Lead a Phonemic Awareness/Phonics Activity/Spelling Activity

Date:
3/12/08 ~20 minutes

Summary:
The activity I led on this day involved students forming word from a begging letter/sound and an ending sound. For example they are given the base tile "__op" then they cover next to this "s","sh","m","x","d", etc. the students are then to write all of the words they come up with on a separate sheet of paper. The rule of thumb is for students to write all of the words that they think are real words, if they think it could be a real word then go ahead and write in on your paper. One word they could get from the example is "shop" adding the tile "sh" to the base tile "__op".

Reflection:

When connecting back to course content, this activity aided me in differentiating between phonemic awareness/phonics and spelling. When looking at what this activities main purpose is, it is to recognize how certain letters make certain sounds and if those sounds can formulate words. The one this that is not stressed in the activity is spelling, many time students would have made up words written on their paper, however the words still flowed and followed a linguistic word structure. This shows that the students are able to recognize how a word should look and sound, able to discriminate between made up words such as “wlat” and “clat”. As with many of the other activities, the students are given a certain level of trust to complete their task quietly. However to ensure that they are actually working and not socializing during this time, the teacher has them write the words they came up with. This serves a dual purpose. The first purpose is for the student to begin to see patterns and relationships with certain words and letters. The second purpose is a check that the teacher has. If the student only has three or four words on their piece of paper, then the teacher knows that the student was not staying on task during the time they were trusted to do so.

One thing I noticed about students’ literacy development with this activity is something that I did not expect at first. This activity also allows for students to hear and see how vowels make different sounds to form word. Often times the base tiles will focus on sort vowel sounds one day “__at” and the next day the students will be asked to use the same vowel, but the long vowel sound “__ate”, so the student is able to see the similarities and differences between the word “bate” and “bate”. This activity is something I see myself using in future practices. I like how students are introduced to an array of word, not just words written on cards, but words that they have created themselves. This becomes a sort of game for the students and again we see a way in which fun and learning can be incorporated. At times you can see the students betting who is going to be able to make the most real words. When I see one kids bragging, I usually sit down by his word list and point out four or five words that are not real, not to de-motivate them, but in a friendly playful way remind them that it is okay to have fun but the goal of this activity is not to race it is to find words.