Today I read a blog post on Beginning Reading Help that I think is highly important. It was called, "What are phonemes?" I was required to take a linguistics class in my undergrad if I wanted to become a teacher. In this class we spent entire class periods discussing phonemes. I, like many other college students, had never heard of them before. This is sad because they are quite literally the basic building blocks to our language. I use them every day and never even knew it. When we are teaching children to read, we focus on all the rules but often forget to teach them what they are learning and what it is all about. That is why I like this post, it focuses on discussing phonemes and learning them. Knowing phonemes will help students with their reading, writing, and spelling skills. Once again, phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language. This can sometimes be a single letter sound, such as /b/ but it can also be more than that, such as the /sh/ sound. I love that the blogger has not only included information on phonemes and the importance of learning them, but also games and resources that are available. I went to the Pumpkin Patch game and found it to be very helpful. I love all the animation and sounds. It also helps in learning how to isolate phonemes. The site is located at: http://www.professorgarfield.org/Phonemics/pumpkin_patch/pumpkin_patch.html. Happy Phonemes!
I read an article about how parents can improve children's reading comprehension, that was posted on Monday of this week. I found it to be a great blog post. This is often a question that parents have and I will say, sometimes as a future teacher I have some worries about talking to parents and knowing what to say. This lays out a nice colorful list of ideas to tell parents. A lot of what she had to say are things that I have constantly heard Groth talk about in our classes. The first one is provide books and other reading materials. This is a crucial point, you cannot expect a child to get better at reading if they are not given things to read. That moves into the next tip, which is to value reading time. I agree with this. I feel a lot of people think of reading time as a chore and look forward to when they can stop reading. This is horrible. As teachers and parents we need to not only encourage reading and provide the materials but also make it fun and talk about how important it is to take time to sit down and read. The highlighted points continue to say that you must read with students of all ages. I can't stress this enough. EVERYONE needs to spend time reading, that means even you as a teacher, and that also includes the older kids, we often feel don't need to be read with, but that is just not the case. Lastly, show children that reading is about getting the meaning. While knowing the words or sounding them out is important and a basic part to reading, the more important part is understand what is being conveyed by the words. I really appreciate this nice short list, but what's even better is the extend details, examples, and tips the post gives about each point it brings up. One of my favorite ideas is to turn off the TV and be entertained by a book. This is the kind of mentality
Today's post is about an article titled, "Learning Common Phonics Rules and Sounding Out Tricks." I chose to read this article because it related to what I deal with every day in the Kindergarden placement I'm in currently. The kindergarten age is a level where children are learning how to spell and write. The ability to sound out words is a major tool to learning how to spell. This is also when students are learning the basic phonics rules. This is why this article is a great one to read.
In the article, the author lays out the common rules very nicely. Having the rule bolded helps in navigating through them quickly. I will be looking over these rules on a regular basis because they explain the concepts in a simple and easy to understand way. The list does not have everything but it has quite a few. These are a lot of the main rules that help teachers and students. The links that are included in this are also very helpful. I visited them and I'm saving these for later use. I really appreciate the games that are included on the Reading Bear website. These first lay out the rules, examples, and then games to ensure understanding. One particular rules that I was happy to read was the one about spellings of the sound /sh/. I have known about these, such as ti, si, and ci, but never thought about it out loud and with purpose. Once again, it can be hard for someone who is a proficient speller to simplify things in order to explain them to students who don't know how to read, write, or spell, these tips help with that problem. Today I'm looking over a post titled "Encourage Young Children to Draw, Scribble, and Write." The very first thing I have to comment on is the title. I love this idea. We were talking about this in Groth's class and about how important it is to let students express themselves in any way that they can. I've been with kindergarteners all semester and I have found this out first hand, it is important to let students get experience doing all these activities, even if they are not using proper or correct Engilsh spelling or grammar. The point of this is to expose them to it, prepare them for the future, and work at teaching the students to be creative. The subtitle talks about giving students blank pieces of paper and let them go. This really is a wonderful idea and we need to give students these opportunities to use their minds to create something from nothing. I also appreciated that the author included work from her own children. This made me chuckle because Dr. Groth has been bringing in a lot of her own children's work over the last few weeks, and a few of the pieces reminded me of the pieces on the website. It is always a fun game interpreting what the students are trying to convey as their message. It is important to remember to find out from the student what they were saying and write it down, so you can refer back to it later. This is what the author does with the examples her children made. This was a great article that brought together things I've seen in my placement and talked about in class. What I really liked about it was the idea of just giving children a blank piece of paper and letting them go. I will b
Page By Page is a blog created by literature expert Maria Salvadore. I love the set up of this blog. It is very colorful and filled with pictures and other fun things. The side bar with the different links to pages is wonderful. If I were to create a blog on a content area, I would include this on my blog. She appears to keep up with her blog rather frequently, given there is a post from two days ago, and the one before that was on the 15th of this month. The pages on top of the blog are also helpful, since they break down who would benefit from each page (ex. For Parents).
The post from two days ago, titled, "Strong, Vivid Narratives, Inspire, In Nonfiction, Too!" I selected this post to look over because today in Groth's class we discussed nonfiction literature. This post, like the presentation in class, highlights the importance of nonfiction. I liked that this post brought up the idea of the power of narrative in nonfiction. It wars also nice to see this was linked to a article written in the New York Times. I have always been a fan of nonfiction, but the idea of thinking about it as vivid and invok This website has a huge wealth of knowledge. As a future teacher, I'm going to bookmark this blog because it has so many great and diverse ideas. I also like the inclusion of videos on this blog. I feel that it adds something extra and ties in the arts to literacy. One specific post that I liked was about free online comic books. I believe that many people forget how useful comic books can be when teaching literature. I recently was in a fifth grade class and saw how many students were reading comic books during their DEAR time. It was shocking. Students love comic books, so the idea of having a variety of free websites where they can see comics is a great idea of how to bring literature and technology into the classroom.
I recently saw something from another post on this blog. There was a post titled, "Videos to Teach Phonics with Magnetic Letters." I saw these letters being used during a reading center with a teacher. I was sadly unable to observe a lot of this interaction but seeing them in the classroom and on this blog encourages me to use them when I'm a teacher. This blog post was helpful in giving me ideas on how I can use them in the classroom. The best thing about this post is that it has a LOT of videos. I hate when people post two videos and say they have lots of information for you. The variety is a necessity and Today I looked over the Paper Tigers Blog. This blog focuses on literacy and specifically great for looking at multicultural books for young readers. The article I read brought up that it is the 10th Anniversary of this blog. I'm shocked to know this but also shows that this blog must be a good one for it to be able to last this long. The article was written by Sherry York. It is about the Top Ten Authentic Historical Picture Books. What I really loved about this article is that it listed books that show US history from points of view that are not normally presented. This is very important because as a teacher, you need to be very aware of what topics you do and do not present to your students. This book helps teachers include topics and points of view that can often get forgotten about. This is something we learned even more about in the Social Studies Inventory done this semester in EDCI 554. Looking over that list, I realized how many things I would have forgotten to make sure I had in my classroom library. I have not heard of any of these books, but I'm looking forward to finding them at the library or on Amazon so I can add them to my collection. I can tell from the titles that they cover topics and groups that are not as commonly covered by other books. It can be so hard to find good books, there are just so many books out there, having this blog guide you in the right direction and help weed through some of the different options, by pointing to the good ones, can be a great help as a teacher.
The other thing I like about this website is it's outreach program. One specific blog post talks about Shanghai, China. The post included pictures of work done by the students there. The work done by the students is in reference to three books from the 2011 Book Set that the blog has. The work done by the students is rather impressive. It can also help give teachers on idea of things they can do with their students. This is also important because a teacher can show this and the rest of the blog to their own students, as a way to show connections to the rest of the world. A teacher could have their students read the same books, do their own project, and then compare to the work that was done by the students in China. This blog offers so many different things to a teacher, books to choose from, project ideas, and outreach connections. I find this blog to be very helpful and look forward to following it and continuing to find books that I can add to my classroom library. |
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