Teaching Experiences, Essay Example

Disc five of the Action Reading Program provided exercises and materials to help the student learn the cousin “y” sound and the long “I” sounds as well.  This disc concentrated primarily on the “igh”, “ind”, and “ild” sounds and presented phonemic letter-sound identification tasks to help the student identify similar letter groupings to associate with a specific sound.  The best exercises to go along with this disc were the flash cards that were used as a form of repetition to help the student recall the sounds and words associated with this material.  Many of the words were already words that the student had already known in the past, so there was very little teaching of new vocabulary.  Nevertheless, the student needed repetitious assistance in learning the letter groupings.  The sounds were the easy part of this disc; it was the spelling of various words such as “light” that caused some problems because of the silent “gh”.

Disc six had quite a bit of material and we needed to split up the material in multiple days.  I found that the long “o” sound was fairly simple to teach and the student picked up on this very well with the exercises included in the workbook.  The flash cards were of little use for this as the workbook had much more material and challenged the student in a different manner than the prior flashcards had with disc five.  The “aw” and “ow” sounds gave the student a very difficult time because of their similarity.  I used the flash cards, workbook, and my own board exercises to help distinguish between these two phonemes.  The students required several days for this part of the disc and I did not wish to rush through the material without having the student understand these sounds and know their spelling and to be able to recognize words that have these sounds without using the flash cards or workbooks.  Finally, the “oo”, “oi”, and “oy” were taught along with sounds and word groupings that break the rules that the student had become used to.  Finally, the disc ended in touching on “ce”, “ci” and “cy” but I did not feel that there were enough examples of these sounds in the flash cards, so I used conversational exercises to point out the words and every time a word was used with this sound, we would identify it and spell it out.  This was a very useful technique and strayed away from the mundane acts of using the flash cards and work books.

References

Goswami, U. (1991). Learning about spelling sequences: the role of onsets and rimes in analogies in reading. Child Development, 62(5), 1110-1123.

Phonics online – indiana university. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.indiana.edu/~reading/phonics/glossary/a_c.html