Beginning Reading

Beginning Reading

1. Phonemic Awareness

   • Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds-phonemes-in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes (the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in a word's meaning).
     • It is an auditory skill and is done aurally and orally. L2 learners can use names, cognates, and words from their L1.
       • Phonemic awareness skills:
         • Rhyming
           • Activities
             • Put your hand up if these 2 words rhyme: "bed" and "shed" , "sat" and "mat", "cup" and "bit"
             • I say "fat", you say ... I say "red" you say ...
             • Children walk around in a big circle taking one step each time a rhyming word is said by the teacher. When the teacher says a word that doesn't rhyme, the children sit down: "she" "tree" "flea" "spree" "key" "bee" "sea" "went"
         • Syllable Splitting
           • Activities
             • Ask them to clap the syllables with you as you say these words: sunshine, vacation, delicious, dinner, astronaut, alphabet, communication, calendar, school, wonderful, merry-go-round, television
             • Children learn to count the sounds in a word. For example, "Can you count the syllables in football?"
         • Blending
           • Activities
             • What word is made up of the sounds /k/ /a/ /t/? "cat"
             • Place a small number of picture cards in front of children. Tell them you are going to say a word using "Snail Talk" a slow way of saying words (e.g., /fffffllllaaaag/). They have to look at the pictures and guess the word you are saying.
         • Phonemic Segmentation
           • Activities
             • Children identify the beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words. For example, "What is the ending sound in pig?" "What sound do you hear in the middle of cat?" "What's the sound that starts these words: turtle, time, teeth"
             • Rubber band stretch: Teacher models with a large rubber band how to stretch out a word as the word is said. /mmmmmmmm-/aaaaaaaaaaaa-/nnnnnnnnn/. Teacher models with stretched out band how to bring rubber band back to original length and says the word fast: /man/. Children pretend to stretch rubber bands as they say the sounds in different words. Class says a verse for each child in the class: "David, David, how do you? Whose that friend right next to you?" Children and teacher say the next child's name very slowly, stretching palms far apart as the word is stretched; RRRR-eeeee-bbbb-eee-ckckckck-aaa. Clap once quickly and say name fast: "Rebecca."
         • Phoneme Deletion
           • Activities
             • The teacher says the word "cat" and asks what the word will be without the /k/?
             • The teacher says the word "cat" and then says the word "at" and asks what sound was taken away. Students would respond with /k/. - Deleting sounds in the middle and at the end of words is another variation.
         • Phoneme Manipulation
           • Activities
             • Ask children riddles that require them to manipulate sounds in their heads. For example, "What rhymes with pig and starts with /d/?" "What rhymes with book and starts with /c/?" "What rhymes with sing and starts with /r/?" "What rhymes with dog and starts with /fr/?"
             • Songs that teach sound substitution: Choose a song your students all know and substitute a consonant sound for the beginning of each word in the song. For example, "Old MacDonald had a farm": make substitutions when singing about each new animal. For a cow, sing, "kee-high,kee-kigh, koh!" For a sheep, sing, "shee-shigh, shee-shigh, shoh!"

2. Phonics

   • The goal of phonics instruction is to help children to learn and be able to use the Alphabetic Principle. The Alphabetic Principle is the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Phonics instruction helps children learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language.
     • Letter-sound and letter-combination knowledge:
       • There are 44 sounds in English. They need to be taught explicitly and in isolation.
         • Blends: combinations of consonants that keep their sounds. Examples: bl, st, dr, pr
         • Digraphs: two consonants that don’t keep their sounds when combined. Examples: sh, th, ph, ch, kn, gh, ti(on) wh
         • Vowel Digraphs: two vowels that don't keep their sounds when combined. Examples: oo, ea, ee, ou, ay, ai, ey, ie, ei, ae
         • Trigraphs: three consonants that don’t keep their sounds when combined. Examples: sch, str
         • Vowel Trigraphs: three vowels that don't keep their sounds when combined. Examples: eau
         • Diphthongs: two vowel sounds joined in one syllable to form one speech sound. Examples: oi oy, ou, ay
       • Activities
         • Word slides for rimes
         • Attack the word: find smaller words in a bigger word. Find the root, prefix and suffix.
         • Ask which letter comes in the beginning, middle, end of a word. Example: What letter does "spider" start with?
         • Ask which word starts with a certain letter. What words have that letter in the middle and the end. Example: Which words have a "d" in the middle?
     • Decoding
       • Good readers are able to correctly pronounce familiar words whether they are regular or irregular words, and are able to pronounce unfamiliar words in a way consistent with the conventions of written English. Decoding activities focus on helping the child to develop fluent word recognition skills
         • Activities
           • Flashcards
           • Word Ladders: Write a word on the board that the students know how to spell and read. Tell students to come to the board and write a new word which is identical to the old word except for one letter (added, removed or changed).
           • Place word cards around the classroom. Gather students in the middle of the room. Say a word, and students look for that word. The first to see the word goes to get the word card. The child with the most word cards at the end wins.
           • Ask students to generate as many words as they can using the letters which are provided. Example: The letters E, E, O, O, L, L, N, S, T, W, Y can form the words ON, LOW, SNOW, SLOWLY, SWEET, and YELLOWSTONE
     • Sight Words
       • The most frequently used and repeated words in the English language are known as sight words. This list of words includes the, a, is, of, to, in, and, I, you, and that. Sight words are critical to reading because they are used so frequently, and because many of them cannot easily be sounded out or illustrated.
         • Activities
           • flashcards
           • Games: Memory Game, Go Fish, Word Find

3. Fluency

   • Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Because fluent readers do not have to concentrate on decoding the words, they can focus their attention on what the text means.
     • Activities
       • Timed repeated readings: Students have 1 minute in which to read a text quietly. Students mark where they reach in the text. The students then have another minute to read the same text to try to read further than the first time. This is repeated a few times.
       • Recordings: Students read a text as they hear a fluent reader read the text on a recording. As confidence and reading skills develop, students read the same text without the assistance of the recording.
       • Paired reading: Students read a text aloud to each other. They take turns reading by sentence, paragraph, page or chapter.
       • Choral reading: The teacher reads a sentence from a text aloud and models fluent reading with intonation. The students follow with their fingers as they read. All the students in the class then read the sentence aloud in unison.
       • Reader's theatre: Each student is assigned a part in a play. Students read the scripts and perform their parts in the play.
       • Repeated reading practice: Students need to collect a certain number of signatures for reading a text. Each time the text is read, the person read to, signs the paper.
       • Memorizing: Students memorize a few lines from a poem.

4. Sources: http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/pa/pa_sequence.php http://teams.lacoe.edu/documentation/classrooms/patti/k-1/activities/phonemic.html http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/blending_games