Phonics Based Reading and Decoding

EDU 371 Phonics Based Reading and Decoding

Instructor Sandy Jungman

September 24, 2012

After finishing CD 2 my student is still having some trouble with memorizing her sounds but in this 3rd cd we are drilling them in more with the games. Aliviah is doing well with the syllable part of the program and seemed to pick that up quickly. I have invested more time than I had planned in playing the games to help her get these a little better. While she is still not fluent in them as I would have liked we are moving on. As we move on to the workbook she is using the letter combinations of sh, ch, th and ck more efficiently. However we did page 26 three times. The shortcuts that we went over previously also seem to be improving with some repetitiveness of going back over page 23 a few more times. When we got back on task on page 27 she was better equipped to breeze on through this and did extremely well. We review and drill more of the shortcuts with game 5 and this helped tremendously in the way she pronounced them more correctly and memorized the sounds that they made.

As we moved on to page 30 she was a little confused and we did this one twice before cutting out the sound picks ar and or. As we went through the sound review of all the cards covered so far I noticed that she was showing even more retention of the pictures and the sounds that they represented. Aliviah seemed to enjoy her new found knowledge and I gave her heaps of praise for her improvement. Although I keep pointing out the correct way to write the letters she still has some illegible writing for the most part but as far as sliding her sounds into words and pronouncing them she is keeping u well. I feel that this is mostly due to her age and lack of experience in writing her letters prior. So I have chosen to not dwell on the handwriting. My student while associating the sounds with the pictures seems to have more trouble associating the sounds with the actual letters. Page 31 using the er sounds in three different ways was very confusing and she did not get this at all, but we move on and I am hoping to have time to review it later.

We move on to the AR sound on page 32 and with some coaching we go along and underline the ar sounds in each word. "When adults are working with their children they should guide them strategically applying phonics to authentic reading and writing experiences to help them develop good decoding skills." (K12Reader) To help her more and keep her focused I have had to use starfall.com to reinforce some of these lessons. This seems to be more helpful in comparison with the black and white game boards supplied with the program. Starfall has phonics lessons that seem to go along with the program and the result is much better. The incorporation of technology