Early+Years+Learner+-+Reading

Engagement with an early year’s literacy learner [[image:IMG_1026.JPG width="269" height="205" align="right"]]
Name: W Sex: M Age: 6 Grade: 1 Reading Level: 2 -3

W chose “My grandma is great” as his familiar text. He said he liked this book because it reminded him of his grandma and he read it with his mum. It is interesting to note how he can associate a book with good memories and those memories made him want to read the book. W said that he had read this particular book “100 million times” and this was evident in the way he fluently read through the text. He confidently read with expression and took note of the punctuation. W stopped periodically to talk about the story and the pictures with me telling me that his grandma knitted him warm socks and jumpers, “just like in the book”. W reading this book is an excellent example of how fluency and familiarity affects the child’s comprehension of a text (Hills 2008, p168).

Mermaids are Moving is the unfamiliar text chosen for W to read. W had not read this text before and using the reading fluency rubric in Hills I was able to assess that W was at level 2 moving into level 3 reading. W, read the text using some variation in pace, he mostly read word by word but by the end he had recognised phrases and was reading them with some expressive use of tone and pitch (Hills 2008, p170).

According to the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS), W is at level 2.25. W displayed many skills at the level 2.25 progression points. These include “use of strategies for working out meaning of unfamiliar words and phrases” (VELS 2006). There were many words in the text that W did not recognise. Using reading syntax, meaning and visual cues as discussed in Hills he managed to read these out by himself. An example of this is when he came to the word clam he did not recognise this word so he phonically sounded this word out and looked at the picture to work out what the word was.

Use of literal, interpretive and inferential questions helped to assess W level of understanding of the text. W had not problem answering any of the questio ns in fact, the text appear to be more difficult to read than to understand. He was asked why he thought the forest would be spooky and he didn’t think it would be spooky at all ”maybe just a night time”. This shows that not only did W understand the text but also was able to apply his own thoughts and opinion to the text. W could easily re-tell the story to me and except mixing up the "weedy forest with the coral cove" he had it all in correct sequence. This would correlate with Hills (6) "Phases in literacy development" chart, W fits into the early reader stage. W displayed other characteristics of this stage, including self correcting words that did not seem right and the uses of multiple sources of information to find correct word.

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media type="custom" key="3714053" This is a recording of my son who is also 6 reading the selected text. He displays similar reading characteristics as W. He stumbles on words however he is able to self correct and realises when a word does not sound correct.======