real-life inquiry

For my real-life inquiry I chose to look more into the information students come to the classroom with. I am placed in a kindergarten classroom for my internship so I am blessed with the opportunity to see what knowledge students have when coming into their very first day of school ever! Before entering kindergarten, all students are assessed to see what skills they do or do not have.

The assessment typically is done before the first day of school. The student meets with the teacher in a one-on-one environment with the parents absent. The assessment is not extremely standardized as far as instructions so the teacher I observed made the tasks more fun by referring to them as games. The tasks (or games) covered a wide range of ability including knowing some basic personal information, colors, parts of the body, math skills, and letter identification. For this assignment, I focused my notes on the letter identification part of the assessment.

Although our class is made up of students from diverse backgrounds, many seemed to share the same strengths and same weaknesses. For students who are performing on an average level, they were able to identify about half of 25 mixed upper and lower case letters on a page. Students easily named the letters A, B, C, X, Z, S, and T. They had more trouble with the letters P, Q, V, U, W, K, and R. I asked my mentor teacher why this was and he explained the most students can easily recognize the first few letter of the alphabet because they have heard A,B, and C quite often. They remember X and Z because those are the ending letters and they are distinct. Students have knowledge of S and T because they are letters that have distinct sounds and are commonly encountered. The main reason for why students make mistakes when identifying the more troublesome letters is because they resemble one another. P, R, and K are commonly mixed up because of their similar shape. U, V, and W are also misidentified because of the same reason.

I am very interested to see how students build off of these initial skills. We have been in school for 2 weeks now and I can already see how these skills are playing a part in students' learning. Some students are absorbing every bit of information such as letter names and sounds. Other students are some moving forward as much, however; they are solidifying the knowledge they came to the classroom with. Having prior knowledge on what students knew before school will let me observe their growth and take note on what other factors, besides prior knowledge, may play a part in the learning process.