The child I worked with is a five year old kindergarten
student in public school. Her phonemic
awareness results were better than her print awareness results. I conducted the sample print awareness
assessment and noticed that she was able to successfully show me the front and
back of the book, where to begin reading, a word, the first and last word in
the sentence, capital and lowercase letter.
However, when asked to show me the title of the book, she pointed to the
author’s name instead. Instead of
identifying the letter, she pointed to a whole word. And instead of identifying punctuation marks,
she pointed to pictures. In phonemic
awareness, the student was able to successfully blend 3 sounds together such as
/c/a/t/, /b/u/n/, /r/i/p/, and /p/e/n/.
However, when asked to segment the sounds she had some difficulty and
reached frustration. When assessing the
sounds of speech, the student was told a 2, 3, or 4 phoneme word. The student then had to segment that word in
phonemes. As she said each phoneme, she
had to push the chip into an individual box that represented each phoneme. She successfully identified the sounds in
words with 2 and 3-phoneme words, but had difficulty identifying the 4-phoneme
words. Her overall phonics skills were
on level.
To strengthen
phonemic awareness, different word play activities will be implemented. To improve her print awareness, big books
will be used during read-aloud time and as I model to read, we will always
review the components of the book and move my finger across the words while
reading. We will continue to practice the activity with moving chips according
to phonemes.
Some
great websites to facilitate these skills are: starfall.com, readwritethink.org,
and turtlediary.com.
Almost all young children develop the ability to understand spoken language, with little or no direct instruction. While most kindergarten children have mastered the complexities of speech, they do not know that spoken language is made up of discrete words, which are made up of syllables, which themselves are made up of the smallest units of sound, called "phonemes." This awareness that spoken language is made up of discrete sounds is certainly a crucial factor in children learning to read. Your analysis of this kindergartener shows the need for more oral segmentation activities. I think these websites would certainly help and motivate the children’s development of phonemic awareness. Here’s an great article about “Blending and Segmenting Games.” :)(http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/blending_games)
ReplyDelete