Student Profile - Narrative

7. General Considerations in the Development of the IEP

Student Strengths (to include academic, developmental, functional, and transition information): Tenesha demonstrates the desire to succeed academically, especially when she is made aware of the progress she is making. She is well-liked by her peers and uses age appropriate behaviors in social settings and in the classroom. She enjoys riding her bike going to the park with her grandmother. She is very open about sharing about her family, friends, and what she likes to do. Tenesha is receptive to teacher guidance and actively seeks help when she needs it most of the time. She is able to follow most verbal directions with minimal prompting or repeating and she follows all classroom routines and schedules. Tenesha is able to stay on task for 10-12 minutes before needing teacher support or peer prompting. In the large class setting, Tenesha participates in most activities required of her. She benefits from working with her peers in small group settings. Tenesha is generally organized and maintains most of her materials in both the large classroom and small group classroom. Teneshas reading skills demonstrate improvement since the beginning of the school year. She shows an increased interest in reading and self-selects texts more often. She is able to use strategies such as using context clues and picture clues to decode unfamiliar words. She also uses several strategies to comprehend texts such as making text-to-self and text-to-text connections. Her reading is becoming more fluid; she uses context clues and pictures to guide her reading. She is able to make probable predictions about a text before, during, and after reading. Teneshas is becoming increasingly independent in her writing. She is able to generate writing ideas and expresses interest in writing narratives about herself, her friends, and families. She is remembering to put spaces between her words. Tenesha creates illustrations for her writing that add to her ideas and she is able to express the significance of the illustrations. SPE 527 NLU 1

Tenesha is able to use mental math to add and subtract single digits when she takes her time. She is able to rename the number using manipulatives with minimal prompting. Tenesha is able to tell time to the hour and half-hour. She is able to read pictographs, interpret them, and answer questions. Academic Needs: General Academic Needs: Tenesha receives small group literacy interventions in the small group classroom daily. She becomes easily frustrated and discouraged when trying to decode unfamiliar words. She often will skip over unfamiliar words while reading aloud rather than using known strategies. She requires some prompting in order to utilize strategies such as chunking, which involves grouping letters together in order to read parts of the word. Tenesha has some difficulty understanding comprehension questions, especially when the question requires her to expand on her response by telling why or how. For these types of questions she requires teacher prompting and guidance with different types of questions so she is prepared to answer them. She benefits from looking at a list of words from a text prior to reading. Practicing reading the words out loud and clarifying the sounds and meanings helps both her fluency and comprehension. Taking picture walks, making connections, and making predictions before reading a book is also helpful for Tenesha as a reader. The mental and physical demands of writing are difficult for Tenesha. She needs prompting to remember to use appropriate spacing and mechanics such as end punctuation and capital letters. She also needs support in order to incorporate all the sounds in the words she writes. Tenesha benefits from talking through her writing ideas and organizing her thoughts of graphic organizers prior to drafting. Math is particularly challenging for Tenesha because numbers often represent abstract concepts. The numbers hold little meaning for Tenesha; they are just symbols. In order to make mathematical concepts more concrete for Tenesha it is helpful for her to use manipulatives such as counters, number grids, and fraction strips. She also benefits from using the calculator to perform addition and subtraction with double digits. She needs prompting to remember the operation she is using and would benefit from vocabulary words that signal which SPE 527 NLU 2

operation to use. Tenesha wears glasses for reading. She often needs teacher prompts to remember to bring her glasses with her to class. Tenesha often forgets to turn in homework, therefore use of an assignment notebook and homework folder are beneficial for Tenesha. She benefits from a teacher checking her homework folder each day for completed work and work to be finished that night. Preferred Learning Style: Tenesha is a visual and kinesthetic learner. She gravitates toward learning activities that allow her to showcase her skills with her hands and body, such as science and the writing program Barrel of Monkeys. Tenesha also benefits from learning new skills that are put to music or sound in all subject areas. Curriculum-based Assessment Results: On the Fountas & Pinnell Reading Assessment, Tenesha currently reads independently at a level H and requires teacher support and instruction at a level I. This places her reading level at about the end of first grade. Tenesha began the school year at a level D and has greatly improved her decoding skills and ability to understand and answer comprehension questions for both fiction and non-fiction texts. Non-fiction texts within this assessment present a greater challenge for Tenesha, as content-area vocabulary adds an additional barrier to fluency and comprehension. District/State Test Results: Tenesha has made significant gains in both reading and mathematics on NWEA from fall 2012 to winter of 2013. In fall Tenesha scored a 166 in math, which is a typical score for a first grader in the beginning of the school year. In winter she scored a 206 in math. This is a tremendous amount of growth and her score now reflects the score of a typical fourth grader at the beginning of the school year. In fall Tenesha scored a 162 in reading, which is a typical score for a first grader at the beginning of the school year. In winter, she scored a 190 in reading. This score puts her at about the same place as a third grader at the beginning of the school year.

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