Preschool, kindergarten, and first grade are essential years in children’s life for learning how to read and understanding the basic fundamentals of language arts. Some of these concepts include letter recognition, sight word recognition, capitalization, punctuation, and reading fluency. Everything that children learn during these important years will follow them the rest of their lives. Reading and writing must start with the very basics of letter identification and then progress to writing and reading words and sentences. It is important for children to have a positive learning experience because reading is a very important skill that will continually be needed in everyday life. Whole language and balanced literacy are two commonly used methods for teaching language arts to beginning students. There are many activities used to teach young children how to read and write including the use of music in the classroom, sight words, games, and worksheets.
There are two main approaches to teaching reading to young students. One common approach is whole language. Kate Walsh states that whole language “emphasizes connecting children with meaningful text as the preferred path to developing fluent readers” (10). In whole language, using the context of the sentence to figure out a word is essential. Walsh further explains the importance of context cluing in whole language by describing it as “having children identify new words by discerning their meaning in the context of the text” (10). Another approach to teaching reading is balanced literacy which, unlike whole language, “fuses the literature-based approach with some phonological instruction but only on an “as needed” basis” (Walsh, Glaser, Dunne 10). Mixing these two conc...
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... the student must understand the difference between an uppercase and lowercase letter and when to use them in different situations. Independent exercises are important in the learning process for children because it makes them feel like they have accomplished something on their own, and they show what the child truly knows.
There are many different approaches to teaching language arts to young learners. It is important to understand that every classroom and every child is different. Different activities and methods should be used with different children and different situations. Learning the basics of language arts will follow with children throughout their years of schooling and throughout their life. Learning how to read and write for a young student should be a positive and fun experience. Through different methods, many teachers have made learning fun!
Karen Bromley (2014) in the chapter “Active Engagement with Words” begins with the harsh reality of students who cannot “read well enough to be successful” (120). She acknowledges that a large vocabulary is key to successful reading due to a number of factors, including: it boosts comprehension, improves achievement, enhances thinking and communication, and promotes fluency (121). Therefore, Bromley advocates that educators equip students with strategies for tackling words, strategies that actively engage students and begin with teacher modeling (direct-instruction). Bromley discusses the three tiers of word types, pointing out that tiers two and three (multisyllabic) cause the most problems for adolescent readers. To approach these words students need attention to the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects, the literal elements (spelling, pronunciation, graphics, meaning, and grammatical function) and then the more inferential and contextual aspects (visual, auditory, or sensory image that connects to the word, for example). Active engagement, the use of metacognitive strategies, is advocated by Bromley because it relies on students’ own knowledge and equips them with strategies they can use on their own when they encounter unfamiliar words. Such strategies covered in this chapter include: KWL (Know, Want to know, Learn), Teach-Teach-Trade, A Word A Day (www.wordsmith.org/words), Root Words, and Digital
This detailed text provides an understanding of reading and writing through detailed case studies, reflective questioning and further reading; in addition to links with the Early Years Curriculum (EYFS)(DCSF, 2008) provide informative information accessible to both practitioner and parent. As pointed out by the authors, literacy relates to fifty % of the early learning goals, therefore highlights the importance by the practitioner to make the acquisition of literacy exciting and meaningful through a multitude of role play scenarios, stories, rhymes and oral language, thus providing opportunities for the child to put life experiences of literacy into context, while scaffolding existing knowledge.
...s in diverse classroom settings” (Dahl & Scharer, 2000, ¶52). Based upon the data set forth in this paper, a system of balanced instruction seems to be the most beneficial route for reading instruction. Students should learn about the relationships between letters and sounds through both traditional instruction and on the spot direction. They should be encouraged to express themselves through writing and educators should give feedback and constructive criticism about their mistakes as well as their creativity. Diane Weaver Dunne (2000) tells us “there is no magic bullet that can teach all children how to read” (¶ 1). As such, educators should individualize instruction to reach all learners, and reading and writing should take place in every area of the curriculum. The problem in this debate lies not in the direct opposition of whole language to phonics but in the misconceptions of both camps.
There are numerous ways to teach a child how to read. Yet most of the methods can be divided in two groups; the whole-language approach or phonics. There has been and still is a major debate about which method is best. The method that is the best strategy to teach children ages six-ten to read is phonics. Phonics teaches people to read by linking sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system. Phonics helps to improve a learner’s sense of phonemic awareness; the ability to hear, identify, and the use of phonemes; the simplest sound a letter makes. The main objective of phonics is to assist beginning readers how to identify new written words by blending the sound-spelling patter...
Balanced Literacy is an approach for teaching literacy that is widely used in classrooms across the country. It involves several methods of teaching and learning reading and writing, whole class instruction directed by the teacher with independent work in reading, writing, and oral language. By integrating a variety of approaches, a balance is achieved in which students learning to understand text (from a whole language approach) as well as how to read text (from a phonics approach). Effective phonics instruction focuses children's attention on noticing the letter/sound patterns in initial consonants and consonant clusters and in rimes.
Whichever way you learned to read, chances are you never knew what the terms “phonics” or “whole language” meant. However, these are the terms that are at opposite ends of an on-going debate over the best way to teach children how to read. “Simply stated, supporters of the whole language approach think children's literature, writing activities, and communication activities can be used across the curriculum to teach reading; backers of phonics instruction insist that a direct, sequential mode of teaching enables students to master reading in an organized way” (Cromwell, 1997).
Literacy is most commonly understood as reading and writing. But before children can read and write, they need to learn about sound, words, language, books and stories (Raising Children, 2015). Children begin to develop and gain knowledge quite differently and with support and developmentally appropriate learning skills children will also come to understand the connection between letters and sounds. Literacy development or early literacy is the most essential in the first three years of life as it the earliest experience children have with language, sound and the positive interactions between child and adult. Vygotsky (1978) believed in how children developed, and the important role of adults in leading child’s early development. The interactions
This literature review was compiled to investigate the question: what effective strategies in reading can be utilized by parents to second grade students to assist and improve their children’s reading fluency? When a child was a baby, both mother and father read aloud short story, poetry and nursery rhymes to make them feel the spirit of learning to reading. According to Lawson (2012), “The parental practice of readi...
Allington states, “It’s time for the elements of effective instruction described here to be offered more consistently to every child, in every school, every day” (Allington, 2012, pp 14-15). When these six elements are included into daily literacy instruction students are able to make gains in their reading and writing abilities.
Children are vastly influenced by their elementary education. The fundamentals and basics of a child’s education begins with language, more specifically, reading and writing. These children are the future cognitively, socially, and physically and they should be provided with the most effective educational techniques available. While children are young, they should be provided with those techniques by starting at the beginning: foreign language. Children should learn a foreign language at the elementary school level.
Fluency in reading and writing involves many steps that can be taught at home or in the classroom. An activity that involves cut-up sentences into phrases is a productive activity for children who are having difficulty with reading fluency. When reading continuous print, children seem to forget what they know. It is quite common that they forget, in the moment, about the letters, sounds and words they already learned. When we test in isolation, most students seem to know letter-sound relationships, phonograms, or high-frequency words; however a reader is required to use both
Introducing literacy to children at a young age is important. The child may not be reading yet but they can gain a lot from being read to; such as directionality, the front of the book, picture word relations, and even how to turn the page. Most of the children in the kindergarten classroom I am observing in are learning to read. They have small groups daily and one small group is always a reading group where the teacher and the children all read the same book multiple times. This reinforces directionality, page turning, and letter and sound correspondence. As stated in the webinar it is also important for children to be exposed to routines. In the classroom I am observing in during morning meeting, some call it circle time, the children go over their schedule for the day. Going over their schedule for the day reinforces the predictability for their entire day and children need that to feel secure about their school day.
The five key elements are one, Phonemic Awareness. This is when a teacher helps children to learn how to manipulate sounds in our language and this helps children to learn how to read. Phonemic Awareness can help to improve a student’s reading, and spelling. With this type of training the effects on a child’s reading will last long after training is over. The second key is Phonics. Phonics has many positive benefits for children in elementary schools from kindergarten up to the sixth grade level. Phonics helps children who struggle with learning how to read by teaching them how to spell, comprehend what they are reading, and by showing them how to decode words. The third key is Vocabulary. Vocabulary is important when children are learning how to comprehend what they are reading. Showing children, the same vocabulary words by using repetition will help them to remember the words. The fourth key is comprehension. Comprehension is when a child’s understanding of comprehension is improved when teachers use different techniques such as generating questions, answering questions, and summarizing what they are
In the content area in Language Arts, students will develop the reading skills necessary for word recognition, comprehension, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation of print and non-print text activating prior knowledge, processing and acquiring new vocabulary, organizing information, understanding visual representations, self-monitoring, and reflecting. This can be accomplished by implementing pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading strategies into the lesson plan. Fifth grade students will read and write a variety of texts with greater scope and depth. In addition, they will analyze and evaluate information and ideas by revisiting and refining concepts about the language arts benchmark and will become more refined and independent learners.
How can what we know about the development of readers inform reading comprehension instruction? Reading instruction typically starts in kindergarten with the alphabetic principle, simple word blending, and sight word recognition. Texts read by early readers usually include very little to comprehend. As children develop reading ability, they are able read more complex texts requiring greater comprehension skills. Separate and explicit instruction in reading comprehension is crucial because the ability to comprehend develops in its own right, independent of word recognition. The ability to read words and sentences is clearly important, but as readers develop, these skills are less and less closely correlated with comprehension abilities. (Aarnoutse & van Leeuwe, 2000) While no one would argue that word blending and sight word reading skills be omitted from early reading instruction, vocabulary and listening comprehension may be at least as important in achieving the even...