Background: Johnny at the Learning Academy

My case study student is named Johnny, and this is his first year at the Learning Academy. He has been at another school up until this year. In the Learning Academy, his class has less than ten students and his teacher, Ms. Jameson, cares very much for her students. Her high expectations and no-nonsense attitude creates a fast-paced classroom that caters to the needs of the students. I was assigned Johnny on the first day of my obversation and I gave him both an Interest Inventory created by me and the ERAS assessment, also known as the Garfield Survey. His survey indicated he isn't partial to either recreational or academic reading even those his scores were drastically different for individual questions. I have found this to be true because of the information I gathered in his Interest Inventory.

Johnny likes a wide variety of hobbies and interests. He loves tigers and turtles, and I couldn't help but laugh with Johnny when he exclaimed his favorite animal is a tiger because, "It's so fluffy!" He has since asked me to find him a book on turtles for read alouds. (I have been reading The Spiderwick Chronicles: Field Guide to him. He loves the books because he has already seen the movies and read some of the books.) His favorite TV channel is Cartoon Network, which shows his favorite TV show The Amazing World of Gumball. In addition, he likes watching movies, like the Lego movie, with his two older sisters on one of their laptops. He's dying to see the movie Ant-Man and the rest of the Marvel movies that he's missed, even though his favorite superhero is Batman. Like most sixth graders (and college students!), his favorite food is pizza with his favorite topping: bacon! Johnny went on a tangent telling me about his favorite sport, baseball, because he got to see lots of stadiums when he was at camp one year. He and Ms. Jameson shared a high five when he announced his favorite team is the Red Sox. Johnny has also been to monster truck rallies, Nascar stadiums, and Daytona Beach.

Johnny mentioned he doesn't like getting up so early for school because he's used to sleeping in during the summer. I was surprised to find out his favorite subject in school is math. He found that the standardized test in math last year was very easy for him, so he likes the subject. He only reads, however, the 20 minutes he does for school a night on his iPad or Kindle. Still, he loves to read mystery books, and claims that his favorite series has the number 52 on the front, but couldn't remember the title exactly. I recommended that he read the Boxcar Children due to his interest in mysteries and his age range. When I said this, he recalled the time his first grade teacher read the first book to them in class and how much he liked it. I felt this was a good indication of his potential to be a successful reader.

From what I have gathered in my observations, Johnny stays up late playing video games every night or goes out on family trips. He is tired in class because he doesn't get enough sleep, and his homework sometimes isn't done. Johnny is in the Middle Within Word Pattern Stage from the Primary Spelling Inventory. He easily breezed through the first 12 words out of the 26. I noticed that he had trouble relating certain sounds to the correct spellings. Often, he knew how to spell the sound but not which spelling to use.

I also administered the Phoneme Segmentation assessment to Johnny and was surprised to find that he successfully segmented 20 out of 22 words. He messed up on two because he was distracted, but breezed through the others. I find that this goes to show that Johnny knows his letter sounds and can hear the individual sounds within words. However, I will need to test him on words that he messed up on during the Primary Spelling Inventory. This will give me a proper idea of what words he does know and what ones he needs to work on.

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