When I was teaching Kindergarten, I followed my sister's advice to do shared writing every day. I am convinced that this practice, along with opportunities to write on their own several times a week, was the main reason my students knew most of their letter sounds, were comfortable with writing, learned how to draw pictures that made sense, and were able to apply their emerging knowledge of sounds to new words. As for the plaid phonics books, I always thought their main value was for kids to practice writing different letters on each page. :-)
Renee On Sep 23, 2007, at 8:37 AM, ljackson wrote: > I cannot discount the role of phonics in the process of learning to > read, > but I can certainly discount much of the methodology adopted to teach > it. I > think that teachers who encourage much writing in the early grades and > are > able to effectively support emergent writers in moving from stretching > words > and hold those sounds to using spelling patterns and analogy do much to > build phonetic understanding in their students. When this is combined > with > word work that draw children from letter-by-letter analysis to using > chunks > and analogies to figure out those tricky words, I don't know that much > more > is needed. I am not sure I see a reason to use some of the of the > terminology (long vs. short vowels, for example), but if children are > aware > of patterns such as /ead/, with the knowing that sometimes it sounds > like > /eed/ and sometimes like /ed/, they can quickly combine this knowledge > with > meaning and semantics to quickly make informed judgment calls as they > read > and increasingly refined approximations when spelling unknown words. > This is > very different from those plaid phonics books, IMO, and I am thinking > most > upper grade teachers should be quite glad of teachers that establish > this > knowledge base. "Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." ~Helen Keller _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
