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Alexandra Russell Professor Nottis EDUC 342 4 April 2013 Tutoring Paper 2 The assessment that I gave my student was on figurative language. Both my cooperating teacher and I have noticed that she had been having trouble in this area; she could not seem to understand the meaning of poems or passages when their meaning was not literal. I decided to take my teachers recommendation of assessing her understanding of similes and alliteration because these were the two areas in which she showed the most difficulty. I have also observed her current work in math and she did not seem to struggle in this area other than in her focus, so I therefore thought it would be more appropriate to stick with what she was currently learning in reading. I gave the girl I am working with the assignment an hour before I had to leave, at about 9:45. To start the assessment, I asked her if she could come over to the kidney table with me to help me with some of my homework. This excited her and she was eager to help me out. I brought her over to the table so that she would be separate from the other children and better able to concentrate in more isolation with only me sitting next to her. I also did not want the other children to distract her by asking her what she was doing since she was the only one who received this assessment. I gave her the worksheet and asked if she could fill it out for me so that I could bring it back to show my teacher. I think it was one of the fastest assignments I have seen her complete.

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As she answered the questions, I noticed that she would say the sentences that she wanted to write before actually putting them on paper, perhaps as a way to help her to get her thoughts together, then she would say each word to herself as she was writing them. She also worked to sound out words that she did not know how to spell, resulting in words such as caparing for comparing or elefit for elephant. She highlighted and underlined phrases in the poem I presented her with as my cooperating teacher has taught her to do. She asked me if her spelling was correct on the words that she struggled with and since I did not want to provide her with too much guidance, I told her that I could understand what she wrote and that was all that was important for this assessment. She also asked me about the last two questions. For number four she asked if the alliteration would be always amazing you with each taste or feeling. I asked her what alliteration was and she told me that it was words that started with the same letter or had the same beginning sound and were next to or close to each other. I told her to use that knowledge to answer the question because I could not give her the answer and she wrote always amazing which is correct. For the last question, she asked me to read it to her, which I did because I knew that the teacher sometimes did this for her when she was having trouble understanding a question. She was confused by my question and asked me what she was supposed to do. I reworded the question in simpler terms and told her that I wanted her to summarize the poem, but that I did not want her to use similes in her summary. She was still confused, so I asked her if she remembered when she learned about summarizing stories in class a few weeks prior. She did, so I told her to use the same techniques to summarize the poem I gave her. My student was good at identifying where the figurative language was in the poem. She therefore seemed to know the definition of a simile and alliteration because she was able to

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correctly identify them in the assessment, but she did not seem to understand what the use of this figurative language meant. When I asked her what the simile she identified meant, she said that is is like comparing two things. It is possible that she did not understand my question or read it as what does a simile mean instead of what does this simile mean? But when she was asked to summarize the poem in literal terms, she said that chocolate cake is good. She was confused with this question at first, but I think that in the end she understood what I was asking. She seemed to be confused either by what summarizing meant or by the poem itself because of all its similes. She identified that chocolate cake was repeated in the poem four times, and therefore thought that this was the main idea of the poem when really the poem was comparing chocolate cake to friendship, and everything that chocolate cake was compared too was really comparing friendship to all of those things. The poem may have been too complicated for her upon reflection because of all these similes, but it seems to me as though she is able to identify what a simile is but not what a simile means. For my intervention lesson, I could go in two ways. I think my first option would be to teach her further about figurative language, I would probably use examples outside of poetry since I know that poetry can be difficult to understand in general. I think that I would work with her more on understanding the meaning behind the similes, not just how to identify them. I think that some of this needs to be taught explicitly, but I think that I can also help her to understand through lots of questioning and having her write more of her own examples of similes and asking her about them as well and to explain them to me. I could also go further in depth in the lesson perhaps and talk about metaphors as well to try and enhance her understanding of figurative language if she starts to understand similes quickly. My second option would be to do a lesson in spelling with her, since I have noted some of her techniques in this assessment that do not seem

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to result in much accuracy for her. I was thinking of maybe doing a modified version of the Look, Say, and See II technique that we learned about in class. I think that this repetition of words that she commonly misspells would be very beneficial to her. I would love to see if physically feeling the words written out would help her to learn how they were spelled. I could use puffy paint to write the words on notecards and that way she could trace over the raised letters rather than just her pencil marks. I am not sure which direction I will go in yet, I will continue to observe her and speak with my cooperating teacher to determine which route would be best.

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Name_________________________________________ Read the following poem then answer the questions. Friends are like chocolate cake You can never have too many. Chocolate cake is like heaven Always amazing you with each taste or feeling. Chocolate cake is like life with so many different pieces. Chocolate cake is like happiness, you can never get enough of it. 1. Identify a simile in this poem:

2. What does this simile mean?

3. Write your own simile:

4. Identify an alliteration in this poem:

5. Summarize this poem in literal terms (without similies). What does the poem really mean?