Teacher Letter

www.mountunion.
edu
November 3, 2020
Dear Cindy,
As you know, I have been working with Olivia on my case study project throughout this semester. I
completed several assessments to discover her strengths and areas for improvement (AFIs) in the areas of
writing, comprehension, vocabulary, word identification, metacognition, and affective development. Upon
assessing all of these areas, I did remediation on a few skills that needed the most improvement, then
completed a posttest assessment to see overall growth. Attached to this letter you will find a copy of the
diagnostic chart that I created based on the data collected about Olivia’s strengths and AFIs throughout this
process. Here is what I have learned about Olivia’s strengths and areas for improvement.
While working with Olivia, she presented several strengths. Her attitude while working with me was
always positive and she was confident in all of the work she completed. As for her academic strengths, she did
very well on oral reading comprehension. If you refer to the diagnostic chart, you will notice that under
strengths for oral reading comprehension that she specifically showed the ability to understand and answer
comprehension questions pertaining to sequencing, main idea, details, and cause and effect. Another area that
she did well on was word identification. For this assessment, Olivia read a third grade level reading passage
and displayed the ability to use multiple strategies to help identify unknown words within the passage. As can
be seen in the diagnostic chart, she displayed use of phonics, structural analysis, high frequency words, and
sight vocabulary as she was reading. She specifically used structural analysis to break down the family name
in the passage as a compound word, as the name was “Pepperday”. As for Olivia’s writing skills, I found that
she is very creative. She never failed to think of ideas for her writings, both when adding details to sentences
or completing a writing prompt. She also did well at connecting all of her ideas and details together as well as
connecting them to the topic.
In addition to Olivia’s strengths, I noticed a few areas that Olivia can improve upon. While her oral
reading comprehension was strong, her silent reading comprehension was a struggle for her. She was assessed
using a different third grade passage and struggled to answer many of the questions. As can be seen in the
diagnostic chart, her AFIs for silent reading comprehension specifically pertained to questions involving
sequencing, details, cause and effect, and making inferences. She especially struggled with inferencing
questions throughout all comprehension assessments. In assessing her word identification, as is seen on the
diagnostic chart, context clues and word families were not evident within the specific assessment completed.
Since they were not used, I cannot be sure if they are strengths of AFIs. As for her fluency, she does not read
very fluently. As she was reading, she would pause randomly rather than stopping with punctuation. She often
ignored punctuation within sentences, frequently ignoring end marks such as periods. As for her writing, she
struggles with word choice and sentence fluency. She uses simple words rather than sensory words, verbs, and
more exciting adjectives in her writing. She also has no sense of sentence fluency as she writes paragraphs.
When asked to answer a writing prompt by writing a paragraph, she wrote a single run-on sentence, even after
several reminders that her paragraph needed to be multiple sentences.
Department of Education
1972 Clark Avenue • Alliance, OH 44601 • (330) 829.8212 • FAX (330) 823-3363
Some of the activities that I did to help Olivia with her areas for improvement in reading and writing
were looking at word choice through The Lorax and “Mad-Libs” inspired worksheets, as well as looking at
vocabulary through sorting activities. When working with Olivia I noticed she really enjoyed engaging
activities, such as the “Mad-Libs” inspired worksheets, being able to draw a picture to show a vocabulary
word, and anything that allowed for her to be creative. Through the assessments she also completed a creative
writing prompt. She enjoyed being able to write whatever she wanted and being creative. She seems to not
enjoy worksheets very much, but never complained about an activity. She seemed to learn the most through
the vocabulary activity in which she completed vocabulary squares for each word. We looked closely at each
term and discussed how to define the word, how to properly use it in a sentence, synonyms and antonyms for
the word, and drawing a picture to represent the word. She enjoyed being able to be creative within this
activity through writing her own sentences and drawing a picture to represent each vocabulary term.
Thank you for giving me the time to work with Olivia throughout this semester. Your constant support
of my ideas and thoughts pertaining to my assessments and remediation lessons was tremendously helpful.
Thank you for also providing me with ideas and resources as needed throughout this time. This experience
was very beneficial to my growth as an educator, teaching me how to look more critically at each student to
assess their abilities and where they need more support. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact
me via email at kisselam2021@mountunion.edu.
Respectfully,
Alyssa Kissel

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