VOCABULARY:
Emergent Literacy: Children’s literacy learning conceptualized as developmental, with no clear beginning or end, rather than as proceeding in distinct sequence. Thus children begin to develop literacy through everyday experiences with print long before they enter school.
Scaffolding Instruction: Instruction in which teachers model strategies step by step and provide guided practice, followed by independent practice and application.
Storybook Experiences: Read-alouds, readalongs, interactive reading, interactive writing, rereadings of favorite texts, and independent reading and writing.
Interactive Writing: Shared writing activity in which children are invited to volunteer to write parts of a story.
Linguistic Awareness: Understanding the technical terms and labels needed to talk and think about reading.
Print Awareness: The ability to identify the use of print for the English language. The idea that print is written and read from left to right and spaces fall behind two words and structure of the printed material.
Concept of Print: The ability to identify how to approach printed material. For example: Understand how to open a book cover and read the text from left to right. How to turn pages
Assessing Concept of Print: One can assess printed material by asking questions regarding a passage. For example: You can ask for the student to identify a sentence, how many words are found in the sentence.
Phonemes: Minimal sound units that can be represented in written language.
Alphabetic Principle: Principle suggesting that letters in the alphabet map to phonemes, the minimal sound units represented in written language.
Phonics: Using phonemic awareness to teach reading and writing of the English language.
Phonemic Awareness: An understanding that speech is composed of a series of written sounds; a powerful predictor of children’s later reading achievement.
Phonological Awareness: The ability to hear, recognize, and play with the sounds in our language. It involves hearing the sounds of language apart from meaning.
Alliteration: A group of words that begin with the same initial sound.
Rimes: The part of the letter pattern in a word that includes the vowel and any consonants that follow; also called a phonogram or word family.
Phonological Awareness Continuum:
Orthographic System:
Phoneme Isolation: The process of identifying sounds from within words. Whether that be the sound at the start, middle, or end of a word.
Phoneme Identity: The process of being able to identify sounds, that are the same, within other words.
Phoneme Categorization: The process of having a student identify the word which contains a different sound from a list of a couple words which sound the same.
Blending: The technique of sounding out the sounds within a word and progressing to putting the sounds together, faster, so the word is found.
Segmenting Beginning and Ending Sounds: Segmenting is the use of breaking out the sounds within words. This skill can be helpful if a sound is found to be difficult, but when the student sounds out the rest, they are able to decipher the tricky sound because of there exposure to the word prior.
Phoneme Deletion, Addition, and Substitution: The process of creating words by adding, deleting, or substituting a sounds from a word. For example: You have the word “top,” or a picture of a top, and before the image there is the “s” sound and the student puts them together to form the word “stop.”
Elkonin Boxes: A strategy of teaching phonological awareness with boxes that are used to segment sounds of a word.
Phonemic Segmentation: The ability to isolate and identify sounds in words.
TUTORING THOUGHTS AND FIELD EXPERIENCE:
I will begin tutoring a second grade student, beginning Wednesday. I have learned where the student has been assessed in terms of reading level. I have materials prepared through the http://www.readinga-z.com website which coincide with the students current reading level. I will be conducting an assessment of his reading through a running record, comprehension check, and also a fluency test.
More to come upon completion of the assessment on Wednesday.
CHAPTER THOUGHTS:
The importance of reading nonfiction books to the class. In the past, fiction was more prevalent in the classroom, but research has shown the growing significance of nonfiction books, such as;
– Increase vocabulary
– Expansion of background knowledge
– High interest to children
– Connection to other content
– Allows students to think about the world around them
Instructional goals met through storybook experiences:
– Motivate beginners to want to read and write
– Interest beginner to think about predicting, sharing, and extending personal meanings through listening and writing.
– Help build an understanding of writing/reading
– Teach to draw meaning from pictures and illustrations
– Teach directionality – Read left to right
– Learn alphabetic principles of written language
– Predict words which may come next
– Recognize words that are used frequently or students have an interest in
The use of observation to assess emerging literacy –
* Do children attend to the visual aspects of print? Are the students following along with the reading, and are they able to answer questions throughout the reading to confirm their listening.
* Do children use their intuitive knowledge of language? Can the child create a story from visual cues or pictures without using a conversation format, but an inventive story.
* Are children beginning to show signs of integrating visual and language cues? Can the child demonstrate they are following along with their own reading, that they can self-correct themselves, and follow with a finger pointer.
* Do children expect meaning from print? Does the child believe there is a message in the story.
Andy Grabowski 