Cultural and Linguistic Opportunities

 Anna  Age 7  First Grade  Female  Home Language-English  Socioeconomic status-low income

Academic Challenges  Anna struggles with reading, writing, and math.  She is in a program called Reading Recovery which is an intense one-on-one intervention, thirty minutes a day, for twenty weeks.  She is also receiving Title I services to help her with math.

Funds of Knowledge  Linguistic-she is able to read and write English, she is just at a low level.  Cultural-she is Native American and does know some things about her culture. One thing she knows about it Pow Wows  Family-she has one older brother and both of her parents that live with her. Her mom has been in and out of treatment and Anna is aware of this to some degree.

Funds of Knowledge  Experiences-she has not had very many experiences that she talks about. She has talked about going to the water park and a big city.  Practical-Anna does not have a lot of practical experiences. She can read some of the words listed on our classroom expectations poster.

Strengths related to literacy expectations of the CCSS  Anna can print all upper and lower case letters now which she was not able to do at the beginning of the year.  She is starting to use punctuation at the end of sentences.  She uses conventional spelling for words with common spelling patterns.  Another strength is sorting words into categories such as color or clothing.

Strengths  Define words by category and by one or more key attributes.  Identify real-life connections between words and their use.  Adjectives differing in intensity by defining or choosing them or by acting out the meanings.  Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, reading and being read to, and responding to texts, including using frequently occurring conjunctions to signal simple relationships.

Challenges related to literacy expectations of the CCSS  Use common, proper, and possessive nouns.  Use singular and plural nouns with matching verbs in basic sentences (e.g., He hops; We hop).  Use personal, possessive, and indefinite pronouns (e.g., I, me, my; they, them, their; anyone, everything).  Use verbs to convey a sense of past, present, and future (e.g., Yesterday I walked home; Today I walk home; Tomorrow I will walk home).

Challenges  Use frequently occurring adjectives.  Use frequently occurring conjunctions (e.g., and, but, or, so, because).  Use determiners (e.g., articles, demonstratives).  Use frequently occurring prepositions (e.g., during, beyond, toward).  Produce and expand complete simple and compound declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences in response to prompts.

Challenges  Capitalize dates and names of people.  Use commas in dates and to separate single words in a series.  Use sentence-level context as a clue to the meaning of a word or phrase.  Use frequently occurring affixes as a clue to the meaning of a word.  Identify frequently occurring root words (e.g., look) and their inflectional forms (e.g., looks, looked, looking).

Conclusion  Anna is a first grader that is Native American. She comes from a low income family where the mom is having some challenges of her own and is not there a lot.  She is able to read and write but she is not at grade level.  She is receiving reading and math interventions.  Some of her strengths are being able to write all of the upper and lower case letters, spelling conventionally using spelling patterns, and identifying connections between words and there use.  Some of her challenges are using verbs to convey a sense of past, present, and future, capitalizing dates and names of people, and identifing frequently occurring root words (e.g., look) and their inflectional forms (e.g., looks, looked, looking).