Literacy, Winter Quarter, Week 1 - Jan. 12

I found the Templeton/Morris piece quite insightful. We often hear through our schooling years about Latin and Greek influences in our words, however I certainly was not previously aware of the amount of French influence on English. (Isn't that just like the French - have to impose their styles on everyone else?) Anyway, I heartily agree with their suggestion that spelling be taught, not simply through phonetics and then later on through memorization, but also by teaching conceptually about words and the sound and meaning relationships to the spelling patterns.

In my kinder class, we mostly are working on the traditional blending of sounds for reading and spelling. One practice last week, though, that I was intrigued by was an activity in which the kids created three-letter nonsense words. It seemed to do a pretty decent job of teaching them the composition of one-syllable CVC words, and they really enjoyed it. We tried to reinforce the kids, tie the words to their math lesson (since they had just done patterns and this was letter patterning), tell them they were learning about the formation of words and give them kudos for being creative.

The Templeton/Morris piece also seems to correlate with what our professors are preaching in our math methods course. If we help children develop a base understanding - a solid internal foundation - of the roots and principles of our disciplines, they'll be able to more naturally apply their cognitive skills to come to answers.

On a note about the Routman readings, I loved the "We Can" book idea she discussed, regarding one of her past kindergarten classes. I think I might try that when I start doing more lessons. I might have to change it up a bit. It is the middle of the year - the kids might say, "Duh, Mrs. Bollesen, we've already done that." Maybe the book will be "We do." Anyway, I liked that one.