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.