November 26, 2019

To the Family of Student,

Hello, my name is Mikayla Milburn, I am a senior Early Childhood Education major at the
University of Mount Union and I have been working with Student, or as she preferred me to call
her, Student in the RAC program at Rockhill. I wanted to begin by thanking you for allowing me
to have the opportunity to work with Student. You are receiving this letter because I would like
to share with you what I have learned about Student’s strengths and some areas of
improvement in reading and writing.
As you know, I have been working with Student and I would like to share some of
Student ‘s strengths with you. One of her biggest strengths was reciting details from a passage
during oral and silent reading. Another one of Student‘s strengths was her understanding of
homophones and compound words. For compound words, Student was able to tell me, without
any prompting, what a compound word was. When I asked her to break down compound
words into the two words they are composed of, she did so without hesitation. With writing,
Student is very good at organization. She was able to properly construct a paragraph when
given a prompt of events, all in correct order. The strengths mentioned above are just a few of
Student’s many strengths in the subject area of reading and writing.
In addition to strengths, I also noticed Student had some areas of improvement. One
area for improvement for Student would be synonyms. I believe that Student had mistaken
synonyms for antonyms, which is a very common mistake made by many students when
learning synonyms. Another area for improvement Student displayed was in the areas of
conventions and sentence fluency. With conventions, Student has difficulty with capitalizing
words correctly and her grammar when writing. Sentence Fluency in Student‘s writing also is an
area for improvement. In her writing, she was unable to correctly use periods, exclamation
marks and question marks. In addition to synonyms and writing conventions, reading orally is
an area for improvement with Student as well. When I asked her to read orally, she would
easily lose focus, lose her spot and get a little confused with the plot of the story because the
skills of recalling details, sequencing, inferencing, cause and effect and main idea were difficult
for her. Though Student had areas for improvement, she always maintained a positive mindset
and was willing to try anything with her best effort.
Now that I have shared with you some areas of improvement, I would like to share with
you some activities to approve and build upon Student‘s learning. For the topic of synonyms, an
activity that could be done with Student is matching. She loved playing matching games when
we worked together. For this activity all you would need to do is make cards with different
words on them, keeping in mind that she is to pick pairs of synonyms, like “smile” and “grin”.
For writing, you could ask Student to write about her day or something that happened at school
in paragraph form. Once she has written it, you can ask her to reread it and keep in mind her
punctuation marks and have her add her punctuation with a colored marker. For the area of
oral reading, I would suggest Student reading orally to you, a sibling or even a pet or stuffed
animal. While she is reading, I would suggest that she have something to keep her place while
she is reading, like a bookmark so that she can follow the lines while she is reading, or even
have her trace her finger along the words that she is reading. This prevents her from losing her
spot when reading and will help her maintain her focus. When she is done reading, you could
 November 26, 2019

ask her to tell you what the story was about, or something she liked about the story. This is a
way to see if she retained what she had read.
I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity with Student, she is an amazing,
smart and bright young girl. She was such a joy to work with and I am deeply saddened that our
time has come to an end of working together. If you have any questions about our lessons and
sessions we had these past couple of months, or anything at all, you may contact me at my
University of Mount Union email, milburma2020@mountunion.edu. Thank you again!

Respectfully,

Mikayla Milburn