Summary: While some may disagree, most statistics show the key to becoming a successful reader is based on one's phonemic awareness. The building block for for learning to read, spell, connect speech sounds to letters (phonics), and potentially writing all goes back to phonemic awareness. This article demonstrates and provides several options for activities for phonemic awareness. It also compares and contrasts phonological awareness (rhyming, alliteration, syllable segmenting and blending, and sentence segmenting) with phonemic awareness (sound matching, counting phonemes, blending phonemes, isolating beginning or ending phonemes, substituting phonemes, etc.).
This article did a great job comparing and contrasting phonological awareness with phonemic awareness. Before, I was slightly confused with all the variations of ways to teach something, they all started running together. This article not only explained what the differences were, but gave reasons as to why they were important, and then demonstrated how a teacher could use them in her own classroom.
Another concept that I grasped was the importance of allow students the opportunity to explore all areas of phonological awareness. By blending, integrating, and connecting all the concepts into reading, writing, spelling, etc. students are going to learn quicker through reinforcement. "Providing children with rich language experiences that encourage active exploration..." (91) will allow them to learn the bigger picture faster, which in turn will lead to better, faster, and more efficient readers early on.
While I might have been skeptical about how much teaching phonemic awareness can make or break what kind of a reader a child will be, I no longer am. This article did a fantastic job of providing evidence to back up its points.
Diller, D. (2007). Making the most of small groups, differentiation for all. Stenhouse Pub.
No comments:
Post a Comment