Jilline is a six-year-old first grader who is an English Language Learner for General Education classrooms. Her primary home language is Vietnamese. On November 7, 2014 I did a reading assessment on Jilline. She read the book Put Me in the Zoo with lexile 150L; she completed this manuscript with 94% accuracy. Jilline is an "EARLY" reader who can read a story with a difficulty of 60 Lexile with 90% accuracy. However, she needs to work on her reading comprehension and on her ability to successfully retell a story that she has read. Although she was able to read the majority of the aforementioned book; she evinced difficulty retelling the story which indicates that her comprehension of the various events and characters in the tale was lacking. Additionally, Jilline could use work in phonics to help her accurately pronounce words. Improved phonemic work could also assist her overall reading comprehension. Lastly, Jilline's fluency also needs improvement. Although she was able to successfully read through the majority of the text, her reading was frequently choppy. By improving her fluency she will ideally read as easily as she talks.

Based on this assessment of Jilline's reading ability, I believe that she could benefit from the READ ALOUD strategy. Reading out loud on a more frequent basis would enable the young girl to improve her fluency and work on her phonemic development. Moreover, it should also help her improve her comprehension by gaining much more experience with reading. The specific strategy I will employ for reading aloud, which will apply not just to Jilline but to her entire class, is based on modeling. I will read a certain amount of pages to the class -- approximately half of that of the story -- in which I will emphasize, via vocal inflection, salient points in the plot, characters and character developments, and other points of interest. I will then divide the remaining number of pages amongst the class to read. Each child will read a page before rotating to another learner....

Those who are able to read with more fluency, vocal inflection, and vivacity will have obviously learned from my modeling. Preparation for this strategy will merely involve finding relevant literature. I will utilize some classic first grade literature, such as those found within the Curious George saga. These books are long enough for me to model reading, and to have students read them themselves. Thus, this strategy will enable Jilline and other students to obtain practice at becoming a better reader by listening and incorporating the type of reading that I perform.
I also believe that Jilline and her classmates will benefit from a Language Experience Approach (LEA) to reading. Actually, it appears as though this approach might produce greater efficacy than the aforementioned method, since it involves the students actually creating the text that they will read. The materials that I will utilize to implement this strategy involve a field trip. The class and I can go on a field trip to the library one day where we will practice our READ ALOUD strategy with books that the students choose. Upon returning to class (or perhaps on the next day), I will utilize various events from that field trip to create a text that the students will dictate for me to write. Doing so will simply require my asking them what they enjoyed, recollected, or best remembered about our field trip. That could involve possibly our walk to the library, greeting the librarians and interacting with other patrons, as well as the journey home. The key is for me to write down in sequence those events utilizing the very words that the children employed while describing them. In such a way they will effectively write the text, and therefore have a better feel for reading the completed story that we will create out of their recollections. Once I have written the story down on the board for…