Teaching Phonics,
High-Frequency Words, and Fluency
As a first grade teacher, I already
implement several of the methods/activities listed in this PowerPoint in my
classroom. I did like the suggestion to use hand signals with a word as a method
of teaching short vowel sounds. I use keyword cards during phonics instruction
for this same purpose, but I think the students would remember a hand signal
when they don’t have access to the cards. I also liked the modified Bingo
example. That would be a great activity for me to include in my literacy center
block. My students currently participate in the “Making Words” and “Building Words”
activities, the secret word clues activity, and sorting activities. I also have
a word wall that I add new words to regularly and a center involving a poem
each week.
Vocabulary Development
I use semantic, syntactic, and
phonic prompts during my guided reading lessons to help students decode words
and develop strategies to help them during independent reading. I didn’t
realize that high frequency words make up approximately 50 percent of words in
continuous text. This just shows how important it is for students to learn to
recognize these words in text. My students have a list of sight words and a
corresponding list of phrases that use the sight words to help them learn to recognize
the word and how it is used in context. I liked the idea of singing high-frequency
words. My first grade students always seem to enjoy the incorporation of music
into instruction. My students also participate in read-along activities on the
computers. I also stress the importance of reading aloud to children to my
parents. When children see and hear words while they follow along in a story they
become more familiar with difficult or high frequency words and will eventually
be able to recognize these words on their own. I am also a big supporter of repeated
readings and partner or alternate readings. This is another area I stress to my
parents. I use poems and fluency passages for repeated reading practice, but I have
recently included reader’s theatre scripts into my guided reading instruction
to promote repeated readings as well as oral reading. I also agree that
charting student progress is a great way to show students their growth and keep
them motivated. I use the fluency passages for cold and hot reads. Recording
the cold and hot read scores show the students how their reading has improved
on a certain passage due to repeated readings over the course of a week.
Assessing Vocabulary
Seeing a breakdown of the different
kinds of words into tiers was interesting and informative. Vocabulary skills definitely
play a big role in comprehension. If a student can read the word but really doesn’t
know what the word means then he/she is losing meaning of the text. I also
agree that there are different levels of “knowing” a word. Classroom conversations,
read-alouds, and the use of rich language is something I am seeing an emphasis
on this year with the implementation of the Common Core Standards. I liked the “everyone
gets 5” quiz suggestion. This is a quick and simple way to assess each students
understanding of certain words. I also like the suggestions on slide 8. I would
like to start using activities such as these more often in my classroom.
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