https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1D_Vlek5NbV7ntvk3SshVlP9NPY5DYRW94Mpp94650c0/edit?usp=sharing

Group members: Meagan, Kristen and Lamesha

Resources/activities that can be used to introduce students to the concept of vowel digraphs:

1. The Vowel Team Clip Card Game can be used as center/station activity for individual students. This activity can be used as students are familiarizing themselves/learning the vowel teams/vowel digraphs, their spellings, and the sounds they make. Students will go card by card, looking at the image provided. They will attach a clothespin to the correct vowel team that fills in the missing letters of the word.

Idea from: https://thisreadingmama.com/vowel-team-clip-cards/

2. Go Fishing For Digraphs! This game follows the same rules as the standard card game “Go Fish”. Students will be paired in partners to play this game, where they will match words with the same spelling and sounding vowel digraphs. They will ask their partner, for example “Do you have a card that has an /ā/ sound and is spelled with ‘ai’?” The players will ask similar questions in order to make matches with the cards in their hands.

Idea from: https://www.fcrr.org/studentactivities/p_018b.pdf

3. Vowel Digraph Beach Ball Toss

Vowel digraph examples will be written all over a beach ball. During our morning meeting, the students will sit in a circle. I will begin by tossing the beach ball to one student. For whichever vowel digraph the student’s hand lands on when they catch the ball, the student will have to say a word that has that vowel digraph in it’s spelling. For example, if the student’s hand it touching the vowel digraph “ea”, they can say the word leash, bead, or dream. The ball will be passed around the circle so all students get a turn.

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksH1s-_qew0

I found this video that demonstrates a lesson on how to teach vowel digraphs. Students completed a word sort activity after the direct instruction to practice sorting their words into the correct categories based on the vowel teams they were learning.

5. Vowel Digraph/Team Bingo

For this activity, each student will be given a bingo card with words that contain the vowel digraphs ea, ee, ai, ow, oa, and ay. I will call out a vowel team and the students will need to search for a word on the bingo card that matches the vowel team given. As students become more familiar with vowel digraphs, I will allow them to create their own bingo cards with words they know have the vowel digraphs within them.

RThe Literacy Teaching Guide: Phonics by the NSW Department of Education and Training Learning and Development 

• Phonics: knowing the connections between printed letters (and combinations of letters) and speech sounds
• Teachers help students learn the relationships between letters and sounds to recognize words when reading, spelling, and writing. 
• Phonics is not only explicitly taught, but it is integrated into the literacy program in many ways 
• Learning one aspect of phonics reinforces to other- like a staircase
• There are many myths about teaching phonics; such as that phonics and phonological awareness are the same thing and that teaching students every possible letter sound, as well as their combinations will create efficient readers and writers (students need to not only decipher print but understand it) 
• To meet diverse learning needs of students: determine prior knowledge, allow students to demonstrate knowledge in multiple ways, differentiate instruction if necessary, and draw upon students experiences to make connections to phonics learning. 

Principles of effective phonics teaching

1. Phonics knowledge and skills are critical to becoming literate- this is why it is important to start teaching/incorporating these skills at an early age 
2. Phonics need to be explicitly and systematically taught- regular, 20 minute, fast-paced lessons
3. Phonics needs to be taught in an integrated and balanced literacy program- scaffold opportunities for phonics learning in other areas, as well as balancing teaching phonics along with vocabulary, writing and concepts about print
4. Phonics needs to be taught to a level of automaticity- recognizing letters, words and sounds becomes a habit
5. Phonics teaching is enhanced by an emphasis on multi-sensory activities- all learning styles and preferences are acknowledged (auditory, visual and kinesthetic) 
6. Phonics teaching needs to be supported and reinforced using quality texts and technology

Methods for teaching phonics 

1. Synthetic phonics: letter-sound relationships are taught so students can then synthesize the letter sounds into words when reading/spelling 
2. Analytic phonics: students analyze letter-sound relationships once a word is identified
3. Analogy phonics: uses parts of written words students already know to identify new words 

• Teaching phonics starts simple and gets more complex, with the use of common then uncommon words. 

Sequence of teaching 

1. Recognize and write single letter-sound correspondence 
2. Recognize and write easy letter combinations (ex. sh)
3. Recognize and write more difficult letter combinations (ex. vowel digraphs)

Sequence for explicit and systematic phonics teaching

1. Assessment for/of learning- determine prior knowledge and provide feedback 
2. Planning- lesson/lesson on what and how skills will be taught 
3. Instruction- use the key three strategies: modelled, guided and independent teaching 

Three Key Strategies:

1. Modelled teaching: directly teaches new phonics skills, teacher models and leads lesson
2. Guided teaching: allows students to have more control, teacher scaffolds students thinking if needed, and corrects errors
3. Independent teaching: students are ready to learn independently and transfer their phonics knowledge to other contexts 

Here is my plan to teach phonemic awareness over the course of the year to a kindergarten class. 

September– Sentence Segmentation

During morning meeting, I will read a book that we had previously read a few days prior. As I read each page, I will ask one student to come up and point to the words as I read them aloud. I will then ask the student to repeat the sentence and count how many words are in the sentence. For example, let’s say the sentence on the page is “Sam wore red shoes.” I will explain to the students that the four words, “Sam” “wore” “red” “shoes” all make up the sentence “Sam wore red shoes.” I plan to start off the year working on sentence segmentation because it is one of the very first steps of phonological awareness. The students will work on hearing how these words come together to make a sentence during this activity. 

November– Rhyming

 The students will create puzzles to practice their rhyming skills. They will be given a puzzle template with blank pieces, similar to the one below. They will have to cut the pieces apart and then write four words/draw four pictures of words that rhyme on the pieces. They will then put the puzzle back together to symbolize that all of the words rhyme with each other.  

January– Syllable Segmentation 

Idea from: https://childdevelopment.com.au/images/Resources/SLP_games_and_activities/Syllable_Segmentation_Resource.PDF

I will begin by making a ladder on the floor with colored tape. I will then create picture cards with different images on them, put them in envelopes, and spread them out at different tables around the classroom. The students will go around to each center, open the envelope, and identify the image/word inside. They will then be asked to come to the ladder and jump on each step of the ladder according to the number of syllables the word has. 

February– Onset and Rime

I will create two sets of two cubes/dice with pictures on all sides to use with small groups. One set will focus on the onset sound of a word and the other will focus on the rime. Students will take the first set of cubes and roll one. Say for example, they land on the image/word “cat.” I will ask them what the beginning sound of the word they rolled is. They will say /k/. I will then ask them to look at all the pictures on the other cube and find a word that also starts with a /k/ sound, like car. 

We will then repeat the same process with the rime cubes. Say for example, they land on the word “sock”. I will ask them what the ending sound of the word they landed on is. They will sock /ock/. I will then ask them to find the picture on the other cube that ends with the /ock/ sound, like clock.

March– Phoneme Identification

I will call students to line up at the door for lunch/recess/specials by calling out the beginning sound of their names. For example, I will say “Can all of the students whose names start with an /m/ sound line up at the door. I will continue this with all of the student’s names until everyone has lined up. This is a fun way for students to hear and recognize phoneme sounds.  

April– Segment/Blend Phonemes

Idea from: http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/blending_games

This activity will take place during morning meeting. I will use a song to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It” to introduce the idea of syllable segmentation. The lyrics are:

“If you think you know this word, shout it out!
If you think you know this word, shout it out!
If you think you know this word,
Then tell me what you’ve heard,
If you think you know this word, shout it out!”

After singing this song, I will segment the phonemes of a word such as /s/ /u/ /n/ and students will call out the word I sounded out. I will then ask students to come up and whisper to me a word to sound out and have the rest of the class identify, or blend the phonemes to create the word. 

May– Phoneme Manipulation

During morning meeting, the students will work on changing the beginning sound of a word. I will focus on one ending sound of a word, such as “-at.” We will use an alphabet spinner (a spinner with all the words in the alphabet) to help us change the beginning sound. Students will take turns spinning the spinner, and adding the sound of the letter they land on to create a word. For example, if the spinner lands on the letter “M” I will ask them “if we add an /m/ sound to –at, what word do we make?” Obviously, some letters will not create real words with the ending –at, but this can be funny to students by determining if the word is real or not. We will continue this process until we make a whole list of words. I will explain at the end of the activity that if we change the beginning sound of a word, we create a whole new word. 

I liked this example of how to teach phoneme blending and segmentation through song. Not only will the two songs shown in this video excite and engage students, they focuse on a very important skill in terms of phonemic awarness. Segmenting the sounds of a word show students that words are made up of different sounds. Blending a word together based on its sounds is a great strategy for students to use when they are doing independent reading. They can sound out each part of an unfamilar word to complete the whole word. The students can use their body parts, such as their arms to tap each sound or slide the words together.

I thought this activity that the teacher had the students participate in was a great way to practice the skill of rhyming. She related the activity to a previous book they had read about a monster who only eats rhyming words. At first, she gave the students different examples of words that did NOT rhyme with the rhyming word of the day, “clay.” I believe she did this to see if me to see if students could idenify if two words rhymed, which I thought was great. She then asked the students to come up with their own words for the monster to eat that rhymed with clay. If they were correct, they placed a piece of “food” in the monsters mouth. I also thought it was a great touch to let the students have fun by making up made-up words that rhymed with “pasta” to practice their rhyming skills. This ties in with the reading Building the Foundation because it directly relates to the standard of kindergarten student’s recognizing and producing rhyming words.

I like how this teacher was using one-on one-instruction in this video. The idea of the book used in this activity was that when the book sneezed, it blew away the letter “B” from all of the words starting with “B” in the book. The child was then promted to read the book and determine which letter had to go in from of all the words. Of course, this letter was “B”. Examples included “-ed”, “-utterfly” and “-ouncing”. The student was able to identify that these words were supposed to be read as “bed”, “butterfly”, and “bouncing.” This lesson directly realtes to the skill of detecting initial sounds of spoken words. The student was practicing removing individual sounds from a word, identifying the phoneme that was deleted, and then putting the sound back on the word to say the whole word.

This teacher focused on the idea of using word families to incorporate onset and rhyme into her lesson. She asked students to identify which words were part of the “-ig” words family. As students gave their responces, she asked them to identify what sound was at the beggining of the word and which sound was at the end. For example, one student indentified the word “fig.” She asked what sound was at the beginning of the word, and the student replied with the /f/ sound. I also thought it was smart of the teacher to write the beggining sound in one color marker and the ending sound in another color, to show the difference. At the end of the lesson, she had all of the students chanting/singing the words together, focusing on the beggining sound, then the end, and then putting them together.

The teacher in this video used words familiar to the students, their names, to practie counting the syllables in words. She asked the students to come up and clap the beats, or syllables in their name, and then place their name into a circle on the board in correspondence to the number of syllables. Each student was given the chance to do this.

Annotations of the two readings for this module

Building the Foundation: A Suggested Progression of Sub-skills to Achieve the Reading Standards: Foundation skills in the Common Core State Standards 

By: Marcia Kosanovich and Connie Verhagen 

Phonological Awareness

Kindergarten 

• Recognize and produce rhyming words.
•  Identify similar words in oral speech.
• Determine which part of the word (rime) is important for rhyming.

Examples: do these two words rhyme? What words rhymes with …? Which words in this group rhyme? 

• Count, pronounce, blend, and segment syllables in spoken words 
• Blend words together to make compound words
• Segment or break compound words apart 

Examples: clap syllables, pronounce syllables while clapping

• Blend and segment onsets and rimes of single-syllable spoken words.
• Detect initial sounds of spoken words
• Detect rime when onset is removed from spoken words 
• Isolate and pronounce the initial. Medial vowel, and final sounds in CVC words.
• Understand there is a first, middle, and last part of a word.
• Add or substitute the individual sounds in simple, one-syllable words to make new words.

1^st Grade

• Distinguish long from short vowel sounds in spoken single-syllable words.
• Determine long or short vowel sound after given word is spoken
• Sort words into categories of short or long vowel sounds 
• Orally produce single-syllable words by blending sounds (phonemes), including consonant sounds. 
• Isolate and pronounce initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in spoken single syllable words.
• Segment spoken single-syllable words into their complete sequence of individual sounds.

2^nd Grade

• Distinguish long and short vowels when reading regularly spelled one-syllable words.
• Know spelling-sound correspondences for additional common vowel teams.
• Decode regularly spelled two-syllable words with long vowels. 

Examples: circle syllables, read syllables in chunks, read syllables together

3^rd Grade

• Identify and know the meaning of the most common prefixes and derivational suffixes.
• Decode multisyllable words. 

Examples: circle syllables in words, read circled syllables separately

Phonemic Awareness instruction helps children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s meta-analysis 

By: Linnea C. Ehri  

• “Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are the two best school-entry predictors of how well students will learn to read during their first two years of instruction.” (pg. 5)
• Tasks used to asses and improve student’s phonological awareness and PA instruction.
• Phoneme isolation: recognizing individual sounds in words.
• Phoneme identity: recognizing common sounds in different words
• Phoneme categorization: recognizing the word with odd sound in sequence of words (which does not belong with the others based on sounds)
• Phoneme blending: listening to sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form recognizable words. 
• Phoneme segmentation: breaking a word into its sounds by tapping out or counting the sounds/pronouncing and positioning a marker for each sound.
• Phoneme deletion: recognizing what word remains when a specified phoneme is removed. 
• 3 reading groups were established for the study: one group with normally developing readers, one group with students below second grade who were at risk of developing reading difficulties, and one group of students who already have reading disabilities. 
• Results: individual tutoring, small group, and whole group instruction working on PA skills improved reading and spelling skills in comparison to alternate or no instruction. 
• Shows the importance of focusing on PA skills in the classroom! 

Annotations of: “Chall on Stages of Reading Development” by J. Chall

Stage 0. Prereading: This stage covers children from birth to age 6. Children in this stage are beginning their educational journey by starting school. They are beginning to learn about letters and words, as well as pretend to read books. They begin to understand rhyming and are introduced to the process of synthesizing and blending word parts. 

Stage 1. Initial Reading, or Decoding: This stage covers children ages 6 to 7, in first and second grade. They learn that there is a relationship between letters and sounds. They begin to understand what letters do to a word, such as change the sound or meaning, and can understand mistakes in the spelling of words. 

Stage 2. Confirmation, Fluency, Ungluing from Print: This stage covers children ages 7 and 8, in second and third grade. Children in this stage are using the information they used in the previous stage to solidify their knowledge. This is done by reading familiar stories/words and decoding this language and well as gaining fluency and speed in their reading. 

Stage 3. Reading for Learning the New- A First Step: This stage covers children ages 9 to 13, in fourth to eighth grade. Children in this stage use reading as a tool to gain new knowledge and information. Reading materials are generally within one point of view, with a clear point and rid of technical complexities. 

Stage 4. Multiple Viewpoints: This stage covers high school aged children, ages 14-18. In comparison to the previous stage, children in Stage 4 can read complex materials with multiple viewpoints. These viewpoints build off of concepts learned from previous stages. 

Stage 5. Construction and Reconstruction-A World View: This stage covers students age 18 and above. Reading is approached for one’s own purpose, meaning they read the materials that concern them and can read for detail and completeness. 

Annotations of: “What is the Development of Literacy the Development Of?” By Glynda A. Hull and Elizabeth Birr Moje

• “Another line of literacy research has centered on understanding how contexts, learning environments, social interactions, cultural practices, and cultural tools inform and shape reading and writing.”
• Refer to practices (technology, knowledge and skills) rather than processes
• Learning should be focused on using the tools of literacy, such as books, pencil/paper and digital media to help with reading and writing
• Literacy: multiple sets of practices 
• Idea of learning differences rather than deficits 

Key findings:

1. “Literacy learning is situated in and mediated by social and cultural interactions and tools.” -Learning has so much to do with cultural practices and interactions of a group, the available tools, and activities that literacy can be practiced, and the schools these activities are practiced in. 
2. “Literacy learning occurs via a range and blend of explicit and implicit teaching, usually guided by interaction with a more knowledgeable other over time.”- Teachers need to be assessing student’s prior knowledge and scaffolding new knowledge to be learned, through implicit and explicit instruction.
3. “Across the range and from all social/cultural groups, people learn and practice literacy outside of school, often with high degrees of proficiency.” -Students are involved in literacy practices outside of school and the classroom and excel in these. However, teacher see these students as unable to learn or unmotivated due to complex and extensive demands of the curriculum. 
4. “To learn literacy well, students need meaningful purposes for engaging in literate practice and opportunities to use literacy for a broad range of life activities related to goals and desires beyond the moment of instruction.”- This allows for students to see the purpose of their learning. Using the interests of students in instruction will keep students engaged. 
5. “Learners require, and literate ability now consists of, facility with composing, interpreting, and transforming information and knowledge across various forms of representations.”- These various forms of representation for learning can be symbols, charts, moving images or oral representations. 

The main difference between cognitive and sociocultural perspectives on learning is that the sociocultural perspective focuses on how one’s environment and cultural can affect their learning, while the cognitive perspective focuses on how a learner acquires their knowledge.

People grow into readers through… READING! Practice makes perfect when it comes to reading. Children begin to grow into readers when their parents and teachers read to them. Before you know it, children begin to read themselves. They dive into reading fiction, non-fiction, and informational texts. They read a diverse range of genres. They read street signs, food labels, and birthday cards. These readings get more and more complex as time goes on. People read to gain knowledge, learn new information and just for fun!

Each child grows up in a different home environment. Some children may be read to every night, given help with reading their homework and practice reading skills on a daily basis. On the other hand, there are some children that do not have these opportunities in their homes. It is up to teachers to give students as much practice reading as possible. Teachers can create an in the class library where students can check out books to read at home. That way, students can be practicing their reading, reading books they like whenever they please.

“Reading and writing are reciprocal literacy activities, especially in the early years; that is, they both promote student literacy learning and provide experiences that children need to gain knowledge about the ‘rules of the road.'”

https://cdn.glitch.com/922d496f-efab-43f7-8936-954e4ce8b467%2FConcepts%20About%20Print%20Directions.pdf?1527531015955

The reading “Concepts About Print Assessment” by Marie M. Clay focuses on the importance of frequently checking up on and assessing student’s understanding of print. By doing this frequently, whether it is through whole class activities, small group meetings or one-on-one evaluation, teachers can identify students understanding, or misunderstandings about print. They can also identify what prior knowledge students have about print through their home life or previous education. The idea “the rules of the road” this author proposes in the reading suggests the skills that teachers should be assessing. These include an understanding that the text in a book is what tells the story, the difference between a letter and a word, what punctuation marks do for a sentence and which way to read across a page. By focusing on these skills, the teacher can see which students need a bit more instruction, clarification in certain aspects about print, and which students are ready to move on to the next skill.

The “Concepts of Print” in my opinion, is a useful assessment for teachers to use during their instruction. The reading gives suggestions on ways the whole class, as well as individual students, can work on their concepts of print. For younger students, focusing on a familiar word, such as their names, can help them identify letters and the sounds they make when they are put together. As a group, reading signs/labels around the classroom, morning messages or signs around the school building are good forms of practice for children’s concept of print skills. 

“In the opening scene of the parent-produced film “A Magazine is an iPad That Does Not Work”, a toddler uses her fingers to press, tap, and swipe icons on the glass screen on an iPad to open various apps. But in the next scene, when she tries using the same finger on glossy fashion magazine pages, nothing happens.”

https://cdn.glitch.com/922d496f-efab-43f7-8936-954e4ce8b467%2Fwohlwend2017ConceptsBeyondPrintinReclaimingEarlyLiteracy.pdf?1527531022979

The reading “Toddlers and Touchscreens: Learning “Concepts Beyond Print” with Tablet Technologies” by Karen E. Wohlwend touches upon the implications of children using mobile devices for learning. As shown in the Youtube video “A Magazine is an IPad That Does Not Work” apps and technology are a part of everyday life for most, including adults, teenagers, children, and now even toddlers. These child size digital tools, can teach children about the concept of literacy nexus; how texts should be used, read and the patterns used in daily life to interact with these different forms of texts. When it comes to mobile devices and tablets, there are many skills that children can learn. Scrolling, tapping, and clicking on icons as well as typing words are just a few to name. Similar to books, these devices are also hand-on tools that children can use to strengthen their literacy skills. Parents can take advantages of these digital tools to scaffold children’s computer literacy skills. Asking questions, prompting observations and helping children learn to use these tools correctly and for educational purposes can be very beneficial for children. 

EBooks are a popular digital tool that can teach many of the same concepts of print that a traditional book can. Children can use EBooks to learn how the text they are reading on the screen tells the story, how capital letters start a sentence, and even when to turn the page using a swiping motion. Writing skills can be practiced while typing on the screen and voice recognition technology can be used to help children see the words that are speaking into the device. 

All in all, pixels can and should be used in the pre-school classroom. In a world that is now technologically dependent, using technology in the classroom can be a great tool to build on reading, writing, and computer literacy skills. There are great interactive and educational apps that can teach students all different concepts such as phonics, print awareness, spelling, and storytelling. Using technological tools, something as simple as a computer or laptop can help students learn computer literacy skills and engage students in their writing or reading processes.