Claire Writing Goals

Goal for the Session: My main goals for today’s session with Claire is to work on her writing and reading comprehension of her own personal work, as well as reading as we normally do for her school work. My first goal is to observe Claire’s writing ability and see how she works with writing strategies she has learned in school. I have noticed while Claire is reading that she sounds out a lot of hard words phonetically and I want Claire to use this strategy while she is writing out words as well. I have chosen to have Claire write and draw about a trip she took with her school a few weeks ago so she can write sentences that are coming from her thoughts and personal experiences. The writing part of my session with Claire will hopefully shine

She stumbled across some of the words she wrote, trying to make her meaning of them from her illustrations. When we got to the second page of her writing, Claire realized she wrote “ugg’s” instead of “eggs” and could understand from the context while she was reading that the word did not make sense. As she was reading the page she said “I got some uggs [?]” as her voice lowered into a confusion voice, “no I did not mean I got shoes, I meant what we saw the chickens lay.” From that statement Claire realized the change in the words she meant to say and pointed out, “look in my drawing I even drew an egg, not a shoe!” The importance of re-reading in context helped Claire in this situation realize her writing mistake, and as Taberski says, “reading involves problem solving and meaning making” (2000, pg. 63). Also, in this situation I was making sure no allow Claire the opportunity to problem solve on her own, making sure I did not provide the right word for her right away, allowing her to learn from this mistake (Routman,

Clay mentions, students use the structures of their language for talking, writing and reading from the experiences they have in each (2014). In the past, when I observed Claire read I would see her take words and put them into parts to sound them out, look and think of certain familiar words to guess a new one, and re read sentences to see if the word she is guessing makes sense. While writing and re-reading her story this time, I observed Claire do the same. When she came to a certain word she did not know how to spell I saw Claire’s lips form the parts of the word, for example spelling out chicken. Not only did Claire mouth the words she did not know when spelling, but I also observed her tone get lower, more monotone, when it came to these hard words. While writing her sentences, Claire spoke out loud, and words she did know her pitch was high. For example, when she was saying some of her sight words, “she,” “the,” “got,” and “have” Claire’s voice was high pitched, I wonder if the tone of voice changed do to her mistakes, and this will be something I will observe again next time we read