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Posts Tagged ‘teaching’

Brenda Geier K-12 Reading Specialist – The research tells us that with the support of parents, caregivers, and early childhood educators, as well as exposure to a literacy-rich environment, children progress from emergent to conventional reading. By interacting through reading aloud and conversation, children are exposed to learning early. It is very important to read aloud to children and provide opportunities for them to talk about the stories that they hear. As Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson (1985) state, “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children, especially during the preschool years”. It helps them develop oral language, cognitive skills, and concepts of print and phonemic awareness.

Children read to develop background knowledge about a range of topics and build a large vocabulary, which aids them in later comprehension and development of reading strategies. They also watch how others read and therefore become familiar with the reading process. They are constantly learning.

Still, many enter elementary school without a strong background in literacy. These are the children who are most at risk of developing reading problems. To provide high chances of success, teachers should be involved in professional development to learn more about child development as it relates to literacy acquisition.

At age 3-4, children begin to “read” their favorite books by themselves. They begin to use “mock handwriting” (Clay, 1975). Around age 5, in kindergarten, most children are considered emergent readers. They make rapid growth in literacy skills if they are exposed to literacy-rich environments (Burns, Griffin, & Snow, 1999). Children may try to recall what has been written or use a picture created with the text to reread instead of using the letter clues (Kamberelis & Sulzby, 1988; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Although they are beginning to apply phonetic knowledge to create invented spellings, there is a lapse in time before they use phonetic clues to read what they write.

For those parents who choose to home-school their children, an enormous advantage exists to teach children phonetic knowledge, sight words and decoding before they enter school. This learning advantage gives them power with text that most will not be equipped with.

Most children will become early readers during the first grade. They commonly look at beginning and ending letters in order to decode unfamiliar words (Clay, 1991; Pinnell, 1996b; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). They know a small number of sight words.

By second grade, they are transitional readers, able to read unknown text with more independence. They use meaning, grammatical, and letter cues more fully and use pictures in a limited way while reading (Clay, 1991; International Reading Association & National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1998; Pinnell, 1996b; Snow, burns, & Griffin, 1998). Transitional spellers can apply spelling rules, patterns, and other strategies to put words on paper.

By the third grade, children are typically fluent readers. They can read for meaning while focusing less on decoding. They may use transitional and phonetic spellings to spell infrequently used words.

The child’s concept of words changes as the child’s literacy development evolves. Children construct their own knowledge thus the difference between how an adult understands reading and writing and how a child understands reading and writing.

Children progress through several categories of phonological skills from rhyming to blending. The most difficult task involves the complete segmentation of phonemes and manipulation of them to form new words (Griffith & Olson, 1992; Hall & Moats, 1999). If we begin teaching our children how to segment and manipulate phonemes at the pre-school age, they will have the tools necessary to spell correctly, understand the meaning of words and be able to write and read complete sentences with ease.

Screen and assessment are crucial tools to determine children’s literacy needs. Data helps teachers identify children who are developing at a less than normal pace and are in need of intervention. The earlier, the better to find these children. Throughout kindergarten and first grade, children can be screened for phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge, and an understanding of basic language concepts (Texas Education Agency, 1997a). Performance based assessments, such as observational records of reading and writing, developmental benchmarks, and portfolios can also be used to inform daily teaching (Allington & Cunningham, 1996; Burns, Griffin, & Snow, 1999; international Reading Association & National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1998; Slegers, 1996).

Teachers, parents and caregivers need to understand and support children’s emergent literacy and, in later years, children’s transition to conventional reading and writing. Teachers, administrators, and specialists must understand the developmental nature of emergent literacy and early conventional literacy and ensure that the curriculum and instructional materials are appropriate. Parents need to be educated in child development and support sharing and exploring literacy with their children. The literacy program needs to support children’s social, emotional, aesthetic, maturational, and cognitive needs. The reading program must be balanced and include quality literature, writing opportunities, development of phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge.

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Your computer can be used as a creative tool in your quest to learn a foreign language. Some innovative ideas can turn your language education into an entertaining, truly memorable experience.

* Audio Modification

Many companies produce software packages that enable you to transform your voice (or someone else’s). You can make your voice feminine, masculine, or robotic. It can be raised to a high pitch or lowered to bass tones.

So how does this help you learn a new language?

Many foreign languages (French and German, for example) assign gender to nouns. When learning new vocabulary, why not record feminine nouns in a female voice, masculine nouns in a male voice, and neuter nouns in a robotic voice? This approach can also be used with other types of vocabulary learning. Perhaps you could record a list of German dative verbs in a woman’s voice and a list of German accusative verbs in a male voice. You can even take audio files that have been recorded by other people and make them more interesting by morphing voices or adding sound effects.

An internet search for ‘voice cloaking’ or ‘voice modification software’ will provide numerous resources to choose from.

* Don’t Just Print

If you own a color printer you can spice up your vocabulary lists with bursts of color – perhaps feminine nouns in red, masculine nouns in blue, and neuter in dark grey. You might want to highlight irregular verbs in another color – or perhaps apply bold or italics to make them stand out on the page. Experiment with various fonts and weights.
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More than likely, when you learned how to add, you started on the right and moved to the left. If you were adding whole numbers, you added the ones, “carried” if necessary, and repeated for the tens, hundreds and so on. This works well on paper, and it is the most efficient paper and pencil method; however, adding in the other direction has several desirable advantages: the left to right method promotes a better understanding of place value, it can be done mentally with much greater ease, and it does not require that numbers be lined up in a column. Students can learn left to right addition, so they have another method to choose from when presented with addition problems.

Left to right addition involves adding the largest place values first. As you move from left to right, you keep a cumulative total, so it is simply a number of smaller addition problems. To give you an idea of how it works and what it sounds like, consider the example, 677 + 938.

Begin by adding the left most place values. In the example this is 600 plus 900 equals 1500. Add the values in the next place, one at a time, to the previous sum, and keep track of the new sum each time. In the example, 1500 + 70 is 1570, 1570 + 30 is 1600. For students who are more proficient at this algorithm, they don’t necessarily think “plus 70″ or “add 30.” Their thought process, if said out loud might sound like, “600, 1500, 1570, 1600, . . .” Continue adding the values in each subsequent place until finished. The final steps in the example are 1600 + 7 is 1607, 1607 plus 8 is 1615. The sum is 1615.
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The following strategies are offered for enhancing language skills and managing language challenges. This listing is by no means exhaustive, but rather is meant as a place to begin.

Alice Thomas and Glenda Thorne

1. Take the mystery away.

The first and perhaps most important strategy is to teach students about the components of language, common language challenges and language strategies, and to help students understand their own language strengths and challenges. This process is sometimes called demystification – taking the mystery away.

2. Simplify directions.

Students with receptive language challenges may need directions broken down into their simplest form. They may also benefit from a comic book-type illustration of steps to take for the completion of a task.

3. Give written copies of directions and examples.

Students with receptive language challenges may need directions given to them at a relatively slow pace. They may need directions repeated to them. They most often benefit from having a written copy of directions that are given orally. Examples of what needs to be done are also useful.

4. Provide frequent breaks.

Students who have receptive language challenges may use up a lot of energy listening, and, therefore, tire easily. Consequently, short, highly structured work times with frequent breaks or quiet periods may be helpful.

5. Give additional time.

Students with receptive and expressive language challenges are likely to have a slower processing speed and should be allowed additional time for written work and tests.

6. Sit Close.

A student may want to sit close to the teacher so he can watch the facial expression of the teacher when s/he is talking. This may also help to diminish interference from other auditory distractions.

7. Allow voluntary participation.

Students with language processing challenges should not be put on the spot by being required to answer questions during class discussions, especially without being forewarned. Rather, their participation should be on a voluntary basis.

8. Teach summarizing and paraphrasing.

Reading comprehension is often enhanced by summarizing and paraphrasing. This helps students to identify the main idea and supporting details. It may be helpful to provide key words such as who, what, when, where and why to orient attention to the appropriate details.

9. Teach a staging procedure.

Most students find a staging procedure beneficial when writing paragraphs, essays, poems, reports and research papers. First they should generate ideas, and then they should organize them. Next, they should attend to spelling and grammatical rules. They may also list their most frequently occurring errors in a notebook and refer to this list when self correcting.

10. Encourage renewed investment of energy in older students.

Older students who have experienced reading failure from an early age must become convinced that a renewed investment of energy will be worthwhile. According to Louisa Moats, an expert in the field of reading, older students who are very poor readers must have their phonological skills strengthened because the inability to identify speech sounds erodes spelling, word recognition, and vocabulary development. Phonological awareness, spelling, decoding, grammar, and other language skills can be taught as a linguistics course in which instructors use more adult terminology such as phoneme deletion and morphemic structure. Phonemic drills may include games such as reverse-a-word (Say teach; then say it with the sounds backwards – cheat.)
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