacher, but the additional information helped to integrate her new learning. We discussed the research tying learning to read along with learning to write at the same time. We also discussed that with ELL students, the importance of including oral language, vocabulary, and the similarities and differences of phonological awareness and phonics between the two different languages.