I spend every day working with students and see their struggles with each word and sentence. It is exciting and emotional when something happens that proves all of their hard work is paying off. Even I usually tear up with pride because I know how hard each of my students is trying.
Today I get to share one of those moments with you all. To protect her privacy we will call her E. E is in first grade and at the beginning of the school year her teacher was telling her mom that she was behind across the board in reading except for vocabulary. She was not meeting grade-level expectations in phonemic awareness, phonics, or high-frequency words. Her beginning-of-the-year testing showed similar trends.
E started with me at the beginning of September and we went straight into Barton Book 1. The last 4 months have been consistent with her showing up and putting in the hard work. She has always been excited and engaged to show up at each session and put in the work. E has progressed fairly quickly with the one-on-one instruction and is more than halfway through book 3 now.
The new testing results from mid-year testing have come in and it is validating for her to see how all her hard work is translating over to measurable scores. We all see how much easier and fluently she is reading. Her confidence is soaring with each new lesson, but to see it on paper shows everyone else what she is doing. E has scored 45 points higher than the beginning of the year testing. She has seen an increase of 6% in the national norms. She is now testing at grade level in all areas except comprehension of fiction, however, this is to be expected. With newly found fluency her comprehension now has room to grow since she is not having to decode every word.
My predictions for E and the rest of this year. I believe she will finish or be close to finishing book 4 by the end of the school year. We think her end-of-the-year testing will show her at or above grade level in all areas, especially above grade level in phonics. Her comprehension scores should reflect her fluency gains as well.
E has worked so hard at the program and all the hard work is standing out with how quickly she has made large gains in skills.
