Miranda Russnow

Literacy Assessment

When I completed the literacy assessment in class, my CT wanted me to do it with three

different students: one that was more advanced, one that was at the average lever, and one that was a
bit behind in his reading level. Although all three students gave me good insight on what literacy
assessments will be like with my future students, I chose to base my reflection and my lesson plan on
the third student who was a bit behind in his reading level.

For the purpose of this assignment, I will call the student that I am talking about Joe. Joe is a
5 year old in my preschool classroom at South River Elementary School. Joe is an emergent reader
who, to my knowledge, speaks Spanish at home. Throughout the school day, Joe doe not speak much
on his own, and when he is called on he takes very long to formulate his answers. My CT wanted me
to assess him so I could understand what the lower level of literacy knowledge looks like. For the
assignment I did 3 different assessments: name writing and picture drawing, concept of print, and
knowledge of rhyme.

The first assessment we completed was name writing and picture

drawing. I gave Joe a piece of paper and a blue marker and asked him to
draw a picture of whatever he wanted to and then write his name.
Afterwards I asked him what his picture was to which he replied, “my
face.” This was one of the easier assessments to do with him. Although
his name is not in the correct orientation, or in the correct order, I could
see him thinking about each letter in his
name and carefully trying to write it out.

The next assessment I completed with Joe is the concept of print

assessment. I chose a small book off the shelf about a sheep. I then
asked him a series of questions about the book to see if he knew what
the parts of the book were. Out of the twelve questions, Joe could only
answer five correctly. I do not think this task frustrated him because I
do not think he understood that he was getting them wrong. On the
other hand, I found myself feeling frustrated with this task. I was
unsure if I should be correcting him after each question or if I should
just work with him afterwards to correct him on the parts he didn’t understand.
This is the assessment that I based my lesson on because concept of print is the
foundation of other parts of literacy. If he was having trouble with this
assessment, Joe would not be able to understand the other parts such as
orientation of the letters in his name, or what a rhyme is.

Lastly, for the choice assessment we attempted to assess knowledge of

rhyme. I use the word attempt because, although I thought I left ample time to
assess rhyme, Joe misunderstood part of the directions, even after I tried to
explain in a different way with showing him, so we did not have time to finish.
For the rhyme assessment, the student is supposed to circle their answers, but instead Joe colored
them in. This frustrated me because I knew that Joe was a slow colorer and we would not have time
to complete the entire assessment if he did not hurry a bit. Although he only had time to complete
one row of the assessment, I could tell he did not understand what I was asking him to do, and he did
not understand wha t a rhyme was.
Miranda Russnow

Overall, Joe was on task with the first assessment, but he was below average on the second and last
assessments. Moving forward, I will need to work with Joe on his concept of print so he can start to
understand rhyme and aspects of name writing he is not currently understanding such as letter order
and orientation.