Classroom App - Phonics & Spelling
Gary Obermeyer, Mon October 31, 2005, 04:27 PM
Your second "homework" assignment for Session Three is to select a tool/strategy that you read/talked/learned about during the phonics & spelling presentation, try it out in your classroom, observe what happens, and summarize what you learned in this thread.
While you're here, take a few minutes to read what your colleagues discovered in their respective classrooms (don't be bashful about asking questions and/or making comments).
One of the phonics programs that we use in the classroom is the McGraw Hill Phonics CD-Rom and the students really enjoy it and seem to get a lot from it. It has music, rhyming games, lots of pictures, and different phonics games that go along with the particular spelling unit of the week. This is a great phonics and spelling tool.
One of the things I use at FES is the Soar program by Houghton Mifflin. Within this program there are awesome blending activities to do with 1st or 2nd graders. It is basically just as described in the phonics & spelling portion of the presentation. I use the blending activities weekly with the kids.
While my group and myself read the strategies and activities for phonics and spelling presentation, they all seemed so familiar because the core and intervention programs that we use incorporate most of the tools or strategies. The components/strategies are embedded into the programs we are using and so far have been very effective and engaging with my students.
I also use the Soar to Success program, but I am teaching it at the 4th grade level. At this level they focus on the best strategies to use when you don't know a word. For example, the program teaches the students to look for the largest chunks in words and then at the remaining letters and their sounds. This strategy is very helpful, but I find that the kids forget to use it. Once I prompt them to use this strategy they, most often, read the word correctly.
I also use these strategies in the intervention programs used at school. these strategies do very well with my students and i really like how they work. it is nice to knw that we are on the right track.
The program we use at our school is similar to this program. I am glad we are right on track with!
To honest, I had a hard time choosing a strategy to use with my 4th graders. I am at the same site at others above that are using Soar to Success. So I decided to talk to some of these other teachers who are tutoring some of my lower readers and see what I can do to reinforce what they are learning in tutoring in my class. The biggest thing that I saw that I can reinforce in my low reading group is to reinforce chunking. So I am currently focusing on this strategy with my low group.
I have my students organize words (from a story or spelling words) by letter clusters or patterns. A fun way to practice spelling is using sign languge. It is quiet and my students love it. I am always trying to fit in others ways to organize vocabulary and spelling words such as: by syllable or alphabetically. It is a never ending task that all age students need practice at.
ESL 3rd Graders meet with me for 30 minutes during their literacy block every morning. I am teaching them spelling strategies by using the phoneme approach...."ight, igh, ild, and ind " words this week. I've used flashcards, realia, and sentence work for words...today I will do a storymap with them as a review using a large table sized paper to allow them to respond to me on each word learned by drawing or writing as I instruct them ...then they rotate the paper to the left ...we end up with words they have learned..
At my school for intervention we use Reading Mastery. We focus heavily on blending, spelling patterns, and phonics skills. We really do not have the flexibility to do many of the activities that were described in the blending section. For my 3rd grade Intervention Group,next week we are looking at prefixes and suffixes of words to get to the base word to help guide us in our word instruction. Many strategies suggested are strategies that are also used in the Harcourt series.
I have students take letter cards and match them to the word cards. They learn letter recognition, as well as saying the sound of each letter. They can also say the words after they have matched them to the letters. Using colored letter cards makes this more exciting for the children to work with.
In fourth grade, it is always important to find patterns in our Spelling words. The first time they look at a set of words, I have them try to get the pattern and sort them accordingly. Then we discuss what they did and what the real pattern is. We play fun games like racing sort, abc order sort, etc. We also hunt for our words in our weekly reading books.
The spelling and vocabulary section was very helpful even though a lot of the strategies are used for younger grades. I have however, used some strategies for my low ESL students who struggle with phonics and phonological awareness. Some of the most basic tasks they have to work hard at. So I have begun using more manipulatives with them and more spelling patterns to help them remember their spelling and sounds.
The presentation did not really offer any specific strategies for teaching the alphabet. For letter sound knowledge it instructed "Teach the common sounds of letters, letter combinations, and spelling patterns, Teach explicit and systematic phonics that involves carefully selecting a set of letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns that are organized into a logical sequence, Focus on teaching letter sounds that have a high utility for reading and spelling simple, monsyllabic words:
I have been spending more time on sorting our Spelling Words. They enjoy figuring out the patterns and at the same time are learning a different way to look at words. By learning these patterns, they are becoming better spellers and are continually looking for these patterns in their daily reading.
It is really interesting to use the alphabet arc. I think it helps students put the letters in order. It is hands on which is great for Kindergarten and my students really got into putting the alphabet in order. It is good practice for my high and my low students. I think this would help struggling students understand the alphabet and the order of it.
I chose to use blending activities with my lower functioning 4th grade students during their small group time. I tried the strategy,Say it lowly, say it faster move it closer and repeat. This worked well when they would come to words that they did not know in our leveled readers.
I had my students organize the words according to spelling patterns.
I have been having my students say their spelling words very slowly with emphasis on the vowel sounds. It seems that the vowel sounds are the most difficult. Is it a short e or a short i sound? Once the word is said slowly, we then say the word quicker.
Our intervention program uses a lot of the strategies mentioned here.
Classroom application. I am the music teacher and will not have an opportunity to do this. Thank you
We are currently blending and I really liked the say it slowly, say it faster, move it closer and repeat. This especially comes in handy with totally unfamiliar words!
I tried the "playing with sounds" activity. I also use a variation with dice. The student rolls the dice (3 dice - CVC). We put the vowel and the consonant together, and then add the first consonant sound. It's fun!
I did an all group activity with spelling words for the week in the Harcourt series. The blending is done well at this time of the year with first grade. They have no problem, except for students who are still at the phonemic segmentation stage.
I led a small group activity with Playing With Sounds. I placed two letters on the table and modeled the blending of "a" "t" - "at". The next step was for students to add an initial sound to the blend, "at". We did one together - "sat". Through guided instruction, students placed initial sounds in front of "at" to make their own words - "cat", "mat", "fat", "bat", etc. After they had some practice with initial sounds, we moved to changing middle and ending sounds --> change "sat" to "mat", "map" to "mop", etc. Students enjoyed the hands-on application (and social learning experience) as well as discovering and pronouncing words they created.
The Scott Forseman program provides many activities that are similar to the ones we learned about. Blending activities are especially difficult for kindergarteners. The program provides phonological awareness activities that include using onset and rime. One of our high frequency words is "at." We used "say it slowly" by blending the a and t sounds. After demonstrating this, we added the letters s,f, and c to the beginning. Some students still found this to be very difficult. Its good that the program includes these strategies in its daily lessons.
I had my students sort pelling words according to letter sound relationships.
I used Playing With Sounds with my high ESL first graders and my early intermediate and intermediate ESL 4th graders. It was challenging for the early intermediate group due to their limited vocabulary. For this group, this activity was helpful as they practised blending the letter sounds. For the other groups, I extended the strategy into interchanging the first and last letters to make new words, and to write down as many words as they could within a minute when given "-at". The kids liked the challenge
Each week we introduce three chunks for the students to learn such as -ill, -ell, and -ock that fit with the HM reading program. The students try and find the beginning sounds for these words and we add new words each day. We also incorporate this into their homework for the week.
I did a blending activity with the Harcourt spelling words. I found in useful for the students as a group to sound the word, blend the word, then say the seperate chunks of the word, and finally say the word fluently.
I did a chunking activity with my lower kids using their spelling words. They broke the words down into their sounds by stretching it out and then chopping it. Finally they do the sounds on their fingers, showing them how my letters (fingers) represent the sounds. Then they write the words on their paper. They really got into it and I saw them using the strategy on their spelling test.
I use many of the blending strategies suggested. I have used sound boxes to teach where different sounds are located in a word. I also have the students search the room and books to find different sounds in words.
I did the "Blending Sounds to Read Words Progress Check" with my benchmark students. Each student read all of the words on our word wall. This activity fit nicely with our grade level's reading goal for the month (each student is supposed to read word wall words with a certain level of accuracy). This individual progress check enabled me to see which words are still difficult for specific students.
I did "Blending Sounds to Read Words Progress Check" with my intensive students. I was able to see which words on our second grade word wall the students were actually able to read. I had a few students who did very well on this; however, the majority of the students were unable to read most of the words. I wonder if doing this progress check with first grade words would be helpful to see where my students are with last years high frequency words.
I did the "Blending Sounds to Read Words Progress Check". It was very helpful because I had my students read high-frequency words and it is giving me an indication of what they know and what they need to work on.
I used the "Letter Identification" to assess where my students are with the knowledge of letter identification and letter sounds. It works well with the Dibels assessment that I use on my K's. Very helpful!
During intervention students enjoy working with words. I like to have students engage in word sorts using spelling patterns that they have been working with during their 90 minute Block.. For example, during intervention we were working with the spelling pattern, ack. I asked students to write ack on the top of a big piece of a paper. They were then given magnetic letters and were asked to build words with with the spelling pattern ack, then write their new word on the paper. Kids love to manipulate the letters and get a kick out of discovering new words. As a third and fourth grade teacher, I use to put up the "magic" word of the day. Student in pairs would be asked to use all the letters in the Big Word and have to build as many little words that they could make, eventually they discovered the "big word" (Cunningham). The exercise gave students a real life experience in detecting patterns in words.
I decided to use the tapping and sweeping strategy with one of my lower readers. After we read a book, we read the word wall and I asked her to tap each letter and say the sound. When she came to high frequency words that were unfamiliar or not easy for her to decode, she automatically used this strategy and it proved to be very effective.
Although I in a Literacy Coordinator position now, I have always used word sorts in my classroom and continue to encourage teachers to use them. Words or pictures can be sorted according to sound to "see" the different spelling patterns used in our language to make the same sound. Sorting also opens up all kinds of discussion about what words mean which is so good for our second language learners. Currently, we use the DIBELS assessment on all k-3 students at our school. The letter recognition portion and nonsense syllable reading give you so much information about what the students are getting or not in terms of phonics. This can be used to remediate and guide instruction.
I used the letter-sound game with my students. They have letter tiles and have to manipulate them by themselves in order to figure out the sounds in the word. We did a lot of changing "at" to "sat" type words. After a few weeks of doing this, one of my students said, "This is easy." When we had first started doing this, all the students had really needed to stretch out the words to hear the sounds and by the end they thought it was easy. What great progress! My students were really understanding how word families and sounds in words really work.
I use a lot of music in teaching letter sounds. I provide visual supprt as well. Many of my children will sit with alphabet books and sing the songs themselves during "book times".
In our reading program we do a lot of the onset and rimes. I also do a lot of "playing with sounds" activities with my intervention kids.
Within the Reading Mastery program they have "sound it out" and "say it fast". In the Early Success Program we have the playing with sounds. I also introduced onsets and rimes with them and they really did a good job. It is something I want to continue doing with them to help them sound out the words.
I have been trying to put studnets at different spelling levels. I am trying to place them at the spelling level they can succeed at. Some have a difficult time spelling our weekly words and I want to give them the chance to succeed to at a spelling test. I have used words that they will come across in their reading in small groups.
I use many of the blending strategies suggested. I do a lot of phoneme segmentation games with my interventiuon students. They LOVE the phoneme games. I have used sound boxes, a huge hit!! I have my higher kids kids go on word hunts to find initial blends, long or cshort vowels, digraphs etc.