Today was a great last meeting, well for now, with Buddy E. When we came in he has his usual smile on his face, I bet he was anticipating the fun things we had planned for him. First we looked at his journal that he had out. I really liked that that teacher had journals for the students and that they wrote in them every Monday after the weekend. When they do a “weekend” journal entry the teacher gives them a piece of paper to glue in that says “over the weekend I…”. Most of Buddy E’s journal entries were just illustrations but he had great stories to add to his pictures. On another page he had talked about their trip to the farm. He had drawn a barn, cow, pig, and cat and wrote in the appropriate label for each of those things. His most recent journal entry was the Monday after Halloween so he of course wanted to talk about trick-or-treating. This was his first entry that he had a nice illustration but also finished the sentence saying he went trick-or-treating using inventive spelling. He was really good at figuring out the begging sounds and some of the ending sounds however it was a little difficult to read what he had wrote. However, it was great to see his progression through the journal from the first journal entry to his last. I am sure when we see him again later in the year I will be even more impressed by his progress.
After we chatted about his journal we moved on to reading Sheep in a Jeep. My partner and I decided to read a rhyming book so that he could see the rhyming being used in context. While we read he jumped in a couple of time to rhyme or to add some commentary to the pictures.
Next we did a game where Buddy E had to create words. He had to take one letter and an ending sound to form the word. It was interesting because he made several different words using the ending “old” and even after his third word created with this ending he was not able to pronounce it. However, he was trying to say the nonsense word “nold” so maybe that was part of the trouble, it was not a word he was familiar with because when he spelled the word “sold” next he got that really quick.
