Sunday, October 18, 2015

Teaching Phonological Awareness

As I was reading this chapter, I was amazed by how early development and literacy are connected. At this point in my college career, I feel as though I am starting to understand development and how we progress from a zygote, to being a full-fledged human. We experience fierce interactions with our world, and that is how we grow. We learn to crawl because we have a need to move, we learn to eat because we have a need for nutrition, we learn to speak because we have a need to be heard. From this chapter, the subject of early literacy was driven home by going back to the basics, and honestly, It is amazing that we have learned everything that we have.
                  On page 137, Frank Smith said: “Young children are more interested in the function of literacy first and then that form. The first words a child says, reads, and writes are those with leaning and function in their lives, such as family names, food labels, and road signs. After function, the child shows interest in the forms of print, which include names of letters and sounds. Finally, children learn conversations of print. Now they realize that punctuation serves a purpose in reading and writing, and that spaces demarcate letters and words and words are written and read from left to write.”  Children learn from their environment and from a need basis. Child literacy is important because it is a need. A need to communicate, to maneuver, to excel.
                  On page 138, the chapter talks about how some children come into school knowing a considerable amount of information pertaining to reading and writing. These children come from homes where books are read to them frequently, and have guardians who have exposed them to print-rich environments. However, not every child has that luxury. Children who have not been exposed to early literacy and print concepts, will not come into class knowing what some other students have down pat. This means that there is a disconnect going on in our classrooms.
                  One of the best ways to enhance childhood literacy is to increase our exposure. Children that may not be able to read words fluently, may have a skill set for context glues or gathers information through print. This means that our classrooms need to be as print-rich as they possibly can be. We need to constantly expose our students to books of different genres, topics, levels and interests to promote vocabulary that they will need in life. Students need to get as much individual attention as they can get. And although that is difficult in a large classroom, we need to remember that there are resources outside of the school to help children further excel (i.e – parents, libraries, tutors.)

                  As teachers we need to be resourceful. What other strategies can you think of that will help children figure out words? What have you used in your teaching experience that has worked with the students, and what was the demographic? What DIDN’T work? We are a profession that is constantly bouncing ideas off each other, and I’m excited to hear your feedback!

3 comments:

  1. Great points Ellen on how literacy is built upon each step! As future teachers our students are always going to be at different levels from one another and it is our job as teachers to embrace this and use it to our full advantage. We should never try to hold back the ones that are ahead and we should never ignore the students that are behind. In class we have talked about strategies like having labels on everything in the classroom as well as having word wall words because sight words are important and a student becomes so familiar with it after seeing it often. There are times still today when someone says a word, I automatically picture the word on the wall from a certain word wall I had in many of my elementary classes. Although I do not have previous experience with it, I have seen little flip booklets that students can have to take home with them or keep with them of their spelling words. This could be a very helpful study guide.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like how you emphasized that literacy is on a need basis and children already come with knowledge about print through interacting with their environment and using context clues to learn about the print in their environment. In my experience it takes a lot of encouragement for those readers who did not grow up in a print rich environment because they are learning to read and realize they are behind their peers, it takes one on one and encouragement that they can read and figure out the mystery of reading. Another thing I’ve learned in my experience is it helps to focus on comprehension when reading and it doesn’t matter how fast they read a book or if they say every word correctly but it DOES matter if they understood what they just read and I think that goes back to your point about the need to read and we read to understand our environment, so it does no good to read if you can't understand what you are reading.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I really like how concerned you are about creating a print rich environment for our students. I think this concept is incredibly important in classrooms because like you mentioned, students who come into the classroom with no previous background of early literacy are at a great disadvantage than the other children who are exposed to literacy at an early age. I think it is very important to constantly expose our students to various texts, genres, and topics, just like you said, because all of our students are going to be at different reading and comprehension levels, so for all of our students to be successful, we need to accommodate for various levels of learners. As for your questions, I think it is important to use strategies that are proven to be successful, like pushing sounds of words, and steer away from the strategies that are easy and convenient, but not always the best choice, like giving students worksheets instead of hands-on activities. From my experience, using activities that are hands-on and engaging can help every student, no matter which ability level, to be successful, and I know in my future classroom that I will use these techniques to promote success in my classroom.

    ReplyDelete