Gattegno And The Silent Way

Next, I observed the standards, differentiated instruction, and the phonemic and phonics lessons in the class. The essential questions and standards are listed in the front of the classroom but are never referred to. I think that differentiation is a big part of this class, especially because of the number of students with individualized education plans. During lessons, the entire class will meet around the rug for instructions and introductions. After the class is given instructions, most students will work independently and there will be one or two groups that work with Ms. Dunlap or her teacher’s aide for guided practice. The majority of the lessons include hands-on activities, such as cutting examples of noun and verbs out of a magazine, using blocks to measure student’s heights, and songs that emphasize parts of speech. While I observed I also saw some phonemic awareness lessons. These are lessons that focus on individual sounds of letters and the structure of the words and letters. I think that this class had a wide variety of reading levels. Some students did very well, but others could not write their names yet. The class met on the rug for phonemic lessons, and Ms. Dunlap would use a book that had tons of activities. The book includes different activities that make students find the sounds in words, substitute sounds to make new words, blend sounds to form words, and to take apart words to find the sounds. Ms. Dunlap

Phonological awareness is being able to distinguish the assembly of isolated sounds that make up words and experiment with adjusting the distinct sounds known as Phonemes to form new words (Emmit, Hornsby & Wilson, 2013). Elements of phonological awareness include practice with separating, manipulating and grouping together sounds of words, in addition to exploring words and sounds in an enjoyable way using rhymes (Matheson, 2005). Phonological awareness provides innovative processes for a broader vocabulary and the ability to sound out new words (University of Oregon, 2009). The decoding process that occurs allows readers the ability to then concentrate on the meaning of what they read and improve their reading development (Reid Lyon, 1998). When teaching phonological awareness to children, teachers should work in small groups that explore only a couple of concepts at a time for instance how the mouth moves when saying a variety of isolated sounds in comparison to these phoneme sounds blended to assemble a word (Learning Point Associates, 2004). In conjunction with the familiarity of phonemes and words in phonological awareness, it is imperative to integrate this fundamental feature of reading development with understanding graphemes, and the link to letters in print to their phonemes sounds with phonics (Fellows & Oatley,

315-317) was used throughout the lesson in order to give the students an example of how to use the strategies that were taught. Before children would work on assignments alone, the teacher would model exactly what is expected of them, and keep examples of what was modeled during the lesson so the students could look back to it if they need to. Read-alouds (Cooper, 2015, p. 37) were used in this lesson to really help children to focus on certain topics of the text. “Sometimes the best way to help children understand a particular piece of text is to read it aloud to them and discuss it with them” (Cooper, 2015, p. 37). Think-alouds (Cooper, 2015, p. 30) were incorporated into this lesson when trying to explain how to use the strategy of character mapping. Think-alouds are a great way to explain to students how to use a specific skill or strategy so that they can have a better time comprehending it. Semantic maps (Cooper, 2015, p.83) were used in this lesson for brainstorming ideas from the text to later reference when making illustrations and creating short responses to the text. This strategy is also a great tool for second-language-learners because it helps to narrow down the specific parts in the text to help create more details of the topic being taught. Cooperative “popcorn” sequencing(Annenburg Learner, 2015) was used in the lesson to allow a variety of students to participate in the

1. ELL students need to be familiar with the sounds of English before they can develop phonological awareness. 2. Instruction needs to be explicit, modifications made, and practice needs to be given when needed. 3. Once phonological awareness has developed in any language, then it can be transferred to other languages that are learned.  4. Teachers should frequently model the production of sounds. 5. Beginning readers should get help to learn to identify sounds in short words.

The four-cueing systems that educators should incorporate within their classroom are phonological (sound), syntactic (structural), semantic (meaning), and pragmatic (social/cultural). According to Tompkins, these systems make it possible for children and adults to read, write, listen, and talk. For beginning readers and writers emphasis should be placed on the phonological system because it applies to phonics skills to decode and spell words (Tompkins, 2014). Ways that educators can apply the phonological system within their lesson is by pointing out rhyming words, decoding words when reading, dividing words into syllables, and pronouncing words. The syntactic system can be used in the classroom by adding inflectional endings to words, creating compound words, and teaching appropriate sentence structure. Educators can teach the semantic system by teaching students the meaning of a word, and studying synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. The pragmatic system can be taught by varying language to fit a specific purpose, reading and writing dialogue in

Big Ideas Phonological Awareness: Phonological awareness is made up of various skills that help students work with our spoken language by manipulating sounds and oral parts of words. There will be students who pick up on phonological awareness very quickly and others that may need a lot of instruction and time in gaining the understanding of our spoken language. It is a foundational skill needed to be able to read and teachers need to make sure they give students support who struggle with phonological awareness so they have the skills needed to manipulate sounds and oral parts of words to begin reading. Decoding Words: Using the skills gained in phonological awareness, manipulating sounds and spoken parts of words, students can start using their knowledge of letter-sound relationships and the oral parts in words to start reading.

Regardless of the techniques/activity phoneme awareness has to be taught explicitly using the gradual release model. McCarthy (2008) mentioned four steps a teacher can use to teach how to hear sounds in words. The first step is to model the stretching of the words out slowly, stretching phoneme by phoneme. While practicing the stretching of words, Carmen would repeat what I have done, by doing this with the correct pronunciations she will learn to listen for the phonemes in each word. If Carmen is not displaying significant understanding then we will use a large enough mirror to show both of our mouths so that we can see what each of our mouths are doing during the pronunciation of words. Step two illustrate to Carmen how to use the Elkonin sound box, drawn or purchase. As each of the sound is articulated, both of us stretch the word then we would put a marker in the box to represent that particular phoneme. Step three is to teach her how to make maximum use of the sound box so that it can help her to distinguish and segment phonemes. This can be done by splitting the task with her. I stretch the word out slowly making sure to articulate each phoneme while she pushes the marker in the sound box. We would switch roll allowing her to stretch the word slowly, and I would push the marker in the sound box. Continuing this to ensure that she understands both tasks. Step four is

At this stage, students are aware of letter formation, print knowledge, how to alphabetize and phonological and phoenemic awareness as taught in Level K. New skills include segmenting words into syllables and syllables into sounds (up to 5 sounds), short and long vowels when given letters or sounds, identification of the structure of words such as blends, digraphs, base words, suffixes and syllable types including closed and vowel-consonant-e syllables. Students are expected to read and spell closed and vowel-consonant-e syllable type words, name sounds for r-controlled vowels and for vowel digraphs and vowel diphthongs, how to read and spell compound words and other words with two syllables, how to read and spell words with “s”, “es”, “ed”, and “ing” suffixes, and how to read and spell words with unexpected vowel sounds. Students will learn to read and spell words with CVC, CCVC, CVCC, CCVCC, and CVCe. They will read and spell 100 high frequency words including a list of trick words and they will read and spell targeted high-frequency, non-phonetic words. Students will begin to produce sentences using vocabulary words, will read about 60 words per minute with fluency and comprehension,

To measure children’s phonological awareness, teachers should look at children’s ability with different skills. For example, a child with strong phonological awareness is able to understand and can use, alliteration, the concept of spoken word, rhyme, syllable blending and syllable segmenting. Children start to read by listening others, and then recognizing sound in words, sounding words out for themselves and recognizing familiar words, so it is important for children to learn the phonological awareness because it can help kids to become a successful reader.

For children with visual problems, project the worksheet on the Smart Board when going over the directions.

An important learning point entails what is phonological awareness, often many confuse phonological and phonemic awareness. Phonological awareness is akin to metalinguistic skills, it allows a child to examine the sound structure of language. Clients have to discern and discriminate sound structure, such as separating words into syllables, producing rhymes, and identifying words with similar initial sounds. So unlike phonemic awareness, phonological awareness primarily entails spoken

Systematic phonics instruction is beneficial to children regardless of their socioeconomic status; it helps children from different backgrounds overcome reading difficulties. Different strategies to phonics instruction might be used in the classroom, such as synthetic phonics (children first are learning how to convert letters into sounds, and after they are learning how to blend the sounds together to create words); analytic phonic (children learn words and after analyze letter-sound relationships in these words); analogy-based phonics (children identify unknown words using the parts of word families they learnt before); phonics through spelling (children divide the words into phonemes , and after writing letters for phonemes they are creating words).

Teach relationships of sounds and letters with bingo games. Upon mastery students will learn letter-sound relationships for consonant sounds. 5. Teach how to sound out words through decoding with onsets –rimes patterns in a game of water balloon phonics. Students will throw water balloons that are labeled with rimes and throw them at onsets to make a word.

For example to access students’ efferent listening skills, I can create an anticipation guide (Head & Readence, 1986, citied in Tompkins, 2005) on the big book “Life of a Butterfly”. Prior to that, teacher can activate the students’ knowledge about the story or any misconceptions they have about butterfly and write a few statements based on concepts on the whiteboard in the form of a chart. Next,

Full phoneme segmentation: Counting out the number of syllables. Speech practice with CVC words. Have students participate in silent reading and use their own ability to sound out words they don’t know with syllable practice. Students can count the number of syllables in a rhyme or poem, they can clap together counting syllables in