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.
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