Literacy 

School Practice: In our classroom this year, we will be using an evidence-based curriculum called Heggerty (2003) to support phonemic awareness skill development. This is a quick lesson every day first thing in the morning to get students ready for later phonics instruction. As a group students listen for the initial, medial and final sounds in words, blend and segment sounds, and even substitute sounds in words (the most difficult of the sound tasks). For example, I may have students say “beep” then change /b/ to /sh/ and tell me the new word.  

Home Practice: A familiar game such as I Spy could be easily adapted to build phonemic awareness skills and played anywhere! Next time you head to the grocery store try playing “I Spy something that starts with the sound...” 

Phonics instruction is the explicit pairing of speech sounds to sound-symbols, or letters. This is usually the component of literacy most people associate with “learning to read” as it is the foundational step of learning the alphabetic code. In second grade we strive to ensure students are able to fluently decode all 6 Syllable types, which students were introduced to in first grade, but may still need practice in acquiring proficiency with. For your reference, the 6 Syllable Types are:  

1. Closed Syllables (cat, bin, run, pot) 

2. Open Syllables (he, she, hi, fly) 

3. Vowel-Consonant-E Syllables (home, kite, mule, stone) 

4. R-Controlled Vowel Syllables (fur, girl, horn, car) 

5. Vowel Team Syllables (boy, soup, play, foot)  

6. Consonant-LE Syllables (humble, boggle, thimble, puzzle)  

School Practice: We use Fundations (2002)  for phonics instruction. It is a well-researched program that teaches phonics explicitly and systematically (this type of phonics instruction is known as synthetic phonics). Students will spend a significant portion of whole group instruction working with these syllable patterns both for reading and spelling purposes and will then be able to start reading multisyllabic words that contain a variety of syllable patters (rainbow, racetrack, toothpaste).  

Home Practice: This is where the real “homework” is! Students should be decoding (sounding out and or fluently reading) as much as possible at home and there is text all around us! Encouraging students to read ads, text messages, recipes, labels, really anything they can get their hands on will be beneficial. They may not have mastered the “code” yet enough to read everything that is out there, but practicing and observing the practical applications of literacy in daily life will support their literacy skills tremendously.  

Another important component of word recognition involves fluency in reading words that do not seem to follow the logic of English (believe it or not, there is logic behind our language!). In our class, we call these words “heart words.” This is because there is a part of the word that they cannot simply sound out. They have to memorize these heart parts/words so they can read and spell them correctly.  

School Practice: Every week students will have heart words to practice as a group (some of these they will already have mastered) as well as in a small group (these will be tailored to them individually based on a high frequency word assessment I have given each student based on Fry’s 200 most frequently used words). In class we will look at the word, for example “is” and analyze what parts follow the rules by putting a check mark above, for example, the “i” because it makes the /i/ sound as expected. However, a heart will go above or around the parts that do not follow the rules, such as how the “s” in this word say /z/ rather than /s/ (even though it can make the /z/ sound as well, but in that case is most often found between two vowels such as in the word “nose” and “rose”).  

Home Practice: This is where frequently writing out heart words in fun ways at home can be beneficial as repeated practice aids in the long-term storage of information. Some research has shown that using a variety of methods can help the group of neurons in the brain that filters information, known as the Reticular Activating System (RAS), to focus into the content that is being delivered (Bell, 2017). For example, students could write there words in chalk, with a dry erase marker on a window or mirror, in a sandbox with a chopstick or simply in the air with their arm.  

Readers not only need to learn to “break the code” fluently, but they also need to understand that meaning of the code they break. Language comprehension is, therefore, the other key component of the reading equation. Vocabulary development is an essential part of understanding language. One of the best ways to develop a child’s vocabulary is to expose them to reading daily by either reading to them or with them. According to a well-known study (Nagy & Herman, 1987), children who are exposed to reading for 20 minutes per day develop significantly larger vocabularies than those who read for less, which has far-reaching implications not only on the child’s academic success, but on their career and overall life-satisfaction. There are many other benefits to reading daily (perhaps too many to note here, but I have provided links to various sources below for more information), but another aspect of language comprehension is the ability to understand complex grammatical structures. Exposure to a variety of texts can support this. Finally, students need to encounter a vast range of ideas and information. It has been said that to learn something you must know something, and this is true! This is yet another reason why “building background knowledge” is so important.