December 2, 2019

To the Family of student,

Hello! My name is Emily Cantley and I am a student at the University of Mount Union. I am
currently a senior Education major. I am writing this letter to you to share information with you
about what I have learned while working with the student. I have been working with him over
the last few months in the RAC program at Rockhill Elementary School. Over the last few
months, I have had the opportunity to work with him to determine his strengths and areas for
improvement in the areas of reading and writing through assessing and going through lessons
with the student. Working with him through the RAC program was part of my assessment course
at Mount Union where we learn how to evaluate a student’s strengths and areas of improvement
in the areas of comprehension, writing, word recognition, metacognition, affective development,
and vocabulary. It has been such a pleasure working with him over the last few months and I
have learned so much about the student as a learner, as well as myself as a teacher.

Throughout this process, I have been able to assess the student’s skills and determine some of his
strengths in reading and writing. One strengths of his that I would like to highlight is identifying
and using synonyms and antonyms. Jack easily understood the concept of synonyms and
antonyms. He was also able to describe that antonyms are opposites and synonyms are the same.
Another strength I found when working with the student was using context clues in reading. He
did really well in telling me that context clues can be pictures or words in a story. He also did
well in using context clues to determine the meanings of unknown words in a book we read. He
was so proud of himself and definitely showed he understood how to use context clues well!
Another strength I want to discuss is the student’s metacognition. Metacognition is the awareness
and understanding of one's own thought processes. This includes self-monitoring, which he
showed as a strength. The student did a great job of self-monitoring his learning as we completed
assessments and lessons. He recalled things he had already learned and applied those to new
things we were doing together. He connected our learning to other learning he had done is his
classes or at home. Jack orally explained answers very thoroughly and was able to think out loud,
allowing me to see his thought process as we learned. He breaks everything up into smaller
chunks to really try to understand it.

From working with the student, I have also found some areas for improvement. One area for
improvement I have found is using and identifying idioms in vocabulary. He had a hard time
with understanding what idioms were and did not understand that they have literal meanings. He
could not describe or define them either. Another area for improvement is his writing,
specifically sentence structure and sentence fluency. When asked to write a story, he did not
write more than one sentence (a long run on sentence with no punctuation). He does not use
complete thoughts when writing sentences and does not write complete sentences. He did not
want to change his sentence or make adjustments to it when asked if anything needed fixed or
changed. Another area for improvement is oral reading comprehension. When asked to read
aloud, the student would wait for me to read first. In reading, he does not try to sound out words,
he often skipped over them completely or put in a random word just to get by the word he didn’t
know. He also had a hard time in recalling key details or information from the reading.

Now that I have shared some areas for improvement for the student, I would like to recommend
some activities for him to do at home to help him with his areas for improvement. For the
student’s area for improvement in vocabulary specifically with idioms, I would recommend
reading Amelia Bedelia books. They contain many idioms and are an easy way to help kids
become familiar with idioms. Also, giving him different idioms and having him draw their silly
meanings and literal meanings helps him see the difference and really think about the idioms.
For the student’s area for improvement with his writing, I would recommend asking him to write
stories on different topics and practicing writing in complete sentences. A way to help him
remember to write in sentences is having him say his thoughts aloud first, and saying one
thought at a time. After he says each thought, have him write that down then add a period. This
will help him break up his thinking and writing. Another activity that could help this area for
improvement is giving him already made sentences that are not complete and asking him to fix
them or make them better. This lets him see how sentences shouldn’t be written and how to fix
them, allowing him to learn how his sentences should look. Also, just having him write a little bit
a day could help him with his writing, specifically with sentence fluency and structure. This just
gives him constant practice; allow him to draw a picture of what the story he writes is about after
to give him a reward for working on his writing. Lastly, for the student’s area for improvement
in oral reading comprehension, an easy way to help this is by having him read aloud for at least
10 minutes a day at home. This helps him become more confident in his reading as he is in a
comfortable setting and can make mistakes. Another way is to have him choose a story and he
reads a page, then you read a page. Breaking the reading up by pages helps it seem like he is
reading less and in small amounts Along with reading aloud, practicing answering questions
based on what you read can help his comprehension. Ask questions, such as: Who the characters
were? Where the setting was? What was the main idea or main event that happened? What his
favorite part of the story was after reading? This allows him to think back to what he read and
answer questions based on it. It practices skills such as recalling information noting key details
while reading, and identifying important parts of reading such as characters, setting, or main
idea.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to work with your child. I have learned so
much about him as a student and myself as a teacher over the last few months we have worked
together. If you have any questions about anything, please feel free to email me at
cantlee2021@mountunion.edu

Sincerely,

Emily Cantley