Reflection+and+Evaluation

**VI. Reflection and Evaluation**
==== Overall, my case study was a great learning experience. I enjoyed working with the student because he always displayed a positive attitude and was engaged in what we were doing. It was also encouraging to see that he truly wanted to gain the skills needed to become a better reader. Looking back, I am glad I chose to work with this student because out of all of my students, I think he was the one who needed the most help in reading. ==== ==== If I had a chance to change anything from the case study, I would focus more on reading with expression. The student read in a monotone voice and we didn’t get to do too many activities to help with this. At times, I modeled reading for him and we did echo reading but it wasn’t consistent enough. I think it would be helpful to even tape record the student reading for him to hear how he sounds while he reads. By doing this, I think he will be more motivated to improve his expression while reading. ==== ==== If I had the access to a computer during our lessons, I’d find online games that focus on some of the skills he needed help with, such as a sight word practice game. Another thing that I would do is bring short books and magazines that have to do with basketball or football to interest the student in reading. One book that I found is called, //The Million Dollar Shot// by Dan Gutman; it is about a boy in 5th grade that plays basketball so it would be something that my student could really relate to. ==== ==== I would continue doing the SRA Corrective Reading stories since that is what he is doing in his Reading class when I pull him out. I think it is also important to continue the one minute reading probes so that the student increases his words read per minute. The Dolch list flash cards are critical too because he needs to master sight words from lists A-E by the end of the year. We only got to word list B, so he definitely needs to keep practicing in order to master all of the lists. I would probably stop the silent e activities because the student has demonstrated great improvement. ==== ==== From this project, I’ve learned that it takes a tremendous amount of effort on both the teacher and student’s part. Being flexible was important since my time with the student was limited. I was given only two days a week with the student for about 35 minutes at a time. It wasn’t easy to plan what to do each week because there were so many areas that the student needed help in. I also had a difficult time with finding appropriate standards for each lesson since the student is working on skills below his grade level. Since the FCAT was coming up, I also tried to squeeze in some activities to help him. I thought it would be useful to work on strategies such as main idea, summarizing, inferences, etc. Although it was difficult to fit everything into our schedule, I covered many areas to help the student as much as possible. His progress was a bit slower than I expected, but I realize that he has been struggling with reading for his whole life. With that being said, it will surely take more than a few months to see any huge improvements. However, he has brought his grade up to an A in his Reading class and he has B’s and C’s in his other classes. ==== ==== By working with the student one-on-one and re-assessing him each week, I was able to closely monitor his progress towards his IEP goals. Based on the data collected, it is clear that the interventions were successful. However for the future, I believe that the student still needs to receive one-on-one attention at least twice a week to continue progressing. Being that the student is such a low reader, it is crucial that he gets extra help aside from his intensive Reading and Language class. ====