Shannon Krebs

Student Literacy Profile

Throughout these past couple of weeks working with Kate, I have
collected many writing samples from her. For all of these samples she
was able to get started right away with little detail prompted. After she
was done writing her stories she would draw a picture of what the story
was about and she would also talk to me about her story and tell me
what it was about when she was done.
Kate has many strengths in her writing. She is able to have
proper spaces between words, she uses punctuation and capitalization,
she tells ideas in her stories, and most of the beginning and ending
letters of the words that she writes are correct. I think with these skills
Kate is meeting the 1.W.2.1 Indiana Academic Standard for writing.
This is true because this standard covers uppercase and lowercase
letters and spacing. Since Kate has all of these strengths I believe that
she is in the consonants represent words stage for her writing abilities.
I believe that she is in this stage because she does not yet understand
how to use root words to help her spell different words and she does
not yet use compound words and contractions in her writing.
After reviewing the first few writing samples that I collected from
Kate, I picked a specific skill to address with her in my conferences for
her writing. The skill that I chose to address was adding details to her
stories. Every week I chose different activities to do to help Kate

improve adding details into her writing. The first activity that I did with
Kate was mainly to help her understand what details are and how they
can be used. I explained to her what details were and I showed her
many pencil. I then said some description words that described my
pencil (orange, skinny, etc.) and then I had Kate think of two other
words to help describe it. After introducing this example I had her write
a story about any topic she wanted to and I prompted her to add some
describing details. I decided to do this activity with Kate because in the
article, A Fresh Look at Writing, it discusses the importance of
demonstration, which I did when I demonstrated to Kate how to pick
out details, and also the importance of the child picking their own
topics to help them be creative while writing (Graves, 1994, p. 106109). This was the main activity that I did with Kate for a number of
weeks, with some slight changes. Another big activity that I did with
Kate was that I would write with her, while she was writing, and then
after we reflected on her writing we would reflect on mine. I would ask
her to pick out specific details that I used in my writing and also where
I could add more details. I decided to do this activity with Kate because
it took some of the pressure off of her writing and it helped her see
that I could even add more to my writing. I was also using the idea of
demonstration again from the Graves article for this activity.
Throughout our time together, Kate has started to incorporate some

details into her writing without me prompting her and this ultimately is
making her stories longer and more detailed.
If I had some more time with Kate I would pick a few specific
types of details to work on with her each week and have her
incorporate those in her writing. I would have her do this because then
over the course of a couple of weeks she would learn about all different
types of details, how to incorporate them into her writing, and she
would add them to her tool belt. I think that this would help to address
standard 1.W.3.2 (developing main ideas, providing details, and having
a concluding statement) and that it would improve her skills as a
writer.
Every week I had Kate read to me and also retell me what she
read. She was able to get started on the books write away and I would
prompt the retelling questions that I wanted her to answer. Usually,
Kate would answer the question and then go more in depth with a
story that related to that.
As a reader Kate has many strengths. I believe that Kate is in the
late stages of the early stage of reading. She is able to read at least
the beginning sounds of every word that she encounters and is able to
read longer books. She also uses visual cues while reading. Since she is
able to get the beginning sounds of most of the words that she
encounters, she is able to guess what the words are that she does not

know by those letters and sounds. She also uses the pictures as clues
to help her if she does not now a word.

References
Graves, D. (1994). A fresh look at writing. Portsmouth, N.H.:
Heinemann ;.