Learning About Letters and Sounds

This term I have made a very conscious effort to make learning about letters and sounds part of every writing and reading lesson to try to increase learners alphabet sound knowledge and thereby increase their knowledge of high frequency words.

 I have  explained to the children the importance of knowing the shape of letters (what they look like) and the sounds they make individually.  We have touched on sounds that some letters make together in our reading groups with learners who have already got a good grasp of alphabet sound knowledge but for others we are still looking at individual letters.   I have also explained that writing and reading are linked and that writing is the recorded form of what we say.  During either subject I will point out something we have focused on in one subject and are now making use of it in the other subject so that the children are aware of the link.

We begin every writing lesson using the "Butterfly Chart" to say individual alphabet letter names, the sound it makes, a word that begins with the letter and to add a bit of fun a child in the class whose name that begins with the particular letter.  Some children are now suggesting other words that might begin the same way.

During writing we model whole class co construction of ideas into sentences.  Magnetic high frequency words that are on their "Butterfly Charts" are arranged on the board in the same format.  The children help find and put these words into the appropriate place in the sentence.  I am finding that others will help someone find a word by giving them clues and time to think such as "It's in the yellow box and it starts with the letter 'w' that makes the sound 'www'."  Some learners find the prompts done in a friendly way helpful and makes them pleased to achieve.

In reading I also make alphabet formation as well as high frequency words part of the teaching segment as well as part of the rotation each day.  Karen Belt has made some very useful activities that can be used independently as part of the rotation each day.   These activities have sound bites so that the children can hear the sound as well as write it.  They are able to listen again and again while looking at the word, identify other things around the room that start with the same letter and take photos of them.  Other activities include sound bites to listen to and writing high frequency words at the magenta, red and yellow levels.

As a team we are working through the iPad reading activities, adding slides with additional word work in different formats.  We discuss why we have added them, which WALT we have used to justify the addition and also how our learners found them.  This sharing of our knowledge and suggestions has been very helpful.

Inquiry For 2016

School wide focus: Formative practice in reading and writing to improve student achievement.

Children's reading development is dependant on their understanding that a letter and letter patterns represent the sounds of spoken language.  This predictable relationship between letters and sounds allows children to apply these relationships to both known and unknown words.

My 2016 Inquiry is to develop ways to help my learners acquire and be able to use their alphabet sound knowledge and to see that it is predictable and systematic.  This should help not only those that are struggling with reading but help those who have mastered individual letter sounds to build knowledge of letter patterns.

I have chosen this topic because New Entrant testing has shown that this is an area that needs to be addressed to fill a gap in the children's learning and that the children are not gaining high frequency words at the expected rate.

To begin with we have been building up a knowledge of letter names and shapes.  Knowing letter names helps the children to remember the forms of written letters.  Then we can move onto the letter sounds.  Some learners are at the beginning stage of learning to recognise the first letter of their name by its letter name and are attempting to reproduce the shape.  Other learners are able to see words as a sequence of letters that can be reproduced.  We practice the shape of individual letters with a writing sheet, or on our iPads as well as during the formal writing session.

Each morning during reading rotation opportunities are given to play with, match and sort letters.  The children with a greater letter sound knowledge also have opportunities to apply and expand their knowledge  of phonetically spelled words that are familiar in meaning during follow up activities.

During 2016 I want to investigate opportunities that will help my learners gain word knowledge more efficiently.

Reflection on Inquiry

For our last Inquiry session of 2015 we had to reflect on our inquiry topic for the year - what we had done, what worked and what impact we felt our inquiry had made on the end of year data.

Team Problem Solving

Our inquiry meeting used team work by a group of colleagues to offer solutions to a class problem.  My problem is the reluctant writers who have good ideas to share, can put their ideas into a sentence orally, are capable of using their alphabet sound knowledge to attempt to write unknown words  and can hear sounds in the correct sequence but are still reluctant to "talk to the paper".

These children are not reluctant readers but do find the physical task of writing and forming letters daunting.   For them writing is a laborious task and I have tried different ways to encourage them such as
-shared writing where I write some of the tricky part.
- giving them a free choice of topic to write on so they did not feel constrained by what they could write about.
-making up digital word banks so they were not constrained by lack of vocabulary or spelling.
- aiming for quality not quantity.   One well written sentence was better than four "formula" (I went to ... and I went ... ) sentences.
-using typing so that they weren't held up by their struggle to physically write a sentence.
-drawing a picture to organise their ideas.

One suggestion was to make the writing shared with a live audience, not just the teacher, so they could see a purpose of the writing.  They were telling their friends of their experience.  This may be recorded or videoed so their ideas are already formed into sentences and they can refer back to it when necessary and let them concentrate on how letters are formed.

Using typing does seem to the best solution so far as it helps overcome the main barrier of writing being a hard physical tasks. It is quicker, gets the job done, it is more legible than "spider" writing and the student can feel a sense of achievement.

Digital Word Banks

We have used traditional brainstorms for our writing but I wanted to use a system of making gifted words more accessible and not a "fixed" word bank.  This is a digital system we have been using over the last weeks of term.

Typing a Story

Another new skill Mrs George has taught the children is to type their stories on to their iPad.  Using the topic of their cross country training a co constructed sentence was quickly put together.  After the children were able to say the sentence they recorded themselves saying it and then set about saying it as they typed.  If they couldn't remember the next word, they played the recorded sentence back again.  For some it was finding the letters that was a time consuming process, while for others it was remembering what word they needed next, listening to the recording and then typing it in.  The  recording gave the children independence to be able to complete the task without having to check in with the teacher.  They were also able to listen to see if they had correctly sequenced the words in their story.

New Skills in Term 3

As the children move up through the reading levels they are looking for activities that challenge them and let them extend their knowledge as they are beginning to read to learn instead of just learning to read.  While they like the familiar format using sequencing and word work, they have also begun to attempt to create their own activities and try their hand at finding further information from their text.  They have found that orally recording their tasks is another way the activities are able to be completed along with retelling stories, listening to their fluency and justifying their answers.
I have been able to used the Solo Taxonomy Venn diagram template that I drew up in Term 1with a group of learners.  We used it orally with the children helping me to write in the words.   They were amazed to be able to quickly see similarities and differences that weren't specifically set out in the text but with further discussion became apparent.

Using the Venn diagram to compare similarities and differences.