The Beginning Reader's Toolkit - Activities and Strategies
The activities is this chapter are designed to target a specific skill and meet the needs of yours students after assessments. These activities will help your students understand how words work and how to use them correctly in writing and reading. The chapter divided the activities into four main categories: reading words, writing words, manipulating words, and transferring words.
Reading Words
These activities will give students the opportunity to practice reading words which will lead to automaticity and fluency. Many activities under this category includes word sorts. These sorts allow students to focus on the sounds they hear and manipulate the beginning or end sounds to create new, but similar sound words. Sentence building, timed reading, word bingo, concentration, and other word board games are other activities to practice reading words. Think-aloud strategies, guided practice, and independent practice is encouraged during these activities. Modifications for the activities are also provided, like practicing during center time independently, providing scaffolding questions, and prompting decoding strategies.
Writing Words
The activities provided in this category allows students to practice spelling words and writing them during instruction time. Writing words and sorting them, creating an interactive word wall to use in the classroom, and word booklets are a few resources that students can access to help with spelling. Sentence bingo and other game boards that have students write and spell are some activities that can be provided during center time.
Manipulating Words
These next activities require the students to blend, segment, and change the sounds of words. As they focus on changing phonemes of beginnings and ends of words, the students better understand how words work. Oral activities where the teacher provides phonemes for students to blend are suggested for classroom use. A hand puppet with a movable mouth can also engage students while listening to the sounds. Letter tiles and other manipulatives with letters displayed can also help students visualize and associate phonemes with letters.
Transferring Word Knowledge to Context
These activities will help students transfer their knowledge of words into reading and writing. Dictation sentences and word hunts are activities that will help student connect the idea of words and writing and reading together. Word hunts can focus on a specific spelling word or even spelling pattern, like long e. Graphic organizers of specific spelling patterns can be displayed in the classroom to use as resources. I use these in my classroom and I find that the students refer to the anchor charts often to help with spelling out words.
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ReplyDeleteWhen reading about your activities and strategies for the beginning reader's toolkit, I saw some similarities in beginning and transitional activities(word sorts, concentration, graphic organizers, etc). I will definitely incorporate sorts into my weekly word work activities. Overall, it seemed as if this activity is very effective and powerful in helping students to compare, contrast, and categorize their words. I liked that the book suggested having the students time their sorts and trying to beat their scores. I tried this with one of my struggling readers today, and sent it home with him to work on. His mom told me that he had told her that it really helped him! I also think it is important thought to have students tell you how the words look and sound the same, and pointing those out. Overtime as students show progress, the sorts can incorporate multisyllabic words as well.
ReplyDeleteJamie,
DeleteWord sorts have definitely been a reoccurring activity among the different stages of reading and writing. Understanding and automatically recognizing the spelling patterns in words can be supported by this activity, as the students see the pattern, hear the pattern, and manipulate it to make other words. As the students recognize these letter combinations in words, it encourages other reading and writing skills to take place, like chunking.
During interactive writing, every Monday, my class always does a word sort with the patterns of the week. For instance, this week's spelling patterns were the dipthongs: ou and ow. We talked about the sound they make and the combination of letters that make the sound. Then I had them read the sample words on the word wall and then come up with their own "ou" and "ow" words with the "ow" sound. After, we'd write their created words on our chart paper, read them together, spell them correctly, and come up with more. The kids love it! They really get to manipulate the words and bring new sounds to make new words! It's great!
I think there were many great ideas in this chapter for teachers to easily incorporate into their classrooms (using the puppets, word sorts, word hunts, graphic organizers, etc). Or perhaps they are already incorporating them but perhaps place more emphasis on them since these are shown to have positive results.
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