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.