Literacy Journal Response, Week 3

Please post a response to this week's readings. You may write in response to a prompt below or you may choose your own topic in relation to the readings. Please tag it with literacy and week 3.

Fox Chapter 1:

Listen to a child read. What does the child do when s/he comes to a word s/he doesn't know?
In listening to a child read, it is interesting to discover the different techniques that child utilizes when she or he comes across a word that they cannot pronounce or understand.

I have learned a lot from children in their reading and that is they truly enjoy and take their time in reading and understanding new words. This may be possible because children are still developing their contextual knowledge. Therefore, they rely more on the word itself and less on the contextual cues within the sentence or paragraph. Often times, I have observed children sounding out the letters slowly. At other times, I have observed children tracking their fingers beneath the words as if to follow the sound. This causes me to wonder why certain children choose certain techniques? Could it be due to a preference towards a learning style such as auditory or visual? I realize that phonemic awareness develops sequentially, as stated by Fox on p. 28. Yet, I am also curious to know if children of all languages rely on the same sequential development of phonemic awareness through word, rhyme, and syllable awareness. Would all these phonemic awareness milestones be present in all languages? These are some questions that I am curious to learn more about, and may discover answers to with further observations.

How are phonics or word identification skills taught in your placement? Which approaches (pages 7 & 8 fourth edition) are being used?

In my school placement, I believe that the phonics that is being taught is the synthetic (explicit) phonics found on page 7 of Fox’s fourth edition. Outside of my classroom, it appears that this style of phonics instruction is quite common for children. Although, it may be an effective teaching method for children to learn phonics in the younger grades, I have not observed this method taught in the upper grades. Based on what I have read and learned thus far, it is my opinion, that the synthetic (explicit) may be more suitable for teaching younger children who are still learning letter sounds. However, for the upper grades, I wonder if the analytic or structural analysis methods found in Fox, fourth edition, pages 7 & 8 would be more effective. I was thinking this because the structural analysis method focuses on recognizing prefixes or roots of words and the analytic method focuses on the sounds of words. At the upper grade levels, children may be more inclined towards learning with these methods where there is greater emphasis on utilizing contextual cues.

Fox Chapter 2:

What is the difference between phonemic awareness (PA) and phonics?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to arrange, rearrange, blend, add, delete sounds or individual phonemes into words and to separate words into sounds. Also, phonemic awareness focuses on the sounds in spoken language. However, phonics focuses on the relationship and approaches to teaching sounds and letters.

Children love to play with sounds. When have you heard children playing with sounds? What kind of sound awareness are they demonstrating?

Children playing with sounds is an innate ability. Beginning at birth, it seems that infants explore sounds by babbling and cooing. Then, as children grow these sounds give way to the language(s) that they have learned and processed in their infancy. The process of reading and listening to spoken language also enhances the learning of sounds because children begin to mimic the sounds they hear in books with the intonation and rhythm of the spoken language. Throughout this process of learning language, children are learning and demonstrating phonological awareness of sounds through an awareness with rhymes, syllables, words, sounds in language (Fox, p.27). In addition, children are demonstrating phonemic awareness through isolating, segmenting, manipulating, and blending sounds (Fox, p.42).

Books and poems are wonderful for encouraging children to attend to sounds. Find a book or poem to share in class that focuses on sounds in some way. What kind of sound awareness does the book promote? What activity in Chapter 2 might complement the sound orientation of your book?

A book that I would consider for children to encourage their awareness of sounds would be The Farm Animals written and illustrated by Rolando Merino. The pages of this book are filled with lively pictures and also teach the sounds that different animals make. This book would be great tool for teaching children about how letters represent sounds. It would be very fun for children to follow along and mimic the sounds in the book. As well, it would help children to remember the sounds and associated letters by remembering which animal made that sound. This method would improve phonemic awareness.

Fox Chapter 3:

Based on your experience and your reading of this chapter, do you think "invented spelling" (in which children spell words the way they sound) helps or hinders young readers?

This is hard to say, as I believe that “invented” spelling is dependent on the child. Regardless, of a child’s ability or intelligence. If invented spelling helps the child to feel confident and competent in learning, then I believe it would be positive for the child. Therefore, I would support invented spelling for that child’s individual learning. If, however, invented spelling does not help another child in learning and slows them down or hinders them, then that child’s learning would have to be independently evaluated.

What cues do you see your kindergarten buddy using based on his/her writing samples? What other experiences do you have of children using early word identification strategies?

After one visit with my kindergarten buddy, I have observed invented spelling as my kindergarten buddy tries very hard with genuine effort to learn and spell words correctly. It is with this observation, that I imagine my kindergarten buddy will learn best independently, rather than having myself or a teacher constantly enforcing correct spelling. I would like to consider that invented spelling allows the child space to gain phonemic awareness and encourages the child to write free flow.

Aside from this, within his/her writing samples, rhyming was also an effective tool. For example, as my kindergarten buddy was spelling a word, I asked how that word was spelled and that it rhymes with another word. With this, my kindergarten buddy was able to recognize the rhyming word and this helped with the spelling. I have also seen the strategies of inventive spelling and rhyming work with children at all skill levels. In addition, I have observed that children utilize these strategies best during independent reading time. I am curious to know if teaching children word identification strategies are universal and if not, then what influences languages. It also remains to be seen whether these strategies would be effective at the upper grade levels.


Other directions for Session 3
Come prepared to administer the ELP to you kindergarten buddy.