Hayley Haines

Assessment Report

Student Information

Name: Sarah Jo

Age: 5

Grade: Kindergarten

Gender: Female

Introduction

Sarah Jo is a kindergartener who is full of energy. She loves to play on the computer after school,

even though she doesn’t get too often. Her favorite thing to do in school is play in centers

because she likes to draw and she calls herself an artist. When asked if she likes to read she said

“yes, it helps us learn”. She has a favorite book but she couldn’t remember what it was called,

but it was about her family, but she has a lot of books at home. When asked about the last thing

she read, she was confused and she just started to talk about singing and how she can type her

ABCs. She says that a good reader is known by if they are being quiet. She says she likes to

write and she writes her sight words for homework. She says she is a good writer because “I

listen to what my parents say to write”. She also said that to make someone a good writer they

have to listen to the directions. She uses her home computer only a few times to play puzzles but

at grandma’s house she plays games on it. She has an iPad at home that she uses a lot, usually

when she is eating.

Assessment Results
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ABC Recognition

Sarah did very well on her ABC recognition. She knew all of the upper-case letters really well.

She had no trouble identifying which one was which. The lower-case letters she had a few

problems with. She mixed up b and d and called them either the opposite of what they were or

she said that a b was p. She messed up l and called it i and she did not know what q was. These

are common errors when it comes to letters that look alike.

CAB/CPC

The CAB/CPC assessment is assessing the concepts about books, the conventions of print, the

concepts of words and letters, and the concepts of punctuation marks. On level one, Concepts

about books, Sarah got three of five areas correct. She knew where the front cover and back

covers were and she know which page we read first was. She did not know where the title of the

book was and when asked about the title page, she said she didn’t know what that was. Level two

was conventions of print and Sarah got three of five correct. She was able to show which way we

read the words, which way the words go when you get to the end of a line, and that the words go

from top to bottom. She did not get the questions right about where it tells a story and where we

start to read. She would point to the whole page. The wording of this is tricky and I she acted

slightly confused when asked to do this. Level three was concepts about words and letters. She

only got two of seven of these correct. She was able to show me the first word on the page and

she was able to show me a letter. When it asked about lowercase and uppercase letters, she

pointed to the opposite ones. When I read the story and she was supposed to follow along, she

stayed on the same word while I continued to another word. When she was asked to put her

fingers between a word, she put her fingers around a whole sentence. On level 4, concepts about
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punctuation marks, she got two of four correct. She was able to point to a period and say what it

was and she was able to point to a question mark, but she had a hard time describing what it did.

Overall, this shows that she has concepts about books but when it comes to the words and letters

she needs a little bit more practice.

P.A.S.T

P.A.S.T stands for the phonological awareness skills test. I found this test difficult for her

because she is a new kindergartener and so she is still working on learning phonetics. The first

activity, she got all of them correct. She was able to repeat the sentence that I had said and then

push up a coin for each word. The next activity was rhyming words. She did fairly well on this

and she only missed one pair of words. On the next one, the task was that she had to find a word

that rhymed with the word that was given. She was not able to do this, causing the assessment to

stop at three for this task. This shows me that she can hear rhyming words but she cannot think

of rhyming words herself. For example, the word was cake and her rhyming word was cupcake.

She took the word and added another word and said that it rhymed. On syllable blending, she got

them all correct. When she was doing this, you could tell that she had done it before at school

because she did the hand movements that you would use when syllable blending. She also did

good at syllable segmentation because she got all but one correct on this task. On this task she

had to push up a coin for each syllable. The only one she missed was helicopter. She showed that

-copter was one syllable. On syllable deletion, she was told to say the new word when a part of

the word was taken out. She missed two of these, but overall did a good job at figuring out which

word was the new word. When asked to say the first sound in a word, she would say the last

sound in the word. She only got three of these correct, and the ones she got wrong, she would say
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the last sound and not the first sound. I found this interesting because then on the next task when

asked to say the last sound she hears, she would say the first sound she heard. When it came to

phoneme blending, she was slightly confused on what she should be doing. I would say the

sounds and she would just repeat the sounds instead of creating the word.

Writing Samples

On Sarah’s first writing sample, she was asked to write about what her favorite thing she did

over the weekend was. She was able to write her name very well and then when looking at her

writing I can tell that she is a stage five writer which is invented spelling. She can produce letters

correctly, but they don’t always make sense. Her writing said “I lc tgu td Amec”. When asked

what she wrote she said “I liked when I go upside down”. From this, I could tell she wrote I and

her “lc” is her trying to sound out ‘like’. Her ‘tgu td’ was kind of on top of each other like she

was trying to write ‘to go up’. By looking at her writing you can tell that she tried to sound out

the words and you can tell that words were there because she connected letters to sounds.

On Sarah’s second writing sample, she was asked what her favorite thing to do after school was.

She would start to write and then she would erase the letters she wrote to then write new ones but

say it said the same thing. This time she wrote ‘ I li ot ip’. When asked what it said she said “I

like to watch iPad”. When looking at her writing you can tell that it says “ I like to” and then the

‘ip’ stands for ipad. When she as writing she started to write a w for watch but then she erased it

but she pretended that that word was still there. This writing was also stage five, invented

spelling because she was able to produce letters and match them to sounds that she heard when

she was writing.

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Sight words

The sight words section of this assessment was difficult for Sarah. She is only two months into

kindergarten and so most of the words she has never seen before. They have only learned a

handful of words so far and so most of the words she just said “I don’t know that one” or “I

haven’t learned that one yet”.

Informal Phonics

For the informal phonics, Sarah was supposed to say the sounds of the consonants, say the

consonant digraphs, say the short vowels in the CVC words, and know the words of the silent e.

Sarah knew all of the consonant sounds except for the second g sound and the second c sound.

This is normal because the second sounds of each of these are tricky to pick out for children.

Sarah did not know the sounds of the consonant digraphs and she didn’t really want to try to

sound them out. She seemed confused at what they were. For the short vowels she knew one of

them and she only knew it because she was able to sound it out. The other words she tried to

sound them out but always sounded them out incorrectly or she would sound it out and then say a

completely different word. For the rule of silent e, she just said that she didn’t know and that it

was difficult for her to understand. Again, this assessment was difficult for her because she is

new to school and she has not yet learned these tasks.

Strengths and Learning Needs

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Sarah shows ability in being able to identify letters, blend syllables, and she can say the

sounds of the letters as well. Sarah needs to work on her sight words and the consonant digraphs.

Sight words are key to starting to learn to read and how the children are able to develop the

reading skills they need. Having sight words helps students be able to quickly pick out words in a

text to then help them read the rest of the story. Consonant digraphs are key sounds that students

need to know to be able to read. A lot of early readers use words that have the -th, -sh, -ch, -wh,

and -ph. As teachers, we wouldn’t tell the students that we are learning consonant digraphs but

we would tell them that we are learning different sounds that two letters make together. Learning

these will also benefit her development of being able to read and then also write. Having the

knowledge that she has, Sarah can improve her development in the areas that she is not doing as

well in as others. Having the knowledge of the sounds of letters helps her to learn the sight words

and then she is able to quickly recite the words she sees.

Overall, Sarah did a fairly decent job at the assessments that were put in front of her. You

can tell that she is a fresh kindergartener because there were multiple things that she didn’t know

how to do. The assessments that were done are a good starting point to see where Sarah is in her

education and then to see where she is at the end of the year. I am curious to see how much she

learns by the end of the school year and if she changes in her scores from the assessment.