Michael Hosti

READ 366 Early Literacy

Assessment
Literacy Assessment Narrative
When teaching in the classroom, using assessments is one of the
most important parts of developmentally appropriate teaching. The
use of assessments shows the teacher where the student is
academically and developmentally, and allows the teacher to shape
their future lessons around the results for each student. Assessments
are the best tools to use when deciding how to differentiate lessons in
the classroom.
The alphabet task was the first component of the literacy
assessment I administered to a student from my practicum class (code
name: G*). She was to first dictate the letters of the alphabet as I
pointed to them in random order, and then write each letter as I say
them aloud, again in random order. G* correctly dictated all 26 upper
case letters as I pointed to them, and 25 out of 26 lower case letters.
When writing the letters as I spoke them aloud, she correctly wrote all
26 as well. I didnt sense any difficulties from her as she recited or
wrote the letters, and her only mishap on the lower case letters was a
mix-up of the letters b and g.
The next component of the assessment was a task concerning
concept of word. G* was to read the 4-sentence Katie book, fingerpointing at each word as she read. After each sentence, I would point
to the 2 target words in the sentence and ask her to read them. G*

Michael Hosti
READ 366 Early Literacy
Assessment
correctly finger pointed and read all 4 of the sentences, and only had
trouble with the 1st target word of the 3rd sentence (water). Although
she struggled a bit on the 3rd sentence, I felt that she read the other
sentences with confidence.
Next was a task that tested G*s spelling. I read 6 spelling words
aloud to her, and asked her to write them, reminding her to think about
which sound comes first, which comes next, etc. She was graded based
on the rubric given in the assessment, and scored 3 points on each of
the 6 words, totaling at 18 out of a possible 20 points.
The last component of the assessment was a word-recognition
task. G* was simply asked to read 10 words as I pointed to each one
individually, the first 5 being frequently occurring sight words, and the
last 5 being short-vowel, decodable words.. She successfully read each
of the 10 words, to score 10 out of 10 points. G* was confused why I
didnt ask her to write the words as well as read them, and decided
that she wanted to write them as well, which I allowed her to do.
From this assessment, I concluded that G* is in the beginning
reader stage of literacy development. The component of the
assessment that I feel best illustrated this was the spelling task. G*
successfully wrote the first consonant and last consonant sound in
each of the words, which is a characteristic of the beginning reader
stage. Another indicator was her ability to track each word by pointing

Michael Hosti
READ 366 Early Literacy
Assessment
to it with her finger as she read, another characteristic of this stage.
her ability to recognize the sight words in the word-recognition task
was also an indicator of the beginning stage.
At this stage of literacy development, there are many different
activities that could be used to increase her reading ability. Sight word
activities are great for beginning readers, and the goal should be to get
their number of known sight words to increase. Adding words
incrementally as she learned them would be the best way to achieve
this. Another activity that would be very useful are activities regarding
beginning and ending consonant sounds. On
www.interactivesites.weebly.com, there are many literacy games on
the computer that focus on just that, and are perfect for a reader at
her stage. Having G* read simple text with some repetition, focusing
on reading fluently would also be a great way to help her advance in
her development.