The readings assigned for today all focused on teaching initial reading skills such as decoding and word recognition in order to help beginning readers become more fluent. The Yopp and Yopp article focused on incorporating phonemic awareness into a strong literacy program. The Clark article focused on using coaching to help while teaching word recognition. The chapter in Classrooms That Work focused on different activities that a teacher could use to help build word recognition.
I have spent time in a first grade classroom with a teacher that was very good at incorporating some of these techniques for helping with word recognition and phonemic awareness. I spent time in this classroom as part of my Education 100 class so this was my first exposure to a classroom. Not having taken any other education classes yet, I was not aware of the specific techniques that the teacher was using but after reading these articles her methods make a lot more sense. She had the students clap and snap when they were introduced to the words and she would use the techniques of replacing phonemes with other phonemes to make different words that the students had already been exposed to. I think this teacher did a really good job of incorporating phonemic awareness into her literacy instruction.
It sounds like you are doing a nice job relating the readings to the classroom experiences you are having. You should make note of any great activities you are seeing.
ReplyDeleteThat's so awesome that you've had those opportunities to observe good teachers who know how to engage their students and give them meaningful instruction. You also seemed to understand the purpose very well. I'm guessin you'll be implementing these activities in your own class?
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