Early+Years+Student+Profile

= Early Years Student Profile = Charlotte* is six years old, and in grade 1 at a co-ed public primary school in her home town. Charlotte has been exposed to language and literacy from a very young age, having been read to as a child. Her mother is a Reading Recovery teacher at her school, and Charlotte had begun to learn to read before she started school.

She lives at home with her mother and father, and her older brother. She has access to many books at home, as well as at school. She says she doesn’t really like school, but sometimes it’s ok. She likes writing stories and reading chapter books at home. She has access to a computer at home, and while her older brother uses it mainly to play “silly games”, she mostly uses it to play maths games.

Her family help her language and literacy education by reading longer books to her, and getting her to read shorter books to them, as well as doing her reader with her every night. Sometimes her older brother even reads to her.

She seemed fairly confident and fluent reading “All Tutus Should be Pink” (Brownrigg, S 1992), having read it the night before. Unfortunately, the book she selected, “Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes” (Fox, M 2008) from the selection i offered was far too easy, and she found it quite boring. She did struggle with more complicated words like “eiderdown”, but in that instance, she was unfamiliar with the actual world.

When asked comprehension questions about the book, she responded to some questions with “I don’t know”, but she did seem to have an understanding of the meaning of the book.

She was also reluctant to write a response to the text as she (understandably) wanted to go and eat her lunch, so as a token gesture, wrote the title of the book and drew some illustrations.
 * name has been changed for privacy