A follow up post, how is reading going in our play-based class

At the beginning of this term I wrote a blog post about the changes I wanted to make to our reading. This blog post is located here.

Currently we read individually with children that are developmentally ready, this may be after four months at school, or eight months, or even a year. It really doesn't matter and we do not engage with reading until we feel a child is ready.

Currently in our group of 38 we are reading with around 14 children. We make sure we check in with them at least twice a week. We have about ten children who are close to being developmentally ready.

My lightbulb moment at the end of last term was around phonics. I have always believed that exposure and specific teaching (when ready) of the letter (symbol) and sound relationship was absolutely essential. However I then just expected children to know how to use this understanding in the reading process. Often I pushed on with the development of other strategies in reading thinking that the ability to sound out would 'just happen.' It wasn't until I read a post about decodable books on face book that a light went on for me.

In my usual enthusiasm I madly downloaded as many free books as I could and purchased some cheaper ones from amazon (scholastic) and star fall. The intention being to try them out and invest in more expensive ones that have a more NZ context if we see the benefit.

Well, can I just say wow, wow, wow! These texts have quickly allowed children to develop confidence and make the link between what they know about phonics to the text. Their eyes light up when they realise there are no 'tricks.'

It has only been four weeks, but already this approach is paying off for us. Not only in reading, but also in writing. Confidence is brimming and we have helped to make the link between our direct teaching of phonics and reading.

Thank you to whoever started the conversation on face book, you have already helped to make a huge difference for our children.

If you are looking for a cute way to help children develop early phonetic awareness, check these guys out.

Not related to decodable texts, but does relate to our work with storytelling. This guy is brilliant, Tony's Sketchbook. Love it.

And a math twist, these guys are super cute!

Comments

ThinkSRSD - my journey so far with my Year 1 and 2 class

A reflection of my journey - slideshow shows my progress this term as detailed in this blog post. Introduction to SRSD If you have been following any of my posts, you will know that my journey into evidence-based practice in all areas led me to SRSD (Self-Regulated Strategy Development) last year. I started to explore what I could find online and quickly realised that, even though I was only scratching the surface of what SRSD is, the impacts on my class's writing were obvious. I listened to numerous podcasts and read as much as I could find, discovering that SRSD truly fits the bill for an evidence-based approach to writing. I must preface this by saying that I am not an expert; my qualifications lie in my commitment to using best practices and making this work in a typical New Zealand classroom. Professional Learning Development (PLD) with ThinkSRSD As a staff, we collectively decided to undertake Professional Learning Development (PLD) in ThinkSRSD. Our goal is to develop a sh...

The Power of Simple Organisers: Building Independence in Young Writers, Intentionally Linking Reading and Writing

The Power of Simple Organisers: Building Independence in Young Writers, Intentionally linking Reading and Writing Why a Basic Organiser Struck a Chord Recently, I shared a very basic organiser for reading comprehension on my Facebook page—something I have used frequently in my classroom. I was genuinely surprised by how popular the post became. It’s clear there’s a real hunger among teachers for practical ways to foster writing independence in young learners. With that in mind, I wanted to share the reasoning behind this organiser and how it fits into the wider journey of developing independent writers. Laying the Foundations: Sentence-Level Understanding My class of six- and seven-year-olds are building solid foundations as writers. We’ve invested a lot of time working at the sentence level, using Colourful Semantics to help children understand how sentences are constructed. From there, we began to add greater detail using planners inspired by Colourful Semantics, linking this with th...

Puppets in my play-based class....why they work so well

I have been using puppets in my classroom for years now. It wasn't until I started using puppets with Number Agency that I actually started to stop and think about why they work so well. When children see the puppet villain their eyes light up, they are excited, engaged and interact very authentically with this imagined character. In fact if you hand one of the agents the puppet they can easily take on the character. I will often see quite shy children come alive with a puppet on their hand, or when they are talking to a puppet. Because of this high level of engagement I started to use puppets last year more widely to explore emotions and friendships. The results were amazing, children seemed to relate beautifully to the puppet and in a way the puppet could convey the message so much better than I could. When the puppets started to create short videos for the children to watch the learning really came alive. The Empathy family was able to guide us...

Number Agents

Search This Blog