Summary of Experience

Throughout this experience I have gained many new teaching

techniques as well as how to deal with students on a one-on-one basis.
Although I didnt have to use classroom management skills, I still was
challenged and had to use management skills while working with my
students. There were times when he wanted to do his own thing, but I
needed him to do another thing. I did let him have his three minutes of free
time at the end of the 30 minutes to do what he wanted to do which was
usually grabbing the iPad and playing a game. I found that boundary and he
agreed with me that this would work. Once I had this system set in place we
never had another management struggle again.
I picked Tristan who is a kindergarten to work with because I noticed
he was a student who was working so hard but was still falling behind the
rest of his peers. He is also on an IEP for SLD. I talked with my cooperating
teacher about it and she thought Tristan would be a great student to work
with. I then contacted his mother and she was more than thrilled to let me
have this opportunity as well as give him the one-on-one instruction he
needs. Once I had permission, I began to look at my goals I wanted to
accomplish. It came down to focusing on the kindergarten sight words and
being able to sound out consonant vowel consonant words or cvc words.
Along with sounding out words, I wanted to incorporate identification of the
middle letter and sound in each three letter word. They work very hard in
kindergarten on this strategy so I knew that Tristan would only benefit from
it.
Once I came up with my goals, I next wanted to assess them with my
pre-assessment which showed me I had the right areas of need to work on.
My pre-assessment showed that Tristan knew 20/40 of his sight words as well
as 11/20 middle letter sounds in words. Once I got my data from the pre-
assessment I began planning my lessons based around what my pre-
assessment and my goals were. I began to outline my ideas for each lesson
and decided to focus on both sight words and middle sounds in majority of
my lessons since they go together somewhat. For the first 3 lessons, I split
up my goals and made the first one about sight words, the second lesson
about middle sounds, and then the third one back about sight words. When I
was trying to plan the fourth and fifth lesson, I wanted to combine both of
the goals and make it all go together. For these we did activities which
involved learning and working on sight words as well as cvc words. Adding
these together created a building lesson on each skill we have been doing.
 After the first two lessons I wasnt seen much growth in Tristans ability
to identify sight words and middle sounds in cvc words. I stepped back and
looked at what I was doing. I decided to create more game like activities
which would get him moving around as well as learning at the same time. I
implemented this after the second lesson and used it in lesson three through
five. After the third lesson, I could tell that Tristan was more into the lesson
and seemed to be picking up the skills he was needing the master his sight
words and middle sounds. I continued to make it game oriented while still
providing a structured learning environment around him.
When I went to do the post-assessment I noticed that Tristan knew 36/40
sight words and 17/20 middle sounds in his cvc words. After getting these
results I realized that when I changed the flow of the lesson was when his
skills and ability began to shine through. I am glad that I switched things up
to see what worked best for him.
Throughout this practicum I have gained a better understanding of
differentiated instruction. I knew what it was and how to implement it before
this process, but doing this assignment made it all more clear to me and
showed me that using differentiated instruction really does help a student
learn a skill they might never acquire without it.

This graph shows the growth from the first pre-assessment all the way
until the post-assessment. I taught five different lessons on sight words and
middle sounds and am very pleased to say we saw major growth within him.
I shared this news with his mother and she couldnt stop smiling she was so
pleased to know that he is right where he needs to be. I am very happy with
how this process went. I am also excited