11/26/2019

Dear Mr. Kadvan,

Hello, it’s me, your student teacher and as you know, I have been working with Anthony
periodically throughout this year and I want to share information that I learned while working
with him so far. You saw us doing activities in class all the time and I am excited that I now get
to share with you what I was able to learn about Anthony through these assessments and lessons.
What I was first looking for through doing the assessments were strengths Anthony has.
Through doing many different assessments, I was able to find his strengths like in silent reading
comprehension. When he is asked questions to recall a text, draw conclusions, and answer
questions that more deeply analyze the text. He is also good at identifying and using vocabulary
words, chunking words, and write fluent sentences when given a random word to create a
sentence around. As shown in the diagnostic chart, you can see that he is strong at identifying
vocabulary words, silent reading comprehension, and writing fluent sentences and the other
strengths I was able to identify.
With these strengths also comes areas for improvement, which there is always room for
improvement in all areas. I found that Anthony had more struggles with oral reading
comprehension when asked inferential questions. He also struggles with understanding and using
age appropriate idioms. Anthony also substitutes words while he is orally reading. Another area
he can improve on is writing because I found that he needed some help with organizing
sentences or paragraphs he comes up with. Another writing area for improvement in writing is
revising his written work. As shown in the diagnostic chart, you can see more information about
substitutions, writing, and idioms as well as other areas for improvements.
Figuring out how to help Anthony grow in his areas for improvement was interesting,
because I knew I had to keep him engaged and doing activities he wanted to do. Luckily, I was
able to find a few things he actually enjoyed. The first was when we worked on writing
organization and I made a google slide show where he dragged sentences into the correct order
that I pre-made. He loved this and even wanted to make his own story when we were done with
the lesson. Another activity I did with anything was really simple, but I found books that were
funny for idioms and comprehension (Amelia Bedelia and If you Give a Dog a Donut) and read
them to him while asking him a lot of questions to keep him engaged. He loved those books and
I was able to relate them to idioms and answering inferential questions and I think the books
being comical and being able to discuss the books helped a lot with that. The last activity we did
that Anthony really enjoyed was allowing him to use a boogie board when revising a paragraph.
He wanted to write the mistakes down before he corrected them because it said it helped him
learn and remember them, so just by having something like the boogie board, or even a white
board he could use really helped keep him engaged.
Working with Anthony has been fun and very rewarding. Seeing him grow from where
we started to the post test, I couldn’t be prouder of him. Overall, I have noticed improvements in
his attitude and work effort as the year goes on and especially in the things we went over. I can’t
wait to continue to watch him grow and succeed throughout the rest of the year and if you have
any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask! Thank you again.

Best Wishes,

Rhiannon Petrisko