Teaching Phonics and Spelling Patterns

After reading this week's reading, I started to think about the activities listed, and how I could incorporate them into my future classrooms.  Cunningham and Allington lists a variety of reading activities that use what a student already knows and helps them learn ways to apply it to enhance their learning. The activity, "Guess the Covered Word" is a perfect example of teaching children word recognition.  It not only allows the child to think of words they already know, but also makes them think about how words make sense in a sentence.   By making this a guessing game, the child is learning important skills and having fun at the same time!  The activities listed in the readings are great resources, because they take into account the different learning levels of children and make it compatible for both struggling and advanced students.  We see this evident in Clark's article on coaching and how successful this can be for a variety of learners.

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• What other variations of "Guess the Covered Word" could you use? (Ex- different skill levels, sight words, etc)

• What activity do you feel provides the best practice of teaching phonics to children?

Week 4: Ways to teach reading skills

The three articles for this week list many strategies and methods used to prepare children for reading.  The article by the IRA and NAEYC emphasize that teaching children in a classroom, especially reading skills is a process.  Of these activities listed, it seems that reading aloud to children is the very important.  This is important because it exposes children to a variety of concepts, and allows the child to interpret the readings in a way that makes sense to them.   For kindergarteners, the major point is to expose a child to a variety of print, so that the child can develop concepts about them.  This only further strengthens their literacy skills.  When a child’s literacy skills improve, systematic code instruction along with meaningful connected reading further strengthens it.  Overall, the key is to continue to reintroduce concepts and words to a child, which enhances comprehension and fluency.  Reading is a process that starts from infancy, and continues through grade school.

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The "Letting Go of 'Letter of the Week" article emphasizes the results from using several different methods in a classroom.  By examining these educators literacy history, they were able to improve how they taught in the classroom.  I especially like how both Donna’s used real world examples to show their kindergarten classes that they already knew how to read, even if they thought they didn’t.  This method was constantly used in the classrooms, which helped children continue to compare these sounds to other words, which enhanced their reading and writing skills.  This article assesses that teaching many teaching strategies out of the “norm” are actually helpful in a classroom, especially if they are constantly reinforced.

The last article on phonemic awareness emphasizes how important this skill is when learning to read.  This involves the breakdown of words into smaller parts.  While teaching phonemic awareness, there are several things to keep in mind, such as keeping it playful and interactive, yet purposeful.  Overall, this article assesses the methodology of phonemic awareness and lists useful ways to teach this to children.

• Do you feel your literacy history will impact your future teaching style?

• What activities could you use in your classroom to show children that they can read, even if they cannot?

Building the Literacy Foundation

     This week's reading discusses the importance of teaching children the basics of reading.  Most of us have learned to read the same way: we all start by learning to talk, then we learn the alphabets, and from there we learn how to put words together.  All these concepts help build the foundation for children to strengthen their literacy.  The reading for this week contained many activities that can used to build children's literacy skills.  Of all the activities listed, I think modeling is one of the most important. Children often want to mimic what they see adults doing.  By modeling reading and writing skills, it will encourage children to want to do the same, which is a great idea to improve literacy.  I found it interesting that one of the suggestions included "accepting the writing they do".  This involves letting a child express themselves through writing, even if it's only scribbles.  I thought this was interesting because I have only observed teachers pushing for the "correct" form of writing;  Overall, there are many interactive ways to help teach a child literacy skills!

• What activities have you observed a teacher using to encourage literacy skills?

• What methods do you think you could use in your future classroom?

Here's a video of a child reading through using phonemic awareness

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Classrooms that WORK! Blog 1

        After doing the readings for the week in Chapter's 1-2 of Classrooms that work, I learned several useful methods that can make a successful classroom.  One of the most important aspects stressed in all the methods seemed to be the need for balance.  This balance involves not focusing on one component more than the next, rather incorporating many skills cohesively.  Throughout each of the methods, it seems that to have a strong classroom, children have to be actively engaged in both reading and writing.  The most important thing to expose the child to is a wide range of skills.  Modeling and demonstrating good literacy skills can be very beneficial in teaching in classrooms.  Of course, this makes sense when thinking back to how I learned in school.  Thinking back to learning the basics like the alphabets, my teacher constantly reinforced our learning by singing and reciting them with us, and using them daily. 

        
        Learning basic skills lead to improving children’s literacy skills.  Also incorporating various reading choices can increase a child’s reading skills.  The more a child reads the better they become at it.  Usually, books that children enjoy when they’re younger, they enjoy the same genre when they get older.  I know personally, when I was younger, I enjoyed reading adventure and fantasy fiction books, much like I do today.  Overall, the key is to expose a child to a variety of book choices to motivate them to read more!

What methods from the reading do you think you could use to motivate students to read more?