Abby Diamond

Pre/Posttest Intervention Plan

Vestavia West: Placement #1

Summary of Student Performance prior to Pretest

For my pre/posttest intervention plan, I chose to work with Student M on letter
recognition. Student M is in first grade and is in the special education for his Speech/Language.
The first week in the classroom I worked with Student N on some of his reading homework and
handwriting pages, which included a lot of letter recognition. I immediately noticed he was not
on grade level in reading. First off, he was reading on one of the lowest levels. When he would
read to me, he struggled with a lot of the words. When he came to a word he didnt know, I
would ask him what letter the word started with and what sound that letter made. Only about half
of the time was he able to tell me. I realized that he must not know all of his letters and their
sounds and that was probably causing him so much trouble in reading. Because he did not know
all of the letters and their sounds, he couldnt sound out words which is the most important step
in learning to read. After observing him in the classroom and working with him for a couple of
days on his reading, I realized that the biggest area holding him back from learning to read was
because he did not know his letters and letter sounds. I also saw that letter recognition and letter
sounds was an extremely crucial part in learning to read.
I talked to Mrs. Turner about this and asked her whether or not he knew all the letters of
the alphabet and their sounds. She told me that at the end of last year, he only knew about half of
his letters, but that she was unsure whether he knew them all yet or not. I was able to look at his
IEP and one of his goals for the year was that he will recognize and name all uppercase or

lowercase letters of the alphabet with 80% accuracy. After talking to her and observing him, I
decided that I wanted to focus on letter recognition. I decided to assess Student M on how many
letters and letter sounds that he knew. I decided to focus on this primarily because he was
struggling with reading so much and knowing the letters of the alphabet and their sounds is
crucial step in learning to read. In addition, this was aligned with one of his IEP goals for the
year.
Pre Test- Letter Identification Assessment

Summary and Results of Pre Test:

I choose to give a Letter Identification Assessment to Student M to assess how many
letters and letter sounds that he knew. The purpose of this assessment was to assess his
acquisition of letter names and sounds. The assessment includes a copy of all of the letters of the
alphabet. I chose to focus just on uppercase letters and not worry about lowercase letters since
uppercase letters are more common. The assessment included a sheet with all of the letters on it.
For each letter, I would point to a letter and ask what letter it was. If he knew the letter, I would
ask what sound the letter made. If he did not know the letter, I would move on. Overall, the
student focused the entire time I gave him the pretest and was very quick to answer my question.
From the results of the pretest, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Student M knew
most of the letters of the alphabet. The student knew the majority of the letter names, which was
better than I expected. The only letters that he did not know were the letters G, J, P, U, and V. For
these letters, he was very quick to answer that he did not know what the letter was when I would
ask him. One interesting observation was on the letter P, the student answered B. I asked him
again if he knew the letter and he again said B. I decided to count it wrong and moved on. Of the
letter names that he did know, he knew the name and sound of thirteen of them. These were the
letters A, B, C, D, E, F, H, K, M, O, R, S, T, and Y. The eight letters that he knew the name of but
not their sound were the letters F, I, L, N, Q, W, X, and Z. From the results of the pretest, I
decided to narrow my focus on designing instruction to teach him the 5 letters that the student
did not knowG, J, P, U, V. My reasoning behind this was that the most important thing for
Student M was to know all of the letter names before he can learn each of their sounds. I decided
to try to teach the letter sounds along with the letter names when at all possible.

Intervention Plan and Resources:

Since I determined that I was going to focus on teaching him the letters G, J, P, U, and V,
I did some research on effective strategies for teaching students letter recognition. The research
all pointed the fact that frequent, short sessions were better than one long session for working
with letters and sounds, so I decided to do many short sessions with him instead of longer ones.
The research I found also pointed to the fact that using manipulatives when teaching letters was
really important because it gave the student an opportunity to actually form the letter himself. It
was also really fun for the student. Although I read ideas about using play dough or sand, I chose
to have him use pipe cleaners to shape the letters on a letter card with the outline of the letter.
Before having Student M shape the letter with the pipe cleaner, I would write the letter on the dry
erase board and have him repeat the letter name and sound three times. I would then have him
say it by himself. After he did this, I had him form the letter with the pipe cleaner on the outline
sheet.
The next thing I had Student M do was to give him an activity sheet that had the letter in
the middle with four pictures around it of items that start with that letter. I would have him trace
the letter in the middle of the activity sheet and we would talk about the pictures around it. We
would always talk about the pictures around the letter and then I would have him brainstorm
other words that started with this letter. The rationale behind this was to have him realize the
things in real life that started with this letter as a way of helping him see the importance of
knowing the letter and its connection to real life. Then, I would let him color the pictures. Last, I
would have him trace over the letter on a sheet that I had already written out the letter in
highlighter. I would have him do this a couple of times. Last, I would have him fill out the sheet

where he had to color the pictures that started with that letter and write the letter. Here are
examples of the resources, activity sheets, etc that I used:

Summary and Results of Post Test:

For the posttest, I administered the same letter recognition test as I did for the pretest to
determine whether my instruction was successful in teaching him the letters he did not know.
The results of the posttest assessment revealed that Student M correctly identified 24/26 letters.
The two letters that he missed were J and Q. In the pretest, the student only identified 21/26
letters, so the fact that he was able to identify four new letters is good improvement. In my
instruction, I focused on teaching the letters that he missed on the pretestthe letters G, J, P, U,
and V. On the posttest, he was able to identify G, P, U, V but not J. There is not a clear reason
why he was able to identify four of the letters that I taught him, but not identify one of them. Of
all the letters that I worked with him on, letter J is what he struggled with the most so this may be
why he missed it on the assessment. However, I have no idea why he could not identify the letter
Q the second time even though he could initially identify it. For the letters G, P, and V, he was
able to identify the letter and sound. In my instruction, I ended up teaching him the sounds too,
so this is probably why he knew the sound too. In the end, Student M showed clear improvement
from implementing the intervention plan. By the end of the plan, he was able to identify four
new letters so the instructional plan was partly successful.
Here is the post-test assessment:

Reflection:
Overall, I learned a lot from designing and implementing an instruction plan. I learned
that not every instructional strategy or technique that is recommended will work well for every
student. For example, throughout the instructional plan, Student M really enjoyed having to
shape the pipe cleaners over the letter outline. This was always his favorite part, so I let him
spend some time on this. However, the pipe cleaners were kind of hard to bend, so I often had to
help him shape them. Next time, I might try something else, like playdough. The worksheets that
I used for each letter were pretty beneficial. Both worksheets were coloring worksheets. Student
M loves to color, so he enjoyed doing these worksheets and listened well because he got to color
them. The worksheet which had the letter in the middle and four pictures of things that started
with that letter provided a good visual and real life connection to the letter. By the time he got to
the second worksheet though, he was less willing to fill it out and wanted to be done. This was
probably because he was tired of working on the letter. For the most part, however, the student
was fairly engaged throughout the instruction time and seemed to enjoy the extra one on one
time that he got to spend with me.
One thing that I would have done differently was to bring in real life pictures of things
that started with the letter or the actual objects themselves to give him an even better real-life
experience with the letter. Another thing that I would have done differently is to focus on
reviewing each of the new letters before starting a new one. I should have reviewed each letter
that we learned the previous session before starting a new one, so that he would not forget the
letter that we just learned. I did not do this, and I think it would have been beneficial and would
have helped the student. Another thing that I could have added was to do more handwriting
practice. I only had the student trace over the letter one time, and I think if he had to trace or

write the letter more often, he might have been able to identify it better. This would have also
given him more practice with the letter. To challenge and push the student, I could have given the
student pictures that all start with different letters and have him sort which one started with the
specific letter I was teaching him that day. This would have provided a good review of the letter
at the end of the instructional period. In conclusion, I learned that some things work and some
things dont work in terms of instructional strategies and techniques. For this student, more
manipulatives would have been helpful and more review and repetition. Next time, I would
spend more time working on letter sound in addition to just letter name because knowing the
sound of a letter is crucial to learning to read.