Phonetics and Phonetic Awareness

Sometimes we think that the different sounds in words, rhymes, or knowing what the beginning sound of a word is comes naturally and there is no need to teach these simple concepts. However, these concepts don't always come naturally. We may not remember learning that stuff, so we may think it came naturally to us, but it might not have! That is why teachers really need to pay attention to teaching phonetic awareness in their classroom.
Not very much time is required to be spent on phonetic awareness, but some students might need it more than others. Some students that may be having a hard time with reading may need a little work with phonetic awareness. It might be all they need too get back on track! What really surprised me while reading From Phonics to Fluency was that even older students can have issues with phonetic awareness. This can actually cause them to have ongoing reading problems. This makes me feel like phonetic awareness might even be more important than what most people think. Maybe we as teachers should spend a little more time in the classroom with teaching phonetic awareness than 20 hours a year.
Small group instruction when working with phonetic awareness might be a good approach for teachers with only a few students who really need the practice. A teacher could identify students that need work with phonetic awareness and formulate a game or a lesson to work with those particular students on phonetic awareness. This might be the point in a student's life when reading starts to make more sense! Since this may come naturally to a lot of the other students, they will not need the practice.
Teachers really need to make sure they know their students well and know exactly when a student is having issues with phonetic awareness. That way, early intervention will be possible and there will be less students struggling later down the road with phonetic awareness.

My Field Experience

I have not gotten to blog about my field experience yet, so I wanted to take the time now to do so! I am currently placed in a 5th grade classroom with Mrs. Kinkead as the teacher. The classroom is very busy; there are 34 students! Mrs. Kinkead seems to handle it well though. She is always keeping the students busy and has minimal down time, which seems to be the key to success in a large classroom like this!
The students seem very technologically savvy. They all have their own personal iPads. Mrs. Kinkead informed me that these iPads were distributed by the school and that almost all of the students in the school use them in their classrooms now. I would have never imagined this sort of technology being in the classroom when I was in elementary school! The students seem to really like the iPads, and they have a lot of educational use. The students use apps like Quizlet, educational game apps, google docs, etc. These students are definitely "technology natives" and probably know how to use those iPads better than I can! I wonder if when I am a teacher or even when I am student teaching if I will need an iPad? I wonder if the schools also distribute them to the teachers? This may be a question for Mrs. Kinkead!
My case study student is a girl who loves to write but hates to read! She is very friendly, talkative, and outgoing. Mrs. Kinkead has told me that she is a "middle of the road" student reading level wise, and is reading at her grade level. She told me that her favorite genres of books are gossip books, books about friendships, and some mystery books. She also likes to write about these topics, and the writings that I have seen from her have mostly been about real-life situations and drama. She loves writing so much that she writes books all the time at home! I have seen some of these writings but haven't gotten a chance to read them yet, and hopefully I will get the chance. Her books are very long and she seems to put a lot of effort into them. However, she does not seem to enjoy reading nearly as much. She actually told me that she had been reading the same book for a month now and that she just doesn't like reading because it is boring. I am trying to think of ways for her to enjoy reading more. I think I should introduce her to different topics in the same genre that she likes. I have a feeling she hasn't looked very hard for books she would enjoy, so it might be easy for me to make suggestions to her. I am making it my goal to have her enjoy reading more! Another thing I am trying is bringing her books that I personally like to read (or books that I like to read when I was her age) because she seems to really look up to me and see me as a role model. If I like to read, she might be more willing to give it a try. If anyone has any suggestions for me of books that I should introduce to my student or suggestions about where to go next with a reluctant reader, I will gladly take them!

Webcast Thoughts: "Making Decisions for Individual Learners Within a Small-Group Setting"

This webcast was full of important information for all teachers! In particular, what stood out to me was the importance of forming a network of reading strategies. This is something we have talked about in class quite a bit. It keeps showing up over and over. This leads me to believe that it is one of the most important things we as teachers will learn. One interesting fact that I saw in the presentation was that 80% of students will form network of strategies no matter what program/method/philosophy is used, and 20% (the struggling readers) will have trouble constructing a network of strategies.  Yes, forming these strategies comes naturally, but we must teach all of these strategies in order to not leave anyone out! Teaching students a balance of MSV is the most important thing that our students will receive when learning how to read.  That is why we as teachers need to have these strategies and how to identify them down in our repertoire of teaching methods. Being able to identify what strategies our students use well and what strategies our students need to work on is very important in guiding students to the next step in their reading. With a strong understanding of MSV strategies, teachers can come up with a prompting question like, “does that look right?” without even really having to think about it because they have worked on this so much while they were a pre-service teacher.

I really thought the talk about ELLs was very helpful. A lot of ELL students are in my classroom for my field experience (5^th grade), so this was very relatable to my own experiences. Choosing books that are both appropriate to their language level and their reading level might be a little difficult. According to the Level Correlation chart, by grades 4 and 5, the ELLs should be considered “fluent”.  This is often not the case, especially for my classroom.  Some students may have a high level in reading, but not in language, or vice versa. When looking for books for ELLs, we must find a book that is in their reading level, but then make sure it also is parallel to their language level. Often times some of the vocabulary in books are difficult. We need to be constantly asking ourselves, “Is there a book at another reading level that this student might be more successful with?” We shouldn’t just bring students down a level because they do not understand the vocabulary.  I think this is a very important highlight of the webcast. So many times teachers will just say “oh, we should just bring him/her down a reading level” but with ELLs, we need to look deeper into what the student understands, what their language abilities are, and what they are capable of doing. Leveling for ELLs will take a lot more time and a bigger process than English speaking students.