Written Dictated Story

Stephanie Netelkos
Written Dictated Story
Foundations of Reading
Dr. Brown and Dr. Madden
December 11, 2014

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Introduction
The purpose of this assignment is to assess the reading and writing skills in children and
the way they are developed between the ages of four and six. I began observing Tamir, a fiveyear old kindergartener, who had not been in any school setting before entering Kindergarten.
Tamir is one of the youngest children in his class. His birthday is June 11th. He goes to
school at Alice Costello in Brooklawn, New Jersey. Since the assessments are on the lengthy
side, I met with him two different times. The first time we met for a half hour and completed one
out of the three assessments: Concepts About Print. The second time we met he completed the
Letter Identification and Writing Vocabulary assessments. He also completed the written dictated
story. Knowing Tamir from observing in previous weeks, I knew it would be best to split up the
assessments so I could have his full attention.
Tamir is an outgoing child. He likes to play around at recess with his other classmates.
He does not like to stay in one place for a while, so it was somewhat difficult to keep him
focused. He likes to be with other students at all times so it was hard for him to focus with me.
Despite his need to be with other students he worked hard on these assessments. The first time I
met with him was on Wednesday October 29, 2014 and the second time I met with him was
November 12, 2014.
Tamir was extremely excited for Halloween on our first visit. He told me how he was
going to be a vampire. The second time we met he was reading a Shark book when I walked into
the classroom and the first thing he said to me was Look Ms. N, Im reading a shark book!!
Tamir is an only child, who lives with his mom and dad. I am not to sure what Tamirs
parents do for a living, but I know that they work long days because the cooperating teacher had
told me so at the beginning of the school year when I needed them to sign a permission slip. He

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was not enrolled in any sort of schooling before being placed in Kindergarten. After sending
home a checklist to his family, they checked off that they read at home with Tamir.
Assessing Tamir at times was very difficult because he frequently was off track and
needed to be directed. I was able to assess Tamir and was able to connect what I learned in class
and in real life experiences. According to Morrow, Assessment should help the teacher, child,
and parent determine a childs strengths and weaknesses and plan appropriate instructional
strategies; it should also match educational goals and practices (Morrow 33). Administrating
these assessments to Tamir should be helpful in determining his literacy development.

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Concepts About Print
The first assessment I administrated Tamir was Concepts About Print. I used a book that
he had never seen or heard of called No Shoes, by Marie Clay. I asked him to first point to the
front of the book, and he did this correctly. He did not know where to begin reading though. He
did not flip the book open when I asked him and pointed to the picture on the cover implying that
is where he should start to read. When I opened the book I asked him where he would now begin
to read and he pointed to the right spot and also knew which direction to read. He did not know
to return sweep to the left after reading one line and he had a very difficult time pointing out the
words as I read them. He understood the first and last word on each page and he also knew the
bottom of the inverted picture. When I asked him what a question mark was he had no idea, and
he called it an idea word. When asked what a period was he called it a dot. He did not know
a comma or quotation mark. With letter concepts, he knew how to identity letters and words. For
example, he knew the letter e and the word the. He knew right away what the capital letter
was when I asked him to identity it, which was an M at the beginning of the sentence.
For Tamir to become a better reader he needs to practice everyday. Repetition is key
when it comes to learning how to read. This could be achievable with help from his family and
teachers. As I stated before, his family reads with him everyday. According to Morrow teachers
should take advantage of teachable moments when they occur during the day to reinforce the
skills being taught (Morrow 250-251). Next to Tamirs parents, his teachers should be one of his
most important role models.

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Letter Recognition
During the second time we met, Tamir completed the letter identification assessment. He
was extremely happy when I asked him to help me. I knew this because he was smiling and
greeted me with a hug. The assessment was administered in the hallway in order to minimize
classroom distractions.
This assessment used a letter identification sheet and a grading sheet to track results. I
began at A at the top of the paper and then continued to go right through all of the capital letters.
For each letter I asked Tamir, he knew what letter it was, the sound it makes and a word that
begins with that letter. It took him twenty minutes to complete this assessment.
Tamir did extremely well on this assessment because he knew majority of the letters
when I asked him to identify them. When I pointed to the capital Y he knew the letter and sound.
When I asked him an example of the word he said the word why. Tamir did not know the
lower case q, t, g and y. He knew the sounds all of these letters made, but he could not tell me
what the letter itself was. These were all letters asked towards the end of the assessment which
makes me believe that Tamir was a little flustered with how long the assessment was taking him
to complete. He was asking me am I almost done throughout most of the lower case letter
identification.
Tamir did very well with making words with the identified letters. Most of the time he
made the connection between the capital and lower case letters and used the same words as
examples. For example, he knew a capital W and then he knew what a lower case w as well.
I would ask for other examples when he did this because I knew he knew other words! He knew
the sounds of each letter extremely well too. He would make the sound of the letter, for instance
an a and then form it into a word from there, like apple. Out of all 52 letters, Tamir could not

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identify 3. Those letters were a lower case q, t and g. Those were at the end of the assessment so
he might have been getting side tracked because he asked me when he was going to be done
about five different times. Out of 52 different sounds between the upper and lower case letters,
Tamir did not know 6. He did not know both the upper and lower case sound to y. He also had
trouble with the lower case g and when I asked him for an example of a word he told me jug.
These are fixes that could be solved with practice, like most of the problems that Tamir has
encountered.
There are four areas to help motivate a child to work on literacy skills in the classroom.
One is designing literacy centers with multiple genres of childrens literature and literature
activities, two is thematic instruction integrated into content areas, three is using new literacies
such as technology and four is literacy in play (Morrow318-319). Motivation is great for
students. Motivation is defined as initiating and sustaining a particular activity (Morrow 319).

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Writing Vocabulary
Writing Vocabulary was a very difficult assessment for Tamir to complete. When I asked
Tamir to write down words that he knew, he told me he did not know any to write. He started to
cry. I feel like he might have started to cry because he was overwhelmed. So I decided to talk
him through it. I asked him to write his name down and he wrote his first and last name without
any problems. After he wrote his name he began to become upset again saying he did not know
any other words. I told him we could take a break so we took a water break. When we came back
he wrote a few more words. He wrote the words: is, cow, cup and sow. I feel that Tamir knows
how to spell words but needs someone there to guide him. This performance tells me that Tamir
needs to become intrinsically motivated. He needs to be able to do tasks by himself and for
himself so he can continue learning.
For the few words that Tamir spelled, he spelled the word cup and drew the letter p
backwards. He knew the letter, but simply wrote it the wrong way. As a kindergartener he has
handwriting that is very visible, which means that is can easily be read. This is important as he
matures.

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Conclusion
Having two days and only an hour and a half to work with Tamir was not nearly enough
time. I feel that our assessments were a little rushed due to both mine and Tamirs schedules, but
we made due with the time that we had. Tamir scored 12/24 in the concepts about print
assessment. According to the textbook, since Tamir is five and a half years old he is a 3 in the
stanine group, out of 9. This places him below average for his age. He still has a lot of time to
improve though. According to (Reading Rockets 2007) Tamir is an emergent reader. He can
recognize more than some letters, he understands that reading conveys a message and scribbles
when he writes. Although he is not a pro, he is still young for his age.
The assessments that I gave Tamir all had a result of lower scores then I had expected
except for the letter recognition. He did very well in a class setting and wrote down words during
class time, but when I asked him to in the assessment he got all flustered. I also feel as if I did
not know the exact way to proctor the assessments, which could have been a reason why he did
not do as well in certain sections like concepts about print. I would love to be able to see how
much his skills improve or not by the end of the school year.

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Written Dictated Story Analysis and Description
Tamir was so happy to create his own story and knew right away that he wanted it to be
about sharks. That day when I walked in the classroom he was reading a shark book and told me
all about them. Tamir created an interesting story, which made me identify a lot about him.
To start off, Tamir used a lot of different words in his story. He used words like hitting,
friendly, deep, and water. This shows his diverse vocabulary and his use in combining
different words together. He understood how to make up the sentences throughout the story. To
start things off Tamir gave me a lot of ideas and then he sat there and condensed all of his ideas
into sentences. Tamir knew that in the beginning of the story there had to be some sort of
problem that could be solved at the end. He started off with him drowning and ended with him
being brought home. He had all parts of a story that were needed in order to be told.
Based on the story that he created showed that he understood story making. When
creating the story he made sure that no one would get hurt, not even the shark. He told me that it
would get him upset if anyone was hurt in the story.

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Sharks and Friendly Sea Animals
By: Tamir Smalls

Tamir was sinking in the ocean and lost his breath.

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When all of a sudden a whale came by and saved his life from the deep waters.

It was a friendly whale and had a baby.

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A shark tried biting Tamir, but then the whale fought him off by hitting the sharks head.

The shark swam away.

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The whale brought Tamir to an island called Brooklawn. The island was far, far away from the
ocean.

Tamir was so happy to be home sweet home and saved by the friendly whale.

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Works Cited
Emergent Readers: Look! That's My Letter! (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2014, from
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/emergent-readers-look-thats-my-letter
Morrow, L. (1989). Literacy development in the early years: Helping children read and write.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

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