Thank you for the phone call earlier today. As I mentioned to you my plan was to also ask H’s teacher for an assessment of her reading. I did so and thought you’d appreciate her response. Here it is:

“I decided to give H a new DRA test (level 24) yesterday because I have noticed such an improvement in her performance in reading group. H did great! Her oral reading has improved SO much. She actually received the highest possible scores for oral reading fluency, and she made only 3 decoding errors in the whole passage. Her decoding skills have come a long way since the beginning of the year, and I definitely see a difference from even a month ago. H did well with predicting and retelling as well. The only areas where she scored lower were on the interpretation and reflection questions. These sections of the test ask children to make inferences or justify their thinking about the story, and we generally find that these are the higher level skills children need a little more help to master. This has been and will continue to be a focus in reading groups.

In terms of spelling, I have noticed that H is paying more attention to using the word wall and other spelling resources in the classroom, which is fantastic. She sometimes still struggles to write all the sounds in words in her stories (even though these are words she could read in a book). I do think that we will likely see that H’s reading gains begin to be reflected in her spelling, but from my experience, the spelling generally follows after the reading.

Based on H’s great progress, I would definitely say that the program that you’re doing at home is helping her. In fact, I rarely see her guess at a word any more, plus she seems to be using the context of a sentence to realize when the word she said doesn’t make sense and she is correcting herself, which is the goal! Thank you for working so hard at home on the reading!”

I thought these teacher comments could be insightful to where H is at. I’m very encouraged.