"Becoming literate is a process that begins at birth and continues throughout life." I really like this quote because it is so very true. No one is so literate that they can not continue to learn and expand their knowledge.
This chapter seemed to repeat and repeat itself and I actually had a time reading it :( But I did find a number of things that I found interesting. That children learn that print has functions as a first step in reading and writing and the three developmental levels in word recognition I was interested in.
After children learn print has functions, they become interested in forms of print, and then conventions of print. I've seen this but didn't realize that there was a pattern; and that because a child can name 10 letters today and only 6 the next doesn't really mean a lot. They will generally take a step forward and one back.
The "Three developmental levels" again had known, just didn't know it had an official name. First identify words through context; use letter-sound cues, and finally rely on sounding out words. To me it all goes back to learning phonics.
This chapter was (I felt) very heavy in phonics and the pieces of it. How important is phonics and why should we bother trying to teach it? Very important and children should learn phonics to help decode words along with learning sight words. There are many phonics programs out there and my favorite is "Sing, Spell, Read, and Write" by Pearson. It incorporates music, letter sounds, vowel sounds, and blends together. We still sing some of the songs and we haven't used the program in at 12/13 years.
One of the classroom ideas that I'd like to incorporate is the "Very Own Word" box. By doing this children will learn their favorite words by sight and it increases not only their reading vocabulary but their classmates as well when they talk about them to each other.
What idea(s) did you like or dislike? Planning to incorporate any in your classroom?
Brandy-
ReplyDeleteI agree the chapter seemed like it was full of valuable information but it was hard to stay focused and read through the many different strategies at times! I really liked the "Very Own Word" box idea but I also loved the "Morning Message" strategy as well. I have had the chance to see a version of "morning message" in action when I helped in a third grade classroom during high school. The teacher used the same principles of the morning message but to make it appropriate for the grade level she would write the students a message that included grammatical and syntactic mistakes that students had to find and correct. I found it to be a great way to start the day because it served as a morning agenda as well as a grammar review and/or introduction! I will definitely be using "Morning Messages" in my classroom! Thanks for the post!
Brandy – I definitely agree that when it comes to learning to read, we can never stop learning. If we were to open a dictionary, there would be plenty of words that we do not know, and maybe some that we would not know how to pronounce.
ReplyDeleteI believe that phonics can be helpful to letter-sound relationships, combinations and decoding skills, but it also has drawbacks. Because there are so many exceptions to the rules we teach students, it would be best that did not so many rules.
For classroom ideas, I think I enjoy the Morning Message, because the teacher can ask students to pick out certain things, like parts of speech, capital letters, or mistakes.
I really like that you started your post with a quote. Like you I also think that literacy does not have a specific starting and ending point in a human’s life. We are constantly learning and building up on what we already know, so over the period of our life we are able to improve our literacy skills and even build a higher vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteI believe that teaching children phonics is very important. This is having a big impact on helping many children learn to read and spell. Phonics is recommended as the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them learn to read.
I really like the idea of the “morning message,” just because it give the teacher so much possibility to introduce print and work on things that might still be troubling for some of the children in the classroom. But I also really liked the idea of using “the context and pictures to figure out words. “ In one of my previous classes we had a project in which each of us students designed several posters using this strategy. All of them turned out really good and we all had a lot of fun creating them and trying to read them in class. I was amazing how we can help children develop literacy skills with something as simple as exchanging a few words by pictures that show the missing word. This is one strategy that I will definitively incorporate in my future classroom.
Brandy- I definitely liked the different strategies that this chapter talked about. I found it very helpful and I know that I will probably use some in my own classroom. Some that I liked were "morning message" (which it seemed was a popular one) and I also liked "word wall". I know that I want to use something like "morning message" in my own classroom in the future. I think that this one is great for many reasons. One being that is is a continual thing. The children will expect this every morning and the students can learn a lot from just putting that little time in the morning to use. We can discuss grammar, how a sentence is put together, punctuation, and you can even throw in new spelling words.
ReplyDeleteGreat post- I really like the quote at the beginning of the post. Talking about how no one can be literate enough to stop getting better and better. This can be applied to anything in life. For example be the best you can be at your job you can never stop getting better and better their are alway areas that you can improve in. I really like the idea of a morning message in my classroom. You can incorporate many things into a morning message. For example, if you are teaching a lesson on capital letters have the student come up and circle places on the morning message where a capital letter should be used.
ReplyDelete