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.