Reading and Observing

While doing the readings for our literacy class, I got excited when I started recognizing things I am seeing in my placement. When I read about analogy-based phonics, I immediately thought about the private assessment my teacher did with one of her students. I will call this boy Sam. Our book describes analogy-based phonics as teaching children to identify new words by noticing shared letter groups. It’s funny because they used the same example my teacher used: 'at' in hat, fat, etc. Sam is an ESL student. She started off with the word 'at'. Once she went over the pronunciation of ‘at’, and once she felt he knew it, she moved on to the other words: sat, hat, bat, fat, and rat. They used zoo phonics to put the sounds together. She had Sam put his finger along the word as he said it.

As talked about in our reading, she also taught Sam and the entire class to use illustrations to figure out how to read and understand the meaning of long and difficult words. During her assessment with Sam, she got a book and hid the text. She showed him only the pictures and wanted him to say what the boy in the book was doing, such as sliding, climbing, etc. At first he said swimming, but then corrected himself and said sliding. When he didn’t know a word, the teacher would ask him if he knew it in Spanish. Many times he did, so it was a matter of him learning it in English.

My teacher talked about Zoo Phonics. During one of my observations, I noticed her making specific (animal-like) hand and arm movements while saying a particular sound. The students quickly followed with the same movements. In fact, during the private assessment that was given to Sam, he started using zoo phonics on his own to help him read a particular sound. The teacher uses zoo phonics when teaching the kids writing and reading in Spanish and English (zoo phonics is different depending on the language). It was really interesting to see the kids using it. They get happy when they do, which in turn makes them excited (and active) in their learning.