How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities

Research indicates a strong relationship between early phoneme awareness and later reading success, and it links some reading failure to insufficiently developed phoneme awareness skills. Intervention research clearly demonstrates the benefits of explicitly teaching phoneme awareness skills. Many children at risk for reading failure are in general education classrooms where phoneme awareness training is not part of their reading program. This article presents a set of developmental phoneme awareness training activities that the special educator can integrate collaboratively into existing kindergarten and first-grade reading programs. Instructional considerations Before preparing to conduct phoneme awareness activities in a general education setting, the special educator needs to become familiar with the method being used to teach reading and should observe the class in action. Phoneme awareness activities work well in classrooms where teachers implement shared reading. Literature Figure 1.

Fluency: Instructional Guidelines and Student Activities Guidelines for instruction Provide children with opportunities to read and reread a range of stories and informational texts by reading on their own, partner reading, or choral reading.Introduce new or difficult words to children, and provide practice reading these words before they read on their own.Include opportunities for children to hear a range of texts read fluently and with expression.Suggest ideas for building home-school connections that encourage families to become involved actively in children's reading development.Encourage periodic timing of children's oral reading and recording of information about individual children's reading rate and accuracy.Model fluent reading, then have students reread the text on their own. What students should read Fluency develops as a result of many opportunities to practice reading with a high degree of success. A text is at students' independent reading level if they can read it with about 95% accuracy. Model fluent reading Repeated reading

Teaching Vocabulary Vocabulary is the knowledge of words and word meanings. As Steven Stahl (2005) puts it, "Vocabulary knowledge is knowledge; the knowledge of a word not only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the world." Vocabulary knowledge is not something that can ever be fully mastered; it is something that expands and deepens over the course of a lifetime. Instruction in vocabulary involves far more than looking up words in a dictionary and using the words in a sentence. Vocabulary is acquired incidentally through indirect exposure to words and intentionally through explicit instruction in specific words and word-learning strategies. wide or extensive independent reading to expand word knowledge instruction in specific words to enhance comprehension of texts containing those words instruction in independent word-learning strategies, and word consciousness and word-play activities to motivate and enhance learning Components of vocabulary instruction Strategies for ELLs:

Reading Aloud to Build Comprehension Once upon a time, there was a grownup, a child, and a very good book. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown is a beloved children's bedtime story. Young children instantly relate to the struggle of the little bunny trying to get to sleep. Such stories are memorable because they move children and allow them to make personal connections that inspire them to think more deeply, to feel more wholeheartedly, and to become more curious listeners. Many of us can remember from our own experience the precious time spent sharing and talking about stories. We remember relating to the friendship between a little girl and a teddy bear named Corduroy in the book of the same name by Don Freeman. We connected to the characters, their situations, or the settings in which the stories took place. Helping children understand what they read This article praises the power of reading aloud and goes a step further to praise the power of thinking out loud while reading to children. The benefits of reading aloud

Syllable Games Marker activity This activity, from our article How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities, is an example of how to teach students to use a marker (i.e., token) to count syllables. The marker activity often used for word counting can be adapted for use in counting syllables. Teachers can provide each child with tokens and two or three horizontally connected boxes drawn on a sheet of paper. The children place a token in each box from left to right as they hear each syllable in a word. Multisyllabic manipulation This example includes several activities and a chart of multisyllabic words. Clapping games Associating syllables with a beat can help students to better learn the concept of syllables within words. Using mirrors The following link includes information on introductory activities such as using mirrors for teaching students about syllables. Jumping syllables This activity teaches student to separate words into syllables.

Blending and Segmenting Games Blending Guess-the-word game This activity, from our article Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines, is an example of how to teach students to blend and identify a word that is stretched out into its basic sound elements. Objective: Students will be able to blend and identify a word that is stretched out into its component sounds. Materials needed: Picture cards of objects that students are likely to recognize such as: sun, bell, fan, flag, snake, tree, book, cup, clock, plane Activity: Place a small number of picture cards in front of children. Robot talk Talking in "Robot Talk," students hear segmented sounds and put them together (blend them) into words.See example > (80K PDF)* Note: To see all Blending/Segmenting Activities from this site, visit here. Blending slide The "Reading Genie" offers teachers a simple way to teach students about blends. Oral blending activity The information here describes the importance of teaching blending skills to young children.

Working on Our Reading Fluency Over the last few weeks, we've been working really hard on learning word families! We do this orally, by listening to chunks in words. My students have been coming up with words in the "at" family, and we sing our word family song. This past week, we've used our knowledge of word families to help with our reading fluency! One of the most important skills for beginning readers to attain is fluency in reading. We used the large foam dice I found at the Dollar Tree because large dice makes any game fun ;) I introduced this game during guided reading groups. Here's a short video of one of my students demonstrating how to play the game. You can try out the at family fluency in your classroom too! We have also started using our Rhyme to Read app during reading groups. Last year was my first year with an iPad in the classroom, and I'm always looking for different ways to use it. We started working on Book 1 since our focus is "at family" words.

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