Teaching Phonics, High-Frequency Words, and Fluency
This slideshow relates how students learn phonics to learning high-frequency words and how it improves fluency. It offered specific instructional activities for building word pattern knowledge. This comes at a great time for me because I was beginning to feel that I was running out of ideas for teaching word families. We quite often make flip books and do sorts to learn the patterns. As we read we make lists of rhyming words but it was getting a little boring. I believe next I will have the students make little books, where a different word from the same family is on each page and they can illustrate. The computer program that we used for Shared Reading in my classroom already involves word building and memory games but we always do an extra activity or two to supplement. The most important point made in the presentation was that you have to match the skills to the texts that are currently being used. If students don’t have the opportunity to apply the skills, it will not be useful to them.
Linking Phonics and Vocabulary Development
This short slideshow reiterated that phonics is not a stand-alone skill in regards to literacy development; it is meant to give the student the necessary skills to be able to read independently and read for meaning, increasing vocabulary at the same time. Phonics instruction must be made meaningful by aligning the texts being read to the skills being taught. I find this true and have caught myself in the past just throwing lessons together without taking the time to align all of the components. It is so much more meaningful when thoughtfully organized in such a way that students are able to make connections between the skills and their application. If opportunities are not provided, they will not be able to make the connections independently and learn by analogy as a result.
Vocabulary Development
This presentation gave several examples of word-analysis strategies. I hate hearing a student prompted to “sound it out.” This tells me that the adult who is working with them does not have a sound knowledge of the different ways students analyze new words; decoding should be a last resort. I enjoy letting students come back to a word after finishing that portion of a reading passage if they need to so they can think about what makes sense using semantic and syntactic clues; they need to be able to look back at what they are reading anyway to monitor comprehension.
I enjoyed the portion of the presentation on direct/indirect methods and strategies for teaching high frequency words. In my classroom the instructional methods have to be fairly predictable and routine because of the specific learning needs of my students but I like to add in a new and fun activity once a week or so to make sure they are mastering the skills and not just the routine. Some strategies that I may incorporate are the Carbo Recorded Book Method (because I feel the books on tape do move too fast for younger students) and making Little Books; we have made little books for content areas before and the students really enjoyed looking back at them later.
This particular slideshow explains the different levels of new vocabulary, key points for instruction, and suggestions for assessment. I found the samples of vocabulary assessments to be the most useful part of the presentation; this section has made me think about how I might modify these assessments to use with my students. Our vocabulary assessments rely on the students’ receptive language skills because of their delays in expressive language; usually by identifying a picture or word from a field of 3 or matching. I think I would like to use an adapted version of the vocabulary rating scale to assess knowledge of words on the 2nd and 3rd tiers of vocabulary words.
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