Phonics Readings for 10/20

Teaching Phonemic Awareness

Students need to learn how sounds work in order to understand phonics and reading. Rhyming and poetry in natural activities help struggling students catch on to the sounds in words. Students must have phonic awareness to be able to recognize words and to help them read. It is not only recognizing, but also being able to blend the sounds represented by the individual letter. This awareness is the students’ awareness of speech sounds, smaller than the syllables.

 “Phonics refers to the knowledge of letter-sound correspondence…”

I think it is interesting that phonemic awareness is a key indicator (by correlation) of how well the students will learn to read during their first two years in school.

I also find it interesting that the National Reading Panel gave an instructional guideline to only have a total of 20 hours of sessions over an entire year with a student to help with phonemic awareness. I would have guessed it would be about a half hour a day, which ends up being WAY more than 20 hours in an entire school year.  It does make sense, though, that children develop phonemic awareness naturally, so too many of these conferences may just burn the student out.

I have never considered that struggling 5^th and 6^th graders in reading might be struggling because they might have been stuck drilling more and reading less than all of the other students because of one misunderstanding. This makes me want to be sure that this does not happen to my students in the future.

From Phonics to Fluency

I agree that many of the terms for reading are very confusing, and there are so many of them that it is hard to remember the terminology for all of them. It does make seem important that the instructors and teachers know these terms so that they can interchange ideas intelligently and more fluently than having to stop to explain what they are talking about so others could follow along.

The list of definitions in this reading will be very helpful now as well as in the future. It will create a common language for teachers. It is important for the teacher to know these terms, but the students definitely do not need to focus on them- they just need to learn how to read.