Reading, Rhyming, and Sounds Part 1

Today we went to meet with our kindergarten buddies. Buddy E seemed excited to see my partner and me. As we walked towards the other room we took advantage of the walk as a time to chat. We checked in to see how he was and what was new. Buddy E said nothing was new and I had to add that nothing was really new with me either.

Once we found a place to do our work we jumped right in. There was so much to try and accomplish in the next thirty minutes with our buddy. My partner took turns doing the assessment which worked really well. While she was being the facilitator it gave me a chance write down some of the things I saw and focus more on observation. For the first couple of questions Buddy E was right on. He knew where the title was, he was able to point to a letter on the page, and he knew what a word was. When he pointed to the word "free" I decided to ask what it said (while that was not one of the questions in the script I just for some reason asked). To my surprise he looked at each letter of the word and sounded it out. I knew he was pretty good at letter sounds and stretching, but I had not seen him read a word yet. After talking about the word I asked him if he knew what it is called when you have a group of words together and showed him a sentence that I hugged with two pieces of paper. He said he did not know, but quickly took it back when I said it was called a sentence. He was not able to tell me what it was but once he heard the term he knew what it was.

I really enjoyed observing the different elements of reading the story. When Buddy E had to first go through and make predictions of what was happening I was surprised to hear what he had to say. As he made his predictions he looked at many different aspects of the picture. For example on the page that there was a boy and puppies he acknowledged both of them an did not leave out much from the illustration.

After reading the story a couple of times I think we were starting to lose Buddy E's interest. There was a lot we were going over. The last two activities were rhyming words and naming a word that had the same beginning sound as another word. I had a assumed that this would not be too challenging for him but to my surprise the rhyming words we slightly tricky. To introduce the rhyming words we asked him if he knew what rhyming words were and he gave us as close to a dictionary definition as the average kindergartner would. Actually it might have been an even more advanced definition than that. Since he knew what it meant to rhyme we did not even go over too many examples. However, just because he knew what it meant did not mean he was able to perform. We helped him out quite a bit. Luckily he knew his letter sounds and words that started with those sounds. The only one he has some trouble with was the word "children" but with a little help he realized that "chair" had the same beginning sound.

Today was a great learning experience. I learned a lot about my buddy and myself as making assumptions. I am looking forward to next week when we will get to find activities that our buddy will benefit from.