Module 2 Response

Sue Ann Mayberry
Dr. Mary Swanson
Module 2
Phonological Awareness and Phonics
One important thing I gained from chapter 6 is that phonemes monitor the changes that occur in your mouth as you pronounce words (p. 111). For example gestures: your lips are closed for /p/, and then your tongue is tapping the roof of your mouth for /t/ also hissing of /s/ or buzzing of /z/ (p.111).
I also learned from chapter 6 that Spanish and Chinese students’ confusion will become apparent when they “segment English words into phonemes and write letters into representing the phones” (p. 114). Therefore, I realize that these students will benefit from explicit phoneme instruction.
Chapter 5 of our book states that “students who have doubts about their ability to learn something are less likely to try to learn it and more likely to give up when they encounter difficulty” (p. 89). Chapter 5 of our book it also says “One of the most important aspects of motivation is self-confidence (also called self-efficacy) (p. 89). With this information I know that as a teacher, I will need to have an encouraging atmosphere in my classroom so that students will want to learn.
One way I plan to implement research into my classroom is through Quick-Writes. Students will write a paragraph describing what they liked best from the book they read at home. After students have written down their paragraphs, they will go back and underline the phoneme that we are working with. This will help me determine whether students understand phonemes and to reinforce the phoneme skills we are working with. Another way I could use Quick-Writes, which would change how I teach in my classroom, is have a sentence on the board and have students write a few sentences down that will go along with the sentence I have on the board. While students are writing, I will be taking roll or lunch count.
When I used Quick-Writes in my classroom it gave me the opportunity to take lunch count and attendance in a quiet atmosphere. It also allowed me to determine if students knew the phoneme that we were working with, when I had them underline them in the paragraph they wrote. It was a helpful tool to use in my classroom.
The article “Phonemic Awareness”(2006), it states that “rime-based instruction is used in a number of successful reading programs. “For example, when wheat is used in a sentence, such as The little red hen gathered the wheat; a student might be taught to compare it to meat and say, “If m-e-a-t is meat then this is wheat” (p. 623). Then students would use wheat in the sentence to see if it made sense. In doing this exercise students are learning comprehension as well as decoding skills. Rime-based instruction worked well in my classroom to teach patterns of letters through sounding out words and showing similarities between words.
Another good point the Phonemic Awareness article talks about is that when teachers are using the basal reading program, they may want to “rearrange the phonics lesson, so that a more appropriate element is taught with each story that is being read” (p. 622). “For example, Trachtenburg (1990) suggests beginning by reading a quality children’s story as Angus and the Cat, providing instruction in a highly utility phonics element appearing in that story (short a in this case), and using that element to help read another book (such as The Cat in the Hat or Who Took the Farmer’s Hat?)” (p. 622). When I used this approach in my classroom, it reinforced the phonics skills that I wanted students to obtain.