We started the session with a guided reading book "Dragon at School" (brought to the session by Nicholas) reinforcing skills and strategies to figure out unknown words. Nicholas was encouraged to help by running his finger under each word as I read them. We would try to figure out the sound of the initial letter of unknown words. We used the pictures to mainly assist in attempts to figure them out. Nicholas was able to answer questions about the story and make a few inferences. Using an alphabet chart Nicholas was able to identify very few letters this week. He was able to tell me more of the letter sounds if I told him the letter. He referred to the letters as numbers. When filling in vowels on a short vowel chart Nicholas would know we were writing the letter "a" in each blank, but after a few words, he would forget the name of the letter and the same for e,i,o and u. He had difficulty retaining the names of the letters while working on them. I spread out bean bags with letters on them and asked Nicholas to find "N" the first letter of his name.