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.