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Here's what's fascinating about kids: you can be working with a child for a half hour on sounding out words and writing them down, and all she realizes is that she is the center of your attention.
And when you take a break to eat something, she'll sit there and say "Jenny! Aren't you going to play with me?" :)
Notice she said play? Oh and P.S. she is pretty awesome at spelling and reading for a Kindergartner.
Oh my, I had the FUNNIEST moment in teaching last night.
I was working with K, leading her very deliberately in sounding out words written on a paper on the wall - so we were looking at what right in front of us - and I had her pointing at each letter as she sounded it out so I could watch her for errors.
So she's sounding out "sit." She makes the mistake of saying /sh/ for the letter S, then very quickly proceeds to sound the short I and the /t/ sound. It happened before I could stop her.
The look of horror on her face as she realized what she had just said was priceless. I told her it was ok, I knew it was an accident and that's not something you get in trouble for. And then she had a giggle fit that derailed us for about 10 minutes. But that's ok. And it reminded me of a friend's Facebook status from last week:
Mrs.Fisher, what does "fack" mean? ( this is how my student pronounced it)... Ummm, whaaaat??? Can you please spell it for me? "fack" F-A-Q... I start to giggle and chill out and I explain to her that it means FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS... She feels smarter knowing she can impress her classmates now and I sat in my office taking note that this was one of the funniest conversations EVER!
Man, I love kids. :)
I've been trying to think of activities I can do with K that will make learning more interesting to her - to engage her on a deeper level. Last week I had the idea to print a picture of her that I'd taken with my phone and use it in an activity. She really responded to seeing her picture, then asked me to take a picture of her that showed ALL of her (head to toe! Plus it had been pajama day at school, so she looked extra cute.) So I printed that picture for an activity this week.
I also like to think of activities that don't take much prep or special materials. Granted, sending the picture to Walgreens could have been out of my way, but I get photos printed all the time. Other than that I just used materials on hand: paper, double-sided tape, pencil, marker, index cards.
In addition to working to strengthen K's phonemic awareness and phonics skills, I've been trying to reinforce that, faced with a new word, we look at the LETTERS first. (Rather than trying to guess by the word's shape.) Some of the words I chose for this activity are beyond being able to easily sound out, but I sounded them out FOR her, while pointing to the letters. (Modeling a skill is a great way to reinforce it.*)
I cut out the 4x6 picture of her and taped it on a piece of white cardstock. Then with a pencil I designated which parts of her body we would label. Grabbing my pre-cut blank cards (3x5 index cards cut to 1/3s), I wrote all the words we'd be using and put those cards in a pile. Then I showed her one card at a time; if it was easy she sounded it out and if not, I talked about how to sound out the word. Then I handed her the card so she could copy the word down on the line (reinforcing the letters that accompany each word, which she had just heard and said and associated with a picture of herself. Multi-sensory learning, friends.) She stayed VERY focused on doing this, which reaffirms my suspicion she'd enjoy working with a picture of herself.
I was very pleased that she told me excitedly about learning in school that two E's together make the /ee/ sound - so she was excited to read "knee." She had also just told me she knows how to spell "know," so I was able to relate that to "knee" also. :)
* Modeling is teaching by example. It's giving the student a very clear impression of the skill you're hoping to teach, while removing the pressure of expectations. Pretty much - watch what I do, this is the way to do it.
I use Google News to view news stories in specific categories that interest me; to personalize my results I created sections with certain keywords, including "phonics" and "sight words." Today an article came up that perfectly summarizes the problem of asking children to memorize sight words as units rather than looking at letters in words first.*
“It’s a fact that many students simply can’t learn by memorizing words and facts,” Melanie West recently discussed with a group of parents in Manhattan Beach, California. “When your child is struggling to learn, stop forced memorization and find ways that do work. Simply put, Drill and Kill doesn’t work! Children who are experiencing a slow learning rate are in fact showing you that their brains need deeper, more meaningful learning strategies.”
My struggle with my 1st grade tutoring student ("K") has always been that she resists any new activity I introduce. Heaven help me if I show a moment of indecision or poor planning - she will jump on it and derail us for a long while. Even just that moment as I put one activity aside and grab the materials for another - she can use it for a diversion.
So I tried something new last week.
Before she arrived, I set up 8 different activities all throughout my living room. Each "station" had a few pieces of candy next to it. (I am not above bribery.) When she came in, I gave her a paper lunch bag with her name on it and said that as she completes each activity, she could collect the candy next to it. Not only that, but she could choose which order we do the activities in.
(Because of her attention issues, there's a constant power struggle, even when she's happy to be hanging out with me. This way I've given HER the power over our time together and we don't have to lose time arguing.)
She was so much more focused than usual, and she completed ALL the activities. This requires more planning and set-up ahead of time for me, but I think it will be worth it.
One of the blogs I follow is called GeekMom. I like it because they celebrate intellectual curiosity - plus they talk about technology, education, science fiction, Harry Potter, and LEGOs, among other things.
Last week in a post about Goodreads.com (a site I LOVE), GeekMom Ariane posted this:
There’s a certain level of personal connection that is made with a book when you read it, and while not every book is life changing, I’d like to think every book changes you a little bit. You can’t unread it; Once it’s read you will carry that book around with you somewhere in the recesses of your mind for the rest of your life.
Truer words were never spoken.
P.S. the picture is of my good friend Elauna, on a trip to Barnes & Noble. Oh, how we love that place!
So when it comes to children's books, Mo Willems is basically my hero. Last semester for my Children's Literature class, I wrote my final paper on his books, for which he typically does both the text AND the images (and it included a presentation, complete with examples from several books on an overhead projector . . . I basically rocked it.)
ANYWAY.
Today on Mo's blog he shared that I Broke My Trunk! from his Elephant and Piggie series has been awarded a 2012 Geisel Honor for Early Readers. (You know those shiny circle stickers you sometimes see on picture books? They're often Geisel Honors, or Caldecott. Both are clues that the book is going to be great.)
Seriously, guys, if you haven't checked out his books yet, you MUST. He's made of awesome.
(this picture of the elephant is the one he posted on his blog. When I link to the entry on Facebook, the picture comes with it; I'm following that model. The image belongs to Mo Willems.)
P.S. If you want to see the cutest thing ever, look at the fan mail Mo posts on his blog. ADORABLE.
Today was our first day back to reading lessons after Christmas break. My darling 1st grader "K" was being very resistant to reading any words outloud. (Happens sometimes.) So I improvised with the flashcards Kate and I made to get her interacting with me. :)
First I grabbed a piece of 12x12 cardstock and drew the words and boxes with markers. I set the cards on the floor, gave her the paper, and let her match the cards to the words.
While she was doing that, I picked out a few more cards and placed the movable alphabet letters for each word on top. By removing the task of deciding which letters to use, the task is narrowed to two skills: 1. sounding out the three phonemes (sounds) in the word, 2. matching a letter to each phoneme.
I left her to that while I got up to grab the Go Fish cards, and when I came back she had already finished. (Which is fascinating, as she's still having trouble, especially at school, sounding out words or recognising sight words - which leads me to believe she understands alphabetic principle in theory, but has a mental block about reading. She protests every time I try to get her to read a word, even when she can. My task with her goes beyond just teaching her skills, I have to convince her that she can learn them.)
P.S. An extension of this activity, once a child is confident with it, is to add extra flashcards and extra letters to her choices (being sure to TELL her that there are some she won't need to use.) This way she not only has to sound out the words, but she has to discriminate between her choices - less chance of guessing your way through it.
Today I started reading a new book: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. It's an odd title, I know, but it's going to be awesome. It's rather technical and scientific, and I can tell already that it's going to challenge me because my brain hurts. (Totally serious. Anything having to do with literature or artistic expression is second nature to me, anything having to do with science or math or extreme technicality taxes me greatly.)
OK! The point of this entry - an amazing expression of WHY WE READ, found on page 7:
While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture . . . Reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person's consciousness . . . We never come back quite the same; sometimes we're inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched.
And, finally, what I think might be my strongest reason for being a reader:
We are no longer limited by the confines of our own thinking.
Go forth and read, my friends. :)
(This entry expands on the previous Types of Vocabulary post.)
One of the things that has fascinated me since I started reading about literacy is the word count estimations I come across. I think I'm going to start compiling a list of the number estimations that different texts contain (like I did with recommended WPM for grade-levels - drastically varying data!)
- Usually I see the figure 600,000 for words in the English language.
