Reading - Phonological Awareness
Gary Obermeyer, Thu October 27, 2005, 12:36 PM
The reading for Session Two is “Supporting Phonemic Awareness Development in the Classroom.”
Please read the article and summarize what it is telling you. Share what you saw as the highlights of the article. Note any information and/or concepts that were new to you. We are most interested in knowing how it applies to your practice and what it will mean for your students.
I found the phonological umbrella quite useful and it will be benefical to reference in the ESL classroom.
We (Heather,Sarah,Terra) found that many of the activities suggested in the article were quite primary given that we work with 4th and 5th grade students. We like that activity for book "The Hungry Thing," and hope to find books like this one that are more appropriate for higher grades.
I thought that this article was beneficial to read because I do not get to see much of how phonemic awareness works since I teach 4th grade. It definitely lets me see why and how it is important in the classroom.
I really enjoyed this article, especially where it talks about how to use phonemic awareness in the classroom. One of the things the article talked about was using rhymes, singing songs, doing chants, and reading poems that have rhythm. I find these tools to be very beneficial!
I thought that the article was very informative. I enjoyed how the article provided specific ideas for phonemic awareness instruction. I wish the article had more ideas for upper grades. Third graders tend to find many of these activities too young. With my struggling first grade readers I want to read "Hungry Thing" and perform the provided activity.
I have been doing similar activities with the Reading First program. This article has given me a deeper insight into WHY I have been doing them with my kindergarteners. However, I have been teaching phonemic awareness mostly in a whole group setting. Since the article states that it is the "quality" of instruction that is important, I think a small group setting would be more beneficial. I plan to emphasize the skills they have been learning with the suggested activities. The songs and chants are great for transition times. I also liked the "Hungry Thing" activity and plan to use this or a similar book to practice rhyme.
I found the article to be very informative.
It was a great review of ideas and concepts about phonological awareness. I like that the article gave specific examples of lessons and games to use in the classroom.
This was a good article on phonemic awareness. It supports everything I have learned. It brings me back to my Kindergarten teaching days. I really miss that grade! In Hesperia, I had CORE training. They have a thick resource book with many great phonemic awareness activities. I used some of these activities with my K class. I also tweaked Duck, Duck, Goose and Freeze Tag with my kids to develop phonemic awareness. At the beginning, the chosen child would repeatedly say a beginning sound for "Duck" and then a word beginning with that sound for "Goose". Later on, the chosen child segmented a CVC word when going around the circle and then said the whole word for "Goose". For freeze tag, I gave a sound and when a child was tagged, he/she had to say a word with that beginning sound to be unfrozen. My kids loved these games! I did them during P.E. You can too!
First off-Lynn, I loved your PE ideas. Fun and educational. This artical was very informative. I enjoyed reading about the activities. I liked the idea of having children create their additional verses to songs like "the Ants Go Marching". Publishing the extra verses in a class made book would be a great extention.
A clearification for myself to understand the differences in phonemic awareness vs phonological and phonics. I work with third grade ESL students who are non readers and see that their difficulty is that they do not hear phonemic sounds as the begin to approach reading words. A giant AHA ! Therefore, I have been focusing my lessons to phonemic awareness with emphasizing the phonemes with finger snapping,enlarging the chanting and poetry reads each week in our HM Language Support masters..not just relying on teaching phonics first for these struggling students.
I found the article a little bit confusing. I read it a couple of time, and will continue to read it until I understand it. It will help me understand how my students learn, and how I should teach them to become better readers.
it was a nice review of some terms, i also liked the chart on types of sound manipulation. that was good to see the difference between them. i liked the activities that were explained, those are great ideas. i liked the sound activities that help with syllables, that seems to be difficult for many students i have worked with.
It was a very informative article. The different games and activities are such easy and engaging ways for the students to develop phonemic awareness. I loved all the neat activities and hope that I am able to use some of them in my classroom to help my students.
Great article! I loved what it talked about chants and songs! It is a wonderful way to teach ESL students!
What was so fascinating about the article on phonemic awareness was how important phonemic awareness is right from the start. That means that kindergarten has the challenge of introducing students to this concept and providing them with the information and foundation they need to succeed and grow. I thought it was quite interesting to learn about the reinforcing ideas focused on incorporating songs, chants, and rhymes in the classroom. This goes along with the ideas I enjoy using that relate to the GLAD strategies. One of the strategies they talked about was using a marine core chant to enhance the learning of specific concepts. As I stated before, this type of learning takes more time to prepare, but it is for the benefit of every learning type in the classroom. Fantastic idea for ELLs.
This article confirmed what I had already heard about phonemic awareness. I liked the article, especially where it clarrified what different, but similar, terms meant. I agree with Sarah, above, that the activities were all really primary and I am a 4th grade teacher. Last year I worked in the tech lab at our school and we had a great phonemic awareness educational game called DaisyQuest.
I liked the article and think that phonemic awareness is especially important with second language learners. The activities with songs and rimes are fun and can be used in transistions so they don't have to detract from other lessons. I liked being reminded of how phonemic awareness ties in with all the GLAD strategies that I have learned. Ginny Warfield
Although the activities talked about in this article were more for lower elementary and not 4th grade which I teach, I did find the information useful for those children in my class who are of special need or who are simply academically low. Many children in my class follow the example stated in the article. They write by recording the smallest units of sound in their words. Often I see them use letters that sound like they may be in the word, but really aren't. I found it useful to know that songs, chants story books, and word sound games all help in the development of phonemic awareness.
I agree that this article was informative. I especially enjoyed the activities for building sensitivity to sounds of speech. My only question is whether or not ELL students would comprehend the nonsense rhymes activity for The Hungry Thing.
This article was very informative. I liked most of the ideas and think that I can modify or use most of them. The one I thought would be fun and easy was clapping the syllables of the names of students to dismiss them etc. I read many rhyming books to my kids and do play with word sounds orally. I like the book "Take Me Out of the Bathtub." It has many funny rhymes that kids like. The rhymes are sung to favorite tunes. We use the same tune and come up with our own rhymes/poems.
Something else about the article that made sense was to start with the largest parts of words and move to the smaller. That makes sense.
Well, being the music teacher I totally agree that songs and chants have a tremedous roll in language development and I have always used those in my regular classes when I taught. More of this is needed in the classrooms but now I think teachers think it's not important or that it's just "fun" time. That's the way language and stories used to be passed down way before written languages. I use songs everyday with my students and I view them as more than just songs, they are expressions of life, language and stories.
The article gives you really good examples to use in the classroom to enhance strategies used in Harcourt. The article focuses on the purposes behind instruction, and includes excellent definitions of terms. In addition, the article incorporates music (one of Gardner's Multiple Intelligence) into instruction. It further gives a variety of systematic activities that can be used for instruction. Our team understands the importance that phonemic awareness needs to be practiced daily as supported by the article. One of our team members was introduced to this article at Kindergarten GRIP in 2000. We feel it's a great tool for veteran as well as new teachers to understand the purpose behind phonemic awareness - it's a foundational step that needs to be in place before students can progress to the next levels of chool. "Without this insight the importance of phonemic awareness, the symbol system is arbitrary" (Yopp & Yopp, 2000).
Phonemic awareness is so important to success in reading. This article helped reinforce the importance of phonemic awareness. Kids of all age love moving around. Something as simple as clapping out the words will reinforce learning.
We thought the article had great examples, but it was very long. We enjoyed the slide presentation more because it condensed all of the important information into some slides as opposed to the many pages. The article helped to clarify our understanding of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. We especially liked the phonological umbrella from the presentation slides
We found the article to be an informative review of ideas and concepts about phonological awareness. We both liked that the article gave specific examples of lessons and games to use in the classroom. After discussing some of the examples, we were interested in trying some of the activities given. Since we bothy have first graders struggling with rhyme, we are going to test out the "ants go marching" activity. We like that it gave a variety of examples, however it was alittle long.
(Robbie, Laura, Chelse, and Marcy)We all read the article and discussed it. We decided that it really helped to make everything we learned more clear. It clearly defined phonemic and phonological awareness. We liked how it had examples of actual work and how it addressed actual instruction as opposed to just reading about it and not having an idea of how to apply it in the real-world classroom. The activities were so great and we are excited to try some of them such as the activities with syllable manipulation.
I found the article very helpful. Since I teach Kindergarten, I use a lot of songs and poems to teach phonemic awareness. The article gave me more ideas to help teach phonemic awareness to my little ones. Phonemic awareness is essential in learning to read. It was great to learn all of the correct vocabulary that goes along with phonemic awareness. Very helpful to me and important, since my world is phonemic awareness.
The authors of this article, the Yopps, are famous for their phonemic awareness activities and research - the article was informative and fun to read. Nursery rhymes, ages old, did serve a purpose! Now, many of the SBRR programs include lots of directed phonemic awareness actvities. What I will do to help our students is include these activities with parents at Literacy events here at the school. I have written in The Hungry Thing lesson for our luncheon so that parents can start earlier at home with phonemic awareness activities - especially with our second language learners.
I liked the ideas that this article shared. Not only is my personal choice to have a lot of musical, rythmic,etc. support with my preschool age children, these types of strategy are supported by current "brain research" that is showing how music, chanting, and simlar activities support how our brains are wired to work and process.
I appreciate the segment on phonemic awareness instruction. When I began my Enhlsih language education in 7th grade (I was an ESL student) nobody taught me phonics, let alone phonemic awareness. I have had to learn it the hard way, and this article is extremely helpful to me as an ELL/elementary teacher. The techniques and strategies provided are helpful although I do not plan to use those that are more suitable for K-1 students. I do make use of activities on onset and rime: Make A Word
I really enjoyed this article. The information about nursery rhymes was very enlightening. I would like to use more rhyming activities in my classroom because the students don't seem to understand the concept of rhyme as well as they need to.
This article was very interesting. It was a good review and also very helpful for my class with a lot of ESL students. It has some great strategies that I have used with my ESL students and some of my low readers.
I liked the article and found it interesting. There are lots of great activities for those struggling readers which I would like to use with my children reading below grade level.
This is a repeat of the response made by Corrine Hardy. She is my partner in these assignments but I noticed that my name was not listed on our response. We both felt that the article served as a great review of the concepts surrounding phonemic awareness. We also found some of the activities suggested in the article interesting and things that we could possibly use with our 1st graders. I especially found the bag game and the scavenger hunt activities interesting. I think that my students would have fun with these activities and at the same time these activities would be a great way to reinforce what they already learned about letters and letter sounds.
The article had great examples. Their was a talk in our group about using more rhyming activities. Some are given in Harcourt but we could use more.
I got a lot out of this article. I used some of the rhyming ideas so that my students could get a better unerstanding of writing poetry. I have a lower reading group and worked with them on breaking off the bigger sounds and then focusing on the smaller segments. I saw that these students were more successful and felt good about themselves.
I like what the article had to say. I think that the article was trying to share that it is necessary for students to have phonics instruction in the primary classrooms, but it can not be the only thing we teach. Students need opporunties to experience other components of reading. It also seems to me that this article is advocating a hands on approach to phonics, not just filling in workbook pages, but ways to enage all learners. As I think about our teachers at Hafen, I think that they are doing a great job of teaching phonics. We have moved more towards centers, teachers are not necessarily passing out the workbooks, but making center activities based on the phonics lesson cycleas outlines by Harcourt. For example, one kindergarten teacher took the pages froma workbook,and laminated them, then organized them into file folders.This is now just one center where students can go and practice what they learned during the whole group lesson, or for those who are having trouble, possibly revisit lessons.