phonemic awareness & phonics

For this topic, I chose to read Kathleen F. Clark's article "What can I say besides "sound it out": Coaching word recognition in beginning reading". I chose this as one of the two assigned readings because that is one of the biggest questions I had about teaching reading- what else is there to say? I feel like the more I get into the program, the more I learn about how my 'go to' teaching phrases need replacing. I used to say things like 'sound it out', 'look harder', and 'keep looking at it'. In reality, what does it exactly mean to look at something harder? As if the students were looking at it softly?

The article provided many new ideas on how to help readers! Here are a few:
- Can you sound it out? (typical, BUT THEN) Now take a running start!
- What do you know about that word?
- What can we do when we are stuck?
- highlighting parts of the word as you go
- Think about all the sounds that letter can make.


& my favorite:

Let's look for a chunk in there. 

or

Let's find the little word in there. 

This makes so much sense to me! When faced with any problem, whether in life or learning, I always break it down. Big deals are easier to handle when they are broken into lots of  little deals. So, it makes total sense to me for big words to be tackled by identifying what we already know. Like the example from the article, 'in' is a word most students can get. Showing them that they already know half the word is just the confidence boost some students need to keep going! This method shows them how they can take on bigger words with basic the skills they already have. 

http://teacherbitsandbobs.blogspot.com/2012/01/magic-spoons.html

This activity practices creating words by just changing the first letter. I would love to modify the activity by using real words instead of just letter pairs. This would build students' skills in recognizing chunks and little words in bigger words.