The Building Blocks of Literacy
10/26/2019
It’s no secret that reading and literacy is a passion of mine, but what you might not know is why I am so passionate about it. On Friday, teachers spent the day experiencing what students with dyslexia might experience. Dyslexia is one of many possible causes of difficulty with reading acquisition. I wanted to take a moment to share my story and literacy journey. I do not have dyslexia, but like many students, reading did not come easily for me, and I did not always enjoy it. In fact, I struggled with reading in first grade. That year, I received reading intervention and my life was changed. I am now an avid and passionate reader. I have made it my mission to share that passion with others and make sure that all children can enjoy the enriching gift of reading.
At PNA, I am not alone in this mission. I feel fortunate to be surrounded by fellow educators who are also dedicated to ensuring that literacy is a gift that all of our students can enjoy. If reading is not coming easily for your child, I hope you are inspired by and find hope in my story and in the fact that there is a talented and dedicated team of teachers partnering with you to help your child become a competent and passionate reader. A foundational component of becoming a competent reader (and writer) is phonics. It, along with phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle, is what unlocks written language for young readers and writers. Heidi Anne Mesmer, author of “Letter Lessons and First Words: Phonics Foundations that Work” captures this perfectly when she writes, “Phonics should be the building of a curiosity--developed by a passionate, informed teacher--about how words work, an inquiry about how the sounds of our language are mapped onto visual symbols. It is discovering the purpose of letters, how letters can work alone or be combined to symbolize sounds, and later in the journey, how the spelling of words quite often intersects with their meaning.” Let’s unpack that a bit. Essentially phonemic awareness is recognizing that our language is made up of individual sounds (phonemes) and that we use sequences of sounds to form spoken words. The alphabetic principle is "the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds." Phonics involves connecting the sounds with their written symbols and using this knowledge to read and write words. When we put words together, we can share our ideas or understand the ideas of others through reading and writing. In the classroom, this involves explicit instruction followed by time for exploration and practice, both in and out of context. The teacher guides the students to explore sounds and letters, their relationship, and how they are used in print. Students study letters and letter patterns and how we use them to represent the sounds that make up words. They listen to and look for patterns; compare sounds, letters and patterns; play games; build letters with straight and curved pieces; build words with tiles, magnetic letters, or labeled unifex cubes; and practice using letters and words in reading and writing (i.e. “in context”), among other things. Explicit instruction means to provide clear, detailed instruction. For example, if I was teaching a lesson about the letter m, I would show students the letter, and say, “This is the lowercase letter m. The uppercase letter looks like this: M. It is a consonant and it represents the sound /m/. /m/ is the first sound we hear in words like monkey and man. It is the last sound we hear in words like ham and zoom.” After the topic is explicitly introduced, it is explored in different ways. We might listen to different words to determine whether or not they begin with or contain /m/ to strengthen their phonemic awareness. Next, students might be invited to build the letter using straight and curved pieces, study it, and note how it is similar and different to other letters, like n or h. They might trace it in various sensory materials or label pictures of items that begin with /m/, like a monkey or a mop. Finally, they might read words that start with /m/ in a predictable text (e.g. I see a mouse. I see a mop.) In this way, we maintain the important focus for all of our work with sounds and letters, which is that they make up words and words carry meaning. Always, students are encouraged to think about letters and sounds and how they are used, to explore their relationships and use them to unlock the world of language and print so that they can communicate with others. Comments are closed.
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Saania AliMs. Ali graduated from the University of Houston with a Bachelors of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies. She specializes in Early Childhood Education, ESL, and Special Education. Her hobbies include traveling, reading, and painting! Archives
April 2021
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