Being in this class, I feel like I am actually
understanding what phonological awareness is and everything that is done when
you teach it. I always thought that children learned the alphabet in the order
it listed in. When I was in kindergarten, my teacher taught the alphabet
starting with ‘a’ and ending with ‘z’. From reading the chapters, I realized
that it’s more efficient to teach students the letters in groups, and introduce
the letters that are more common at the beginning.
Another thing that is discussed in the fifth
chapter is the type of environment in the classroom. It should be print-rich,
which I always knew what it consisted of. I am noticing it more in classrooms I
observe in and substitute teach in, how heavily the print rich environment is
stressed. Everything is labeled with a picture, the word in English and
sometimes in another language depending on whether there is an ESL student.
When students come into school in kindergarten,
I always thought that students would learn the alphabet, then the word families
like “-at” and “-am”, then advance on to sight words. The way the chapter goes
through the many steps about how to tackle the process of teaching phonological
awareness. It’s very interesting to see how many steps and subcategories fall
under phonological awareness.
What strategies do you have if a child is
struggling with learning the alphabet, or making the sounds for each letter?
What would you do if a student simply gets frustrated while learning the
letter/sounds?
Before this class, I only had a basic understanding of phonological awareness. Now, I understand what it is and how it is implemented in the classroom. I also remember my kindergarten teacher teaches us the alphabet in order. I found it interesting that it is helpful to teach the students the more common letters first. I always noticed that everything is labeled in kindergarten classroom, but now I understand the importance of this. It is important that students see print words all of the time. I also never knew that there were subcategories that fell under phonological awareness until this class. I thought there was just a simple definition that described it, but that is not the case.
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