I've made the heroic resolution to post every day because I have this idea that it's something people with blogs ought to do if they want anybody to read, and also because it will keep me from taking any one post too seriously, since it's just going to get buried in a bunch of other posts anyway. Of course, considering that it's only going to last until I get bored, I can't guarantee any long stretch of posts. But I can guarantee at least ... two days. Including yesterday.
And today I'm going to talk about my kids. Not my biological kids, though maybe tomorrow I'll post about my biological kids and how they're all going to be protegies and perfectly behaved, but today I'm going to post about the kids I teach. Who are also protegies, and sometimes they're perfectly behaved too.
Thus, this post is mostly for people who know something about teaching. If you don't know anything about teaching, you have my permission to get on with your life. If you do know something about teaching, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD tell me what to do! (actually it's really not all that serious, but I would like to know if you read one of my ideas and think "yeah. THAT'S going to work. with two five year olds in the class??)
So. Tomorrow, that is, not really tomorrow, but the next time we have school, we're introducing the letter A, which is our very first vowel. Big excitement. The textbook has them learning A AND learning to read 3 letter words all in the same day. Georgie, who's been through this part of the book already, told me that he cried on this lesson. So my goal is to make stepping stones instead of a quantum leap.
We've already been finding words that begin with letters that we've had already had, and listening exercises where they say whether the word begins or ends (or neither!) with the letter we're studying. You know, "clap your hands if the word I read ends in S. House, door, pony, walrus." Walrus and pony aren't really on the list - they're all monosyllabic words so far.
So here's my idea: (1) Introduce the letter. Hi, A. Practice writing it, find words that start with A. Apple, And, Antenna. Kidding about Antenna, unless one of them thinks of it. Art project in which we draw an apple with a worm crawling out of it, conveniently placed to resemble lowercase a. Construction paper, because they like construction paper.
(2) Introduce words that have only A and another letter that we've had so far. At, An, As, Am, Add (which has two ds, but that shouldn't be too hard to explain. It's just that way, accept it, kids.). Give them 3 words, see if they can find the others. End first day's lesson here, to give them time to sleep on the idea of two letters they already know making a word.
(3) The next day, put letters in front of the words we found yesterday. At - Cat, Bat, Mat, Sat. Again, give them three, see if they can come up with others. If they don't get it, I guess, just keep throwin' the words at them until they see the pattern.
My goal is for this series of steps to take some of the stress out of the leap from identifying letters to reading words. Does anyone have any advice, warnings about how my plan won't work, tips for more stepping stones?
9 years ago
