Case Study 2 - Marina
Age 9, Year 4, length of support 3 months.
The Hospital School intervention:
Literacy Support:
- 1:1 daily guided reading sessions
- Reading an instructional-level text with the teacher, focusing on decoding strategies and comprehension strategies
- Reading an easy-level text with the Student Learning Support Officer (SLSO), focusing on fluency, phrasing and reading stamina
- Reading box assessment to identify reading and comprehension level (re-assess throughout the year)
- Running Records as an assessment to identify the instructional level of texts
- Reader-pen used during independent reading
- Personalised and differentiated literacy group tasks targeting specific phonic and reading needs
- Letter and sound identification assessment
- Daily 1:1 guided writing sessions
- Focused on unfamiliar digraphs in isolation, on a word level (sound boxes) and then a sentence level
- Multi-lit program with SLSO
- DEAR Program
Marina was an engaged learner who always enjoyed literacy tasks but was very aware of her challenges in reading and writing. She lacked confidence and was very dependent on teacher assistance in literacy tasks. After conducting various assessments on her phonic knowledge, reading accuracy and comprehension, a Personalised Literacy Program was implemented for Marina, targeting her specific areas of need. The repetitive nature of the Multi-lit program and Marina’s guided writing sessions helped Marina consolidate her knowledge of phonics and sounds which she began applying to her reading.
Marina’s first running record showed that she was reading a decodable Level 1 (Book 10) at an instructional level, with adequate comprehension.
Marina left our school three months later, reading Level 3 decodables easily. With each level of decodables being made up of 20 books increasing in complexity, the growth in the accuracy of Marina’s reading was very pleasing. Although Marina demonstrated a sound comprehension of the texts she was reading, she wasn’t self-correcting at all when she first joined the Primary Classroom. Through teacher modelling of ‘listening back’ strategies, Marina began to hear her errors and re-read the sentence correctly. This was a continuing goal that was focused on in her guided reading sessions and Marina was eventually able to read some texts with a 1:1 self correction rate.
Marina’s guided reading sessions, the use of the reader pen, the Multi-lit program and the Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) program helped to build her engagement and confidence in reading. She became so proud of herself as a reader and began to approach all literacy tasks with a growth mindset and positive attitude.