fun with phonemes

Last week we had our first literacy class in the elementary school we'll be working at for the rest of the quarter. My cohortmate, Amelia, and I met our kindergarten reading buddy, Nathan*. What a fantastic little boy Nathan is! I was quite astounded by Nathan. We had great fun filling out our "getting to know one another" questionnaire. Once we got started on it, Nathan insisted on writing down everyone's answers all by himself. I was quite impressed with his thoughtful concentration and ability to spell out words phonetically. I didn't realize until yesterday, when I read Fox's chapters on phonemic and phonological awareness in her book Word Identification Strategies, that we were being wise when we let him try to spell out words phonetically. Apparently, this exercise built up his phonemic awareness as he tried to identify the sounds he heard in the words and write them down. This seems a particular skill of Nathan's, as he came very close to correctly spelling a lot of the words he was recording for us.

His ability to identify sounds in words became even more apparent when it was time for us to read him our book selections. Nathan turned the tables and insisted on reading to us! My book selection, The Very Busy Spider, had some words in it that were pretty sophisticated for a kindergartner, and so did Amelia's. However, I can't recall more than a few words that Nathan couldn't manage to sound out correctly on his own. He also recognized word patterns in the book, such as phrases that regularly repeated and he surprised me when, a few pages into his reading, he announced the connection between The Very Busy Spider and another book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar - both were written by the same author. I was quite impressed with Nathan. As precocious as he is, he will need to allow us to read to him in the future, in order to practice his comprehension skills. Although he could sound out words, he didn't always understand them and he wasn't really reflective in his reading because he was too focused on sounding out the words correctly. I am not sure how well he could have summarized or re-told the stories he read to us.

In all, I think it's going to be an absolute pleasure working with Nathan (and with Amelia, too!). It's clear his kindergarten teacher has done an excellent job promoting literacy in her classroom. Literacy was highlighted in many ways that spoke to its importance, such as the alphabet charts on desks and on the walls, a lite brite for spelling out words, and signs and sight words posted throughout the room. I'm excited for next week.

*name changed to protect privacy

reader's workshop

As I read the article Emergent Literacy: New Perspectives by Teale and Sulzby, I found myself noting parallels to the "Reader's Workshop" model that was implemented at my main placement school this year. Although the techniques in the article were generally prescribed for early childhood education programs, some of them were familiar to me as components of the "Reader's Workshop." One important aspect of the workshop is to clearly model a reading life for the kids. As teachers, we're encouraged to keep reading diaries right alongside the kids - noting books we've read, are reading, and want to read. This strategy is promoted to ensure that kids become aware of you as a reader with a reading life, and to let them see you reading and enjoying books. This sort of modeling is what came to my mind when Teale and Sulzby described the importance of encountering literacy at home, through having books around the house, through read aloud experiences, through seeing their family members engaged in reading activities, and through learning about and helping to construct shopping lists, to name a handful of ways in which literacy can be encouraged.

It appears to me that the backbone of the "Reader's Workshop" is a largely a continuation of some of the strategies described by our reading that encourage emergent literacy. I believe this approach will prove useful for developing strong readers, especially since many of the kids may not have, or have ever had, rich literacy experiences at home, nor may they have had beneficial early childhood experiences with literacy. I am interested to see how the workshop progresses over the year and whether it will engage the children effectively or prove beneficial, especially to some of our struggling readers. I believe the workshop's potential benefit will be enhanced by it's advice to have a wide variety of reading materials available in the classroom, dealing with diverse topics and at different reading levels, so kids can have books available that appeal to and are accessible to them. This may seem too common sense to mention, but it might be easy to overlook a genre that doesn't appeal to us when building classroom libraries. Also, kids need books with characters that look like them and reflect their own experiences.

Reading aloud seems another important component of the workshop, in the same way and for many of the same reasons given in Teale and Sulzby's article. I've noted most, if not all, of the read aloud strategies described by Teale and Sulzby implemented in my classroom, such as making predictions, drawing inferences, and examining vocabulary. However, I haven't really noticed that reading aloud to the kids is encouraging them to widen their reading horizons or to select books they may have otherwise passed over. Perhaps it's still too soon in the year for me to observe the benefits of reading aloud described by Ivey in her article The Intermediate Grades. Maybe the book we were reading last month just didn't grab them, or it could be that they were doing a lot of internal processing that wasn't apparent to me. At any rate, I am intrigued by the "Reader's Workshop" - and am interested to see how it unfolds over the year. My one concern is that I don't have a good feel for how scripted the curriculum is, and hope there is room to incorporate reading for other subjects, such as science and social studies. We'll see!