Although I focus on phonics and true phonetic readers (like Bob Books), I know many of my colleagues still use and believe in whole language and sight words and reading strategies like we see in the CAFE book.
There is some handiness for this in the early years, especially to build confidence, but it will eventually fizzle in the long run. Why? The human brain can only hold on to so much. Memorizing each word is impossible; we must be able to decode it (and encode it) using phonemic awareness and phonics. (If this interests you, I highly suggest reading Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It by Diane McGuinness, Ph.D.).
I also know that all of our levelled readers and reading assessments follow this whole language approach. (*sigh*)
I no longer spend a ton of time on cutesy reading strategies and building up a CAFE Reading Strategies board. The Science of Reading doesn't support these being healthy strategies for the long run. If you'd like to read more about the Phonics Codepack and grab a free download of the assessment and cards, check out this blog post.
My shared reading using poetry has evolved since learning about the Science of Reading and how phonemes and written language work. I do still love it and am infusing more discussion of phonics into my instruction when reading the poem. For example, instead of teaching "the" as a sight word to memorize, we are learning that TH makes your tongue stick out to make the /th/ sound.
We have the same poem for the week. I project it or photocopy an enlarged copy and put it on my chart stand. I read the poem, teach and model today's focus, then we read it again. After, students do the same on their copy, which is in a duotang. When they're done today's task, they read the poem independently (and read the rest of their poems in their duotang!).
I have a binder with photocopies and print-outs of tons of poems from various sources. It's a good thing to start collecting as a primary grades educator!
A typical week at the beginning (of Year 2 Kindergarten and Grade 1) might look like:
Monday - introduce the word that's missing, decode it (sound it out), explicitly teach how to print the letters (Handwriting Without Tears is a good resource)
Tuesday - a strategy like look at the pictures. This book of poetry has many poems with pictures at the end of each line. I tie this into labeling (which we typically start the year off in Writing and Science). We circle or underline the word and draw an arrow to the picture.
Wednesday - any other key words? Draw them (annotate text) to help them remember - or perhaps there are colour words in the poem (colour the word "yellow" in yellow, "red" in red, and so on).
Thursday - point to the words as you read. Make sure you're looking at the word/page and not skipping words!
Friday - colour (or do the drawing task)! We always end the week with colouring the page!
Other tasks might include:
- finding rhyming words
- look at ending punctuation
- finding phonetic code (th, ch, sh, ou/ow...)
- finding other repeated words we know how to read
- finding compound words (rainbow, ladybug, earthworm...)
- writing and illustrating their own sentence on the back of the page
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