Inquiry 2019: Summing up

At the beginning of the year our focus was on phonics and improving the children's sight words.  Our attention has now turned to comprehension and being able to read with speed, accuracy and expression.

Some of my priority students are struggling with fluency.  They read each. word. like. this.  I have been trying several approaches to try to find different ways to help my robot readers.  We continue to have "reading to".  This is so the children have a modal of what reading sounds like.  With a familiar book the children often join in the parts they know and we try to make it sound just like talking.

Being able to recognise sight words quickly at each level and to have graphics of how the children are doing has encouraged many children to keep on learning.  This is also helping their fluency.  Knowing a lot of sight words is helping to make their reading sound less awkward.

Team one has incorporated into this term's Inquiry topic a lot of fairytales.  The children are enjoying making up small "plays" about their favourite part of a fairytale.  This helps the children make the scripts come alive through their voices.

We still do choral reading so the children can hear each other read.  Children have been heard telling others - "you need to make it sound like talking and not like a robot" as they try to help each other.  Also the children are having fun with the repetitive phrases in various fairytales as well as listening to or joining in as a model reads at a good pace and has good phrasing.

As my groups have spread out through the levels I now have some children in a group of their own.  This gives me time to be able to read together or do echo reading where I point as I read (as a model) and then get the child do the same.  This reading time on their own gives them more confidence to attempt different strategies without the fear of making mistakes in front of their peers.

Being able to record themselves reading part or all, of the text they have read as a group, is a great aid to hearing what they sound like.  They can play it back and hear when it sounded good, when it sounded not so good and to discuss why do you think it sound good or not so good.  It might be that they had trouble pronouncing a word or how the text said something, was not how they would say it so they slowed down and reverted to word. by. word. reading as they work on each word.  These discussions are helpful.

When beginning to learn to read, we get children to point to each word.  This gets the children use to seeing that they need to say each word that is written in the text and they can easily see if they are putting in extra words.  Running a finger under an unknown word draws attention to that word - you need to take notice of the letters and the order of them to be able to recognise it again.  By late red to early yellow books (if not earlier) we want children to drop this habit as the eyes track faster than a finger and reading can become word by word without fluency.  Some of my readers have found this a hard habit to break.

We have been practising fluency by also reading up to punctuation or a card, modelling short phrases and getting the children to read it several times to hear the difference.  Rereading a familiar book at the beginning of our reading lessons, or by taking them down a level or two it is helping them practise fluency by not having to figure out the words but just to concentrate on fluency has been helpful.  Scooping a finger under a group of words to form phrases within a sentence is another way of helping children see how to make a phrase.  This is helpful for some being a multi sensory task - the children are using their eyes (visual reading), using their voice (oral speaking) as well as touching (physically scooping along the page) all at the same time but can hark back to finger pointing and be a backward step for others.

Incorrect phrasing and slow word by word reading can impede comprehension.  Texts are longer in the higher levels so there is more details to remember.  This is our present focus as with end of year testing taking place the children are able to decode but comprehension is letting them down particularly with inference questions.

So what has worked and what hasn't worked?  Having a literacy programme that is very focused and teaches children the importance of noticing has helped all my priority learners make progress.  This may not have been at a pace that would let them reach expectations after a year at school but they have learnt good strategies to use on unknown words and they have all made progress.  Reading each night has also shown the difference between the rate of progress and maintaining it.

What would I do differently?  I would like to devote some time to have individualised reading.  How this would look and how often it could take place would require some further thought.  Reading by themselves is one way to quickly see or hear what strategies they can use, or what they still need to practise, teach only what they need to know and plan "where to from here?" to help them even further. 

I would like to implement a similar focussed approach next year.  Making the learning of words into a competition has spurred a group of children on to learning a good bank of words to help with their reading and writing.  This does take time with setting up lists and then testing but if it is a strategy that helps even just some children it is worthwhile in the long run.  The purposeful noticing and explaining what they are doing and why, helps the children to choose what strategy would be best to use on an unknown word.

To be able to enjoy the process of reading and to understand what they are reading, children need to be able to read text accurately, at a reasonable pace and with expression and phrasing.  It is to this end we have been systematically working through phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency this year.


   

Moving onwards and upwards

For our 5 year olds learning to read, it can be a huge shift of focus from the first five years of life when everything evolves around the spoken mode of communicating.  They have been learning to talk with adults and peers but suddenly the focus is on obtaining meaning from a written code.   Some children find that they are easily able to acquire the skills needed while others need support, explicit teaching and time to practice these new skills.

For my priority learners I have found that they have all needed a lot of encouragement to see that new skills will become easier and easier with time, practise and patience.  We have spent three terms getting to where they are now and when they come to an unknown word they know they can at least attempt to find a way to unlock the code and see that they are making progress.  It is exciting to watch them in their attempts and the joy when they succeed.

The skills need to be taught in a certain order starting with the more simpler up to the more complex.  Starting with simple phonics instruction of the alphabet has helped everyone not just my priority learners.  It is not something that will prevent some children continuing to have difficulty but on the whole it is helpful to most children.

"Explicit teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful to none, and crucial for some."
(Professor Catherine Snow and Emeritus Professor Connie Juel Harvard University 2005)

English is a "rules-governed" language even if there is an awful lot of rules to learn!  So starting simple with one to one correspondence between sounds and letter combinations, practising and consolidating and moving on to the more complex makes sense.

We have been looking at the 26 letters and learning that they are used to make 44 speech sounds and up to 120 graphemes.  If a child is trying to read the word "shoe" focusing on the initial letter won't be helpful but knowing that the letter combination of an "s" and an "h" makes the digraph "sh" will help.

When a child comes to an unknown word, I try to give them time to work out what strategy to use.  If they need assistance I try to help them clarify their thinking as to how to "attack" a word or what would be the best strategy to use instead of telling them the word outright or saying exactly what strategy to use.  Prompts such as "Look for something that would help you" or "Remember the word you found tricky yesterday and I said you might need it again".  These sort of prompts help the child notice and think "I need to pay attention here."  It is this noticing that has made a big difference with both reading and writing.  They know that they need to "think" when they are reading and writing. 

Reading the predictable texts of the lower reading books gives a child confidence but knowing that only one word per page changes and that word is pictured on the opposite page doesn't give the child a skill that they can use with certainty.  Guessing an easily identifiable pattern is more like reciting a text than reading.  Guessing a word from a picture diverts a child's attention away from the text that contains all the information they need to be able to read.  It is for this reason that I moved my readers off the early readers and on to the red level fairly quickly so that they could see that they needed to use the phonemic skills they are being taught to gain meaning from the text.

"Reading to" is still very much part of our literacy programme.  It is where the children hear words and sentences of all kinds.  Words that are complex, rhyming, non sensical but trip off the tongue to show how rich our language is.  It also exposes children to sentence structure and the structure of a narrative story something which they will need in story writing.  It is usually an enjoyable time for listeners and the reader with discussions taking place and vocabulary explored in a fun way.

Phonics and phonemic awareness are just two decoding skills.  They can help a child decode or read words but reading is also about gaining meaning from words.  Using a range of texts now that the children are reading texts at a higher level is helping the children see that books don't just tell a simple story.  We can learn facts and information too.  Books can help us use prediction and questioning strategies and help us think about our own experiences.

In writing the children are beginning to see the value of phonemic awareness.  It is a "two for one deal" in that it helps them read as well as helps them transfer their spoken stories into a written code. 
Moving through phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary and now comprehension and fluency is helping my priority learners become more efficient at decoding as well as understanding what they are reading.  Being able to do this will not only help them read the lines of printed words but also to "read between the lines" and to pick up inferences and nuances.

So teaching a repertoire of strategies has been most effective in meeting the needs of my priority learners.  Knowing my learners and being very encouraging,  systematically introducing phonemic awareness and phonics and working at the learners pace have all helped my priority learners come a long way on their literacy journey.

Inquiry End of Term 3 2019

Expanding Skill Bases

This term has seen the priority learners expanding their literacy skills and learning to manipulate sounds in unfamiliar words in their reading as well as in their writing.  This is giving the children a degree of independency in learning to recognise words and how to write words they need.  They are learning to develop their phonemic awareness using a wider range of skills and to know that some letters represent one sound in one word but a different sound in another word.  Some letters when put together make a completely different sound.

In reading they are learning to distinguish sounds at the beginning of a word, in the middle of a word and at the end of a word.  This means they have to listen carefully to the different sounds in letters as they try to use their newly learnt skills.  Perhaps it is thinking of a word that begins with the same sound, isolating just a single sound within the word, blending individual sounds into a word or breaking a word into individual sounds.  Manipulating sounds by being able to change, move or modify the individual sounds in a word is another important skill that the children are beginning to be aware of.

To use any of these skills the children are really "thinking" as they reading.  They know they need to  attend to or notice the letter components of a word and the sequencing to work out what skills are needed to help decode unknown words.  If one strategy doesn't help they need to be able to switch tack and choose a different strategy.  They are learning that some strategies may be more helpful on a word than another and to at least try something different instead of appealing to the teacher.

It is important that they remember to use these skills as they are moving up to levels where the books are longer and the challenges of a larger, more complex vocabulary is greater.  Three of the children are now reading at Level 11/12 and the other child is reading at Level 8/9.

In writing they are being encouraged to record sounds even if they aren't able to record every sound in the word and move on to complete their story, going back and editing later.  This is giving them more confidence with their writing - they are not getting stuck on one word and leaving the task incomplete.  They are writing three or four sentences and on the whole making some good approximations of unknown words and being proud of their efforts.  Their enthusiasm to write each day is great to see along with the writing they are doing in their own time.  Some of the words and phrases they are using are not coming from the writing discussions but from books that we read aloud and they have remembered.  This is something new.

Unsupported writing is still formulaic in ideas - "I went to ..." as it is easy and something they know how to write but one of the children is starting to try and include speech with what was said in the story.  Spelling is mainly high frequency words but with the beginnings of "inventive" spelling.  It is good to see that being unsupported they are trying hard to be resourceful and use their knowledge to complete the task.

Looking at how many correct words they can write in 10 minutes is also improving.  One child can write 19 correct words with the highest being 35.  These include topic words, high frequency words and well as word families.  All these children are still striving to learn words from their word lists.

Other ways to encourage enthusiasm for writing are dictation iPad activities, learning to say and write words and games and listening skill activities such as Chinese Whispers, "I went Shopping and bought...", oral cloze games and rhyming "I Spy".  These games and activities give the children time to practise their skills in a fun way.

It is exciting to see the children on the way to becoming "code breaker" and "meaning maker" word detectives by progressing up the continuum of learning phonics even if they still need support as they practise their skills.

Inquiry Term 3 2019: Moving On

Moving On 

I have begun to move on from teaching single letter sounds towards more advanced phonetic skills to help the children learn the 44 sounds in the English language.  Teaching letters that frequently occur together such as in blends and digraphs, helps children to recognise the patterns in words.  Common consonant blends are two or more letters that are blended together but each sound can be heard in the blend.  They can be either at the beginning of a word or at the end.  Digraphs are two consonants that represent a single sound such as sh, ch, th and wh.

We still have both whole class practise as well as small group teaching where instruction meets more individual needs.  It is great to see the children moving beyond recognising single letter sounds and that they are learning to put two or more sounds together for a blend and know that two letters make a certain sound in a digraph.  When working on an unknown word it is exciting to hear the children "problem solve" saying things like "those two letters say oo like in food so in this word (boo) it might be the same."  Many sight words contain digraphs so it provides a way of helping the children read new and unfamiliar words as well as how to spell it when they hear it.  They are aware that the spoken language is broken down into smaller units of sound and that there are rules about how words sound but there are also exceptions to help trip you up!

It is with hearing and distinguishing the two different letters in a blend that many of our children have difficulties.  They also have trouble articulating the sounds.

Two of the children have noticed that some words sound the same but look different when they see how they are written down.  On the first occasion this was noticed we had an interesting discussion on how to differentiate between the two words.  Finally one child asked me to write the words down so they could compare them.  The penny dropped as they noticed that the spelling would tell them what the meaning of the word was.

Reading levels continue on an upward trajectory.   There did not seem to be any significant drop off during the holidays as three of the children continue to take home more than one book to read each night.  All four children are very much engaged in our spelling programme.  Continuing to practise each night gives them confidence and at the higher levels there are more words introduced at a faster rate so it is very helpful that these children have high expectations of their reading.

Reading levels showing movement in first two terms of Child A and C

Reading progression for Child B and D beyond 40 weeks

My priority learners all seem to be becoming more competent readers than writers.  They are attempting to write more than basic sentences independently using their phonemic skills to sound out and locate words but they often get bogged down on one particular word.  Instead of just recording what they can hear, and moving on to at least complete the task, they become completely stuck and find it hard to move on.  I am looking forward to the children feeling confident enough in their phonemic awareness to be able to make an attempt at writing an unfamiliar word.

Games, reading to the children, dictation and fun with words continue to be part of our routine in an effort to expose them to language in many different ways.  Where to from here will be about continuing a similar programme as the children are all feeling confident about reading and writing and continue to put effort into their practise.

Inquiry End of Term 2 2019: Keeping on, Keeping On

The successful teaching of phonemic awareness relies on helping children to understand how words can be segmented and blended and how this information can be used to work out unknown words.  Since the beginning of Term 1 I have been working on developing the necessary skills to help strengthen this understanding.  Throughout term one and two as a child shows an understanding I have added new strategies to extend their capacity.  A child does need to know how print works.  This means he can give the sounds of letters and hear the sound sequences in the words as they are spoken and from this knowledge he can "problem solve" or find other ways that can help him decode unknown words. 

The priority learners have all developed a good understanding of the sound of basic alphabet letters. We are trying to learn that letters need to be in a certain sequence to make up a word and when they are said and recorded in the same order you are able to work out an unknown word.

So far my priority learners
* can identify the alphabet letters and sounds;
* are beginning to identify common blends or graphemes such as ch, oy, sh
* are beginning to apply strategies such as sounding out words and looking for chunks that they know
* recognising that some words might have the same initial letters but one needs to look right to the end of the word eg winner and winning

We have been doing activities to help build up these strategies.  Memory and bingo games are popular.  Independent dictation tasks and spelling words on their iPad using sound bites are a daily part of reading and writing activities.  They are able to revisit these until they are ready to go on to new words.  We also do whole class dictation and writing out as many words as you can in 10 minutes.  This is to get the children to write quickly the words that they do know.  A weekly spelling test of words at each child's level is helping the children develop a visual memory of a bank of basic words that they are able to quickly and accurately use in their personal writing.  My priority learners are among those who are wanting to learn their words and are eager to get on to the next list.  They are commenting about how they can write words by themselves and even help others to write words which is adding to their confidence.

Reading levels are improving with the children becoming more fluent and confident.  In the previous 5 weeks Child A has gone from L4 to L5/6; Child B has gone from L7 to L8/9; and Child C and D have gone from L6 to L8.  These improvements might not be huge gains but for these children I am happy to see them wanting to be reading at the next level and trying their best to learn how print works.

I have found it invaluable to be noticing the strengths and weaknesses and gathering information on these learners to see how they have changed over time and how they are working on tasks.  Two of the priority learners have had their 6 year net tests done and this has been invaluable to have another colleagues input in how they are progressing.

Where to from here?

I would like to see them transferring skills and strategies that they use in reading to making good attempts to write unknown words, to show an awareness of the structure of words and the ability to manipulate the sounds.  At present they still want to be scaffolded when using spelling resources and have not yet got to the stage of "inventing" a word and listening to what they can hear and recording these sounds in the correct order.

They all continue to have a very positive attitude towards reading and writing and although we need to learn to follow all the rules about print we don't learn them all at once.  It will take time and my priority learners are working towards this point.

Inquiry Term 2 2019: Developing Phonemic Awareness

I am continuing to develop phonemic awareness in our Literacy programme.  In discussions with colleagues who teach higher up in the school, they have identified children who seemed to be "stuck" with their reading at fairly low levels because they can not decode.  In an attempt to help children develop good decoding skills at the Year 1 level I am using a variety of different ways to try to engage the children to notice patterns and to use appropriate ways to decode.

 We still do alphabet poems, songs and chants daily "to warm up our brains" (as one child put it) before beginning our literacy programme.  I have added blends and chunks for those children who already know all their alphabet sounds and were showing an awareness that groups of letters make certain sounds.

Two of the children have made a valuable discovery in noticing that some words look and sound alike at the end and that one chunk can unlock many more words.  Our brain like to be "pattern detectors" so learning words by chunking is a natural way to learn. They are saying "It looks a bit like..." or "It sounds like..." showing that they are beginning to notice patterns in words and thinking about rhyming words.  So they do know how to use these skills on occasions but not at every occasion that they need to.  Listening to their friends reading is often the quicker option.

I was planning on using Elkonin boxes to help children build phonological awareness by segmenting words into individual sounds or phonemes.  The child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme.  But the children who already have good alphabet sound knowledge found a way that works for them.  I said that they needed to stretch out all the letters in the word to be able to hear them individually and to think of the letters as if they were on an elastic band.  They are able to individually identify the sounds letters make but had trouble "putting them together".  The child puts out his hands as if he was going to clap then pulled his hands apart as he says each sound or phoneme such as "rrrr  aaaa nnnn".

then pulled his hands apart as he says each sound or phoneme such as "rrrr  aaaa nnnn".

He then snaps his hands back together putting the sounds back in the order he first said them.

Snapping the sounds back together

 He is usually able to say the word he needs by manipulating the sounds until he can "hear" a word that sounds familiar and would fit in with the story.

We have several letter/ word sound activities on our class site for the children to use on completion of reading and writing tasks.  They have sound bites so that the children hear the sound of the letters as well as seeing what they look like.  These activities are very popular with most children completing some of these activities daily.

As the children are constructing their stories for writing, they are also recording the sentences on their iPad using the record option.  This gives them the opportunity to replay their story to listen to how it sounds and to check their story to see if they have written all the words they need.  The checking is a visual as well as an auditory exercise and can help those children who find difficulty in holding a sentence in their head long enough for them to get it recorded on paper.  It also helps a child revisit a word to listen to the sounds or the initial sound to be able to make an attempt to find it on class spelling resources. 

While the children are waiting to come up for their group reading they are reading familiar texts.    Those children that are reading each night are beginning to develop more confidence and fluency.  They are attempting to use strategies to decode and self correct.

While the results on the 5 week reading graph are not showing spectacular improvement there has been upward movement for three of the priority learners and the fourth child is becoming more confident saying the words she knows and is reading more fluently and is not despondent about where she is at with her reading.

Five Weekly graph of Priority learners

She is steadily able to identify more letter sounds and for some children progress is not like the hare but more like the tortoise and perhaps for her this will stand her in good stead.

Letter Id Data

Where to from here?  What else can I do to help these students pick up the pace?  While pondering these questions I try to help these children to remain positive about their progress.  They still enjoy reading and try their best to complete tasks.  Their fluency has also improved as has their letter sound knowledge.  It is a case of putting the knowledge and skills they are learning to greater use each time they come to an unknown word and not waiting for others to help them out.  

Inquiry 2019: Phonemic Awareness Fun Activity

Phonemic awareness underlies the foundations of reading and writing.  Phonemic awareness can be "taught in the dark" because children listen to sounds while phonics is looking at letters.  The need to listen to beginning sounds, final sounds and medial sounds and the ability to understand and manipulate these sounds in words helps a child unlock the alphabetical writing system.  Having fun while learning is important so at the end of term we stepped aside from our usual lessons to have some fun with writing.

We co constructed a story about a shared experience so that the children had some idea of what we were writing about.  The story was written on paper and tapped to the back of the reading corner and teaching station so that only some children had access to the written story.

The story would be "dictated" to the writer one letter (or blend) at a time by sounding out the letter or letters.  The children were then buddied up in pairs.  One child was the writer while the other was the runner.  The writer had to listen to what letters the runner wanted him to record to be able to re create our co constructed story.

The runners had great fun trying to make themselves understood to the writers.

  Those that were having difficulty found different ways of communicating what letters were needed.  They would say a letter but each time repeat its sound - "It starts like..." then say the sound again.  Another runner would use how the letter is made - around, up and down then repeat the sound.  Another way was "drawing" the letter on the table then repeating the sound.  Saying the little poem about a letter which repeats the sound also helped others.

Then we stopped and read the results and repeated the process with another story after swapping roles.  It was amazing to see how the runners were determined to get their message across and stick to the rules that a runner could not be a writer and help out.  It was a fun way to show why we need to know the sounds letters make.

Inquiry 2019: Phonemic Awareness In Action

My Inquiry this year has focused on teaching phonemic awareness in a bid to raise reading progress and help children see that there is a systematic and predictable link between written letters and sounds and to give children a strategy to use on unknown words rather than their previous guesses.

Each day I read to the children to expose them to a variety of texts.  There are labels around the room, a word wall, alphabet booklets and letter activities to "sort and say" for the children to have plenty of experiences with letters and text. They also use iPads to take photos of things that begin with the initial letter we have introduced and make their own digital alphabet "booklets" of letters.  A next step for this activity maybe adding a recording of the letter sounds.

Taking a photo of a picture then writing the word

Finding a letter "g" and practising the skills of taking a photo, cropping and arranging.

During group teaching there is more time to tailor the lesson.  I am using individual magnetic letters so the children can notice and manipulate each letter and its position in a word or chunk.  Each letter is introduced with sounds (looking how the mouth and lips form the letter), pictures, actions and time is taken to practise forming the letter in the air, on a hand or tracing sandpaper letters.

I have a white board set up with the two new letters of the week plus two letters from the previous weeks.  There is a range of magnetic letters both upper and lower case plus pictures that relate to the letters.  The children are encouraged to sort and say the letter names and sounds as an activity during writing or reading.  I also have another "sort and say" activity with ice cream cones that have lower and upper case letters on them picture "scoops of ice cream" that are stacked up on the cones.  This has been a popular activity as the children love to see how many pictures they can stack up.  I have heard some of the buddies saying, "You didn't say it right.  It's a ...." or "Hey that's not...".  So they are helping and monitoring each other.

Testing the alphabet letter and sound identification has shown an increase in their knowledge ranging from 14 to 31 letters in a month.  The child who increased the least amount of letters /sounds has picked up far more high frequency words and this has boosted her confidence enough to feel able to correct other children's errors.

Child A  February 23 letters /sounds known          March  47 letters/ sounds known
Child B  February 7 letters/ sounds known             March  30 letters/ sounds known
Child C  February 7 letter/ sounds known              March  38 letters/ sounds known
Child D  February 5 letter/ sounds known              March  19 letter/ sounds known

The results for the first 9 weeks reading data has shown a steady increase.

Child A started at L1 in February and is reading at  L2/3 in Week 5 and L3 in week 9
Child B started at L3 in February and is reading at L5 in Week 5 and L6 in week 9
Child C started at L3 in February and is reading at L4 in Week 5 and L5 in week 9
Child D started at L1 in February and is reading at L3 in Week 5 and L5 in week 9

I have also been monitoring the children's reading logs to see what practise is being done at home.  Child D has great home support to read each night and has been learning her words and letters and is beginning to remember more HFW.

One child is beginning to move from noticing that a letter represents a speech sound to letters that go together to make words.  I have been teaching them to notice - different shapes of letters and sequencing of letters.  Child B was reading a book that contained the unknown word "cook".  She stopped reading, thought for a moment then pointed to "look" and said "This word looks a bit like that word.  See it has got these same letters here."  She pointed to the "ook" part of the word.  Then she surprised me further by pointing to a reader on my desk called "My Book" and said "It's like that word too."  Suddenly a word family was noticed as another way of working out unknown words.

Other incidents of noticing "chunks" of a word within a word and working out the unknown word has helped.  "Where" was a unknown word but the child recognised "here" and knew the "w" sound and with support put the two together.  Although this child has begun to notice, it is not a strategy that she uses with confidence preferring to revert to a quick guess.  It is early days so perhaps with practise she will see that thinking about sounds in this new way is helpful.

Getting the children to "get their lips ready" to say the sound and to watch how I put my lips to say a sound has helped with some tricky sounds such as "th" that our children often say as "f".  Again noticing small changes in what shape the lips are, where they need to put their tongue and whether the chin is lower down or held higher up and whether they are quiet sounds like "p" or more noisey ones such as "b" will all help thinking about sounds and how they are made.  Watching in a mirror will be a next step in this phase.

Another next step will be to use Elkonin Boxes - a "say it and move it" strategy to see if this multi sensory approach will help in segmenting and blending.  It is a visual way to "see" each sound by moving a tile then dragging a finger to blend it together.

 I will continue to promote speaking and listening skills through games and activities to hopefully lead the children to a love of reading and being successful at gaining meaning from text.

Inquiry 2019: A Literacy Focus

After reviewing the general number knowledge, reading and writing ability levels and letter identification of my new group of students for 2019, it was obvious that I needed to focus my Inquiry on literacy and in particular on phonemic awareness.

At the beginning of the year I looked carefully at all my students reading and writing.  In writing, if they had ideas to write about, and were attempting to write a simple sentence, I looked at what strategies they used when they came to an unknown word.  For many in this group they were unable to sound out the word to even record an initial letter and could therefore not use a class spelling resource.

Similarly, when looking at reading strategies at unknown words, I found that many of the readers were trying to memorise texts and their patterns.  In many early texts the word "Look" is followed by "at".  When the text changed to  "Look, said Mum", they were thrown.  When prompted what they would expect to see if the word was "at" they were unable to say.

Testing alphabet sound knowledge showed 3 children had a reasonable grasp of letter names and sounds and that letters had to be put together in certain sequences to make a word.  Another  child knew all the letter names but had no knowledge of letter sounds.  The other children's ability ranged from not being able to identify any letters (not even the initial letter of their name) to seven letters or sounds.

All this information pointed to the need to help the children, and in particular my focus group,  to develop a basic phonemic awareness and to see if this would be an effective strategy to move my focus group at least three reading levels by the end of term 2.

So I have started at the very beginning.  Skill building in phonemes does not come naturally but must be taught so I choose letters that have some meaning to them such as the initial letter of their name.  At a class level we work on two letters a week, introduced one at a time.

These letters, both upper and lower case, along with pictures of things that begin with the same initial letter are posted on the white board.  The children can sort these pictures as well as an array of letters into the two letter categories, saying the letter sound or name as they move the letters.  Beside the whiteboard are books with the initial letters and sandpaper letter forms the children can trace over to feel the shape.  The children have access to these letter displays as part of their literacy activities.

Tracing letter 

Letters, pictures and book

Letter sorting, "I found one like that."

For my priority learners, during group reading teaching there is more time for individually tailored teaching of alphabet letter sounds at a slower pace.  I have been making the children more aware of how sounds are articulated or to translate how sounds are put together to make a word, and using prompts such as "What can you see... what can you hear...?", "Which sound can you hear first?"  Also asking the question "What do you notice...?" is getting the children to actually look at letters.  We use our ears along with our eyes and our brain.

We also play alphabet games in those odd few minutes before home time or break time.  The children love the competition and are learning to give others "thinking time" or are finding different ways to give clues to help their buddies such as writing in the air with a magic pencil, saying a word that begins with the initial letter, or a little poem about the letter or even saying how the letter is formed. for those who have trouble in recognising a letter.

Each child has been given an alphabet sheet to take home along with their reading book.  It has upper and lower case letters as well as a picture of an item beginning with the letter.  They are encouraged to remember some of the poems we say about a letter which include the sound the letter makes.

Being aware of the deficit, and commenting on sounds or letters we encounter, modelling new sounds, correcting any errors promptly, helping to develop strategies to show the link between the spoken word and the written word, I am trying to grow my students knowledge, getting them to notice and to see the importance of knowing their alphabet sounds to both their reading and writing.  Hopefully using this knowledge the children will be able to "hear" different sounds that letters make and listen and respond to what they hear thereby increasing their reading levels and writing ability.

Betsy Sewell: Phonemic Awareness

On Wednesday 20 February Betsy Sewell gave a presentation on Phonemic Awareness to the Junior school.  This discussion was very pertinent as we have so many children who struggle with reading.  It sounded as if this could be one area that we could use her findings to help these children to gain a love of reading and to be competent, fluent readers who could think about what they are reading and answer comprehension questions.

She began her presentation by explaining how complex and challenging English language is with 40 plus sounds but we only have 26 letters thus many sounds are represented by 2 or more letters.  To further complicate things English has words that come from Old English, French, Latin and Greek - a sound maybe represented by "sh" in old English maybe written using the letters "ch" in French or "ti, ci, si, su or ud" in Latin!  We also have letters in English that our students do not have in their first language.

We need to learn the patterns of letters and the sounds they make to be able to make sense of words.  Being able to decode may be adequate with reading but the skills involved in decoding break down for spelling.  This is because the link between the spoken word and sounds is different.

In a spoken word sounds may not be emphasised so heavily.  We run sounds together and often children do not hear where one sound begins and another ends.  Maybe a child had glue ear when they were learning to speak and could not differentiate the sounds.  Saying a word slowly can help a child notice how the mouth is held for different sounds.  Some pairs of letters such as "p" and "b" may sound similar but there is a difference in how you say them.  By learning how sounds go together they can see that there are repeated patterns in chunks, blends or substituted sounds.  Children who have difficulty detecting some of the tricky sounds need to be taught strategies that work for them and then practise, practise until it is secure.

In print, letters are necessary seperate and discreet.  This knowledge of thinking in sounds and patterns can then be transferred into reading.  A competent reader may pause at an unknown word as he notices and absorbs the word, thinking of the differences and how he can put the chunks together using his sound skills, having developed a mental agility to manipulate sounds and make substitutions instantly and effortlessly.  He can also use emphasis and expression and think about comprehension because he knows the strategies to use.  A struggling reader can not do this automatic processing of sounds and finding patterns.  It is unnatural, not instinctive, and leads to the default of guessing.  As a child works so hard on looking at the words their comprehension is compromised.

A struggling reader will often invent their own spelling when they write, maybe as they say it.  They will try and think of how it looks, look at the Teacher for clues, look somewhere else and hope they will be "rescued" by the teacher who might know that the child has trouble with a particular sound such as "ph" and "f" sounds and always writes "with" as "wif" and will interpret for them. 

The essential skills around sounds and words need to be in place for efficient decoding and spelling.  They need to be able to - 
* detect individual sounds in words and identify them
* represent them in print
* manipulate and blend sounds
* be attuned to patterns and chunks

While these strategies may apply more to the older reader who is struggling I am sure there is much that I can take from this presentation to help some of my year ones who find learning the high frequency words and even identifying individual alphabet letter sounds a struggle. 

Thank you Betsy for your presentation.

Research Presentation Of 2018 Data

The Manaiakalani schools meet on Tuesday 12 February to review the Woolf Fisher data from 2018 to help us set our Inquiry goals for 2019. 

We looked at the data from 2018 to celebrate the successes we have had as well as to ask ourselves "What went well/ or not so well?" and "How can we build on this?" or "How can we replicate these results in another area of the school?"  It is a great reminder to help us define our thinking and planning.

Rebecca gave us some interesting data about the junior area from the School Entry Assessments (SEA) that we do to all children after they have been at school for 5 or 6 weeks.  There was wide variation on the number of letters that a child could identify according to the decile of the school (with our decile 1 children able to identify 17.4 letters while at a decile 7 to 9 school they could recognise 34.7) as well as the variation in the number of words a child could read. 

A similar disparity occurs in other areas with our children shown to have to run so much harder to catch up.  We have made a start on improvements in Maths and now we will focus on on how we can best provide strategies for our children in literacy as we plan and set goals for our classes in 2019.