I will continue to engage my students in phonics and sight word instruction.
Phonics instruction teaches children the relationships between the letters of written language and the individual sounds of spoken language. It teaches children to use these relationships to read and write words. The goal of phonics instruction is to help children learn and use the alphabetic principle--the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Knowing these relationships will help children recognize familiar words accurately and automatically, and "decode" new words. In short, knowledge of the alphabetic principle contributes greatly to children's ability to read words both in isolation and in connected text.
Here is an example of some activities that will be implemented this week to help promote a strong knowledge of the alphabetic principle:
Students will segment (isolate sounds within a word), judge if two words start the same or end the same, remove a phoneme (smallest sound) from a word, count phonemes in a word, blend sounds together, sound/symbol identification, including knowing the letters by sight and by sound, and matching letters with the appropriate sounds and vice versa, and awareness of sound patterns in the language.
Learning sight words is also an important step in literacy. Readers need to recognize each word as quickly and effortlessly as possible so that they can pay attention to the more mentally demanding task of understanding what they are reading. Students will encounter sight words more frequently than any other words in print and, for this reason, they need to recognize them on sight, and need to read them without hesitation.
Some activities that will be implemented this week to practice sight words include word activities, magnetic letter activities, and writing activities such as "Mind Reader" and "Rainbow Writing."
Mind Reader: Students number their papers 1-5. They listen to clues and write a sight word on each line- hoping to read my mind to find the correct word from our word wall. "It has four letters, rhymes with __, starts with __, ends with __, etc.
Rainbow Writing: Student write a sight word, whispering the correct spelling of the word. Then they trace the word three times with different colored crayons. This creates a fun way to memorize trick words.
