Teaching Phonics and Spelling Patterns

I enjoyed reading all about different lesson formats I can use as a teacher one day to help my students learn and pay attention to patterns in words. One game that stuck out to me is called “the wheel”. In the game show wheel of fortune, which I love, it is based on the idea that having meaning and some letters allows you to figure out many words.  A modification of this game can be used for students to introduce them big words and to teach them the meaning and all the letters they know.

How to Play

1. ·      Students guess all letters without considering if they are consonants or vowels.
2. ·      They must have all letters filled in before they can say the word.
3. ·      The word must fit in a sequence rather than in a category
4. ·      Vanna will not be there to turn letters J

Write a sentence on the board and draw a blank for each letter of an important word. The students will then take turning guessing letters until they can guess the word. I have always loved the wheel of fortune, and now I can incorporate it into my own classroom which I love!

I feel it is so important to really have your students engaged in a classroom. Having fun activities and games that teach your students about the lesson you are giving helps them learn in my opinion a lot better than having lectures all the time; Especially for me because I am going to be a special education teacher in an elementary setting. I really enjoy how Arlington and Cunningham provide a lot of different examples of activities and games for students to practice their reading, words and writing.

Phonemic Awareness

         Reading out loud to your child or your students is very important and helps their process of learning to read.  There is different aspects to learning how to read but phonemic awareness was something brought up more than once in this week’s readings. What is phonemic awareness?  According the article, Begin to Read, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds, which are phonemes, in spoken words. Before children learn to read write, they need to become more aware of how the sounds in words work. Kids must be aware that words are made up of different speech sounds.

·      Why is phonemics important?

o   It helps kids learn to spell

o   It improves their word reading and comprehension

Research tells us that it’s essential to focus on phonemic awareness in the classroom before reading can begin. Bevin, a teacher from Virginia Beach said that we want to ensure that children have a solid understanding of the sounds of speech before we start phonics instruction.

Questions that I considered during this and that you might consider as well:

·      Can direct instruction in phonological awareness help children learn

to read more easily?

·      Why is phonological awareness important in learning to read?

Children can practice phonemic awareness as they determine the beginning sounds of words in this fun game. 

To play, the children simply take turns spinning the spinner, stating the name of the picture to which the spinner points, and determining the sound/letter with which the object begins. If needed, children may use a key to help them determine the correct letter. Each child will then look for that letter on their bingo card and will cover the letter with a marker. You may choose to have the children continue playing until a child has covered 3 letters in a row or until they have covered all of the letters on their bingo card.

Building the Foundations for Success

This chapter had a lot of information on how to have a classroom that is full of successful readers. It provides us with different things to do in our classroom.

o   Reading to Children and Independent Reading Time

§  Read aloud to children

§  Allow children to have their own time to read

o   Supporting and Encouraging Writing

§  Model writing

§  Provide things to write on

§  Accept the writing they do

o   Teach Concrete Words

§  Making the kids’ names “special words” for the students to learn

o   Develop Phonemic Awareness

§  Done orally calling attention to sounds not letter

§  Ability to take words apart and put them back together

o   Teach Letter names and sounds

§  Use the students’ names to teach this

§  Use favorite words

Using these concepts will help and encourage your students and help them have a successful literacy concept.

What will I do in my classroom?

This chapter had me thinking a lot about what I am going to have in my classroom. I work at an after-school program with 2^nd and 3^rd graders, and one of my favorite things to do with them is play games that are educational. If the kids are having fun, they learn so much better and enjoy doing it. I love the idea of the names in the hat for learning creative words for the students. I will definitely probably use that idea.

What it Takes to be an Exemplary Teache

The 6 T's

Will I practice these 6 T's when I am a teacher? Reading through the article really had me thinking about the kind of teacher I want to be. 

• Time
• Reading and writing versus other things (50/50 ratio)
• Text
• Children need a different variety of books they should read
• high success reading other than difficult reading (Allington Pg.742)
• Teaching
• Modeling and demonstrating rather than letting them "just do" an assignment
• Talk
• Encourage, model, and support a lot of talk throughout the school day
• Tasks
• Longer assignments instead of short multiple "busy work" assignments
• Let students choose work so they engage more
• Testing
• Evaluate student work on effort and improvement rather that achivement

I want to be able to model this type of teaching. Allington explained in the article how difficult it was to do this because it is so against the norm these days of teacher across the state. He specifically said that good teaching should not have to be against the organizational grain, and i could not agree more. It is sad to me that teaching has to be by "the book". People always express to you how important diversity is and using your own strengths and personality traits to incorporate into your teaching, but yet they give you rules on how to teach everything. It is very frustrating, and I hope when I become a teacher one day I can find a way to teach all different learning styles and be a successful teacher.

So how can I be a successful teacher in teaching children to read?

1. Give children books they can read and want to read
2. Create a positive environment to where the students can converse with me as a teacher and other students about the book they are reading at the time
3. Talk to my students about useful reading strategies and good questions to ask themselves while reading
4. Focus more on my students' improvement and work ethic instead of strictly assessments

Below are some things I would like to use in my classroom to encourage students with reading. I found all of them on pinterest!

In this picture below, I thought would be a good idea for students to pick a stick and converse with groups of students.