Takeway on the Literature review
"Letter Names Can Cause Confusion and Other Things to Know About Letter–Sound Relationships"

Key takeaways
This is central to the whole literature:
"Rather than teaching children rules, expose them to lists of words that all follow a particular pattern."

 

Teach morphology to children in kindergarten; use -s to make a word mean more than one even if we say it with /z/. Also use -ed to make a word indicate that something happened in the past, whether we say it with a /d/ or with a /t/.

 

Encourage child to use vowel flexing and decide which sound is more correct, eg word leak may try both the short e sound (as in head) and the long e sound (as in leap).

1.     Don’t insist on correct spelling early on; 

2.     research strongly suggests that engaging children in listening for sounds in words and inventing/estimating/approximating their spelling supports their literacy development

Teach digraphs explicitly. Children don’t have to know that they are digraphs.

Examples of explicit teachings;  take a digital photo of children showing thumbs up for th, making the quiet sign for sh, and pointing to their cheeks for ch, and they post those along with the digraphs as a reminder of the sound associated with each of these digraphs.

 

Teach dipthongs explicitly. Children don’t have to know that they are dipthongs.

Use high frequency word eg boy, toy (as a reference point for learning dipthong)

Teach phonograms in kindergarten. Expose them to words that have the represent the same sounds. (ight as in sight, light, bright etc..) Thus exposing the children to chunking. This is more preferred way than teaching each letter sound in isolation than blending them.

Position in a letter affects its sounds. Y in the beginning of a word sounds the y itself (consonant) eg Yoga, yellow . In the middle or end then it sounds like a vowel eg funny, happy. 

Suggestion: Use more words examples in both situations will help children to recall. This is the most preferred mode of teaching than to remember the rules.

Words with Schwa sounds
Never try to breakdown words containing Schwa to its phoneme (as Schwa is silent). Choose instead to show pupils more examples of words with Schwa and get them to pronounce them.

Reflection on today’s tutorial

Thank you for today’s lesson and the food <3. There are so many things to reflect on today. At the start of the lesson, you said something along the lines of “student always come first and to always remember that you are doing it for your student.” It made me relate back to what Dr Carol said the other day in class. She was also saying that we should always think of our student. When planning for our students, we should always think how the lesson plan would benefit our students. The most important thing is that they understand what we are trying to teach them. For today’s group presentation, it was another AHA moment. 

For floss rule, I was amazed that there was more than one method to teach floss rule. There was even a game that can help us assess whether the student understood the rule. For multiple spelling, I really liked how Stephanie taught the different sounds by using the Elkonin box. I really learnt a lot of things from my class which I am always grateful for.

When looking through the phonics, I realised how confusing English is as there are many rules and exceptions. This is also why as an educator we should make it a point to understand so that we can teach our students well. 

The one thing I always tell myself is “If it is difficult for us, it is harder for our kids.” That will always be my motivation factor to make sure that I can give my students the best that I can so that even if it’s not much, I can make a difference by making it less challenging for them. 

Reflection on journal article

While I was reading the article, I had many thoughts. “Wow that’s a lot of things to remember”.  I was wondering how I will get my students to remember all this. That is when I realise how important it is to repeat the things that we have taught the students by doing a recap of the previous lesson at the start if the lesson or doing a summary at the end of the lesson. 

The few takeaways that I can use in the future is 

1.       to always ensure to pronounce the word correctly even if the letter does not make the sound they are supposed to make. When we are assisting the student with spelling, we should make the correct pronunciation of the word instead of changing how a letter will sound to make it easier for the student to spell. If we change the sound to make it easier for the student to spell, it might cause the student to get confused over the true pronunciation of the word. It may help them with spelling but during their oral reading, it will affect them. 

2.       When students spell or pronounce the sounds inaccurately, we should validate them first. We should recognize their effort for trying to recognize the sound. Afterwards, we can repeat the word again and ask the students to guess what other letters make such sounds. After all that, we will then correct their spelling and ask them to repeat it back to us to ensure that they understood.

3.       As we are teaching the students, we may come across words that they will mispronounce, and we might have not taught them the rule behind those sounds. It is okay to correct their pronunciation and teach them the correct sound and rule. I feel that it is important for us to correct the student at once when we heard them mispronouncing it so that they can unlearn and relearn fast

4.       Lastly, teach the students on the rules slowly. Use visual aids to make them understand better. Go through the lesson over a few sessions to ensure that they understand everything before moving on to the next rule.

Sorry it’s such a long reflection. Thank you for taking time to read our thoughts and comment on it. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the letter too. It made me feel warm. I hope you enjoy your weekend and please rest well!

Best Regards

Norsara

Multiple spelling

Takeaways from the Article ‘Letter Names Can Cause Confusion and Other Things to Know About Letter–Sound Relationships’

My takeaway from the article, It create confusion for me and I believe I would need more practice and application to understand them. To conclude from all the points from the article we must create simplicity in teaching. Exposure new words but not to much. Double check with the phonics we teach to the student and the phonics the learn. 

One thing that resonate from Dr Liz's wisdom is to focus on the student and engage the student. Do not care others around him. Same sentiment I do with my kids.

Regards,

Sofian Adnan

 For multiple spelling, the lesson taught was clear and we understood when to insert the ch and tch and refresh the term Elkonin box which we will be using as LBS. 

When I was learning English in Primary school, learning English wasn’t so difficult for us probably we were exposed to the words and we had to memorize them by hard. 

The first article says that the letters can be confusing… So are the rules! Took me a few secs to realize what the YD meant.. :p Therefore some children will need the help to correct it if not they will continue to make the same mistake of pronouncing the words.

With the different sounds for each letters in different words and so many combination of letters and so many others in the articles we have read, I do agree that instead of focusing of the rules, exposing them to words that follow patterns will help greatly as I do feel it will benefit me in learning a lot as well. Although teaching of the rules is still a must ensure that they are reading correctly and their spelling is right. 

Using various methods of teaching, strategies and different approaches in this article to engage the children might help them more than we think.  

1.       Thank you to the 2 groups who presented.  The floss rules help learning and remembering the rules much easier.  The quiz which is at the last part of the lesson is a good idea of checking student understanding with fun and excitement (time limit to give answer).  Multiple syllabus spelling taught me to remember when to use ‘tch’ and ‘ch’ vividly. 

2.       Remembering all rules of 2 or more letters phonogram take time.  I realized I had pronounced some of the phonograms wrongly in daily use.

 

It is not easy to remember all the rules, so to our students. I’ll apply the rules below and let students understand how to use the rules. I will let them learn the rules progressively.

1         show students a list of words that follow a same pattern and help student focus on sound-letter pattern eg look, book, cook etc

2         Teach diagraphs explicitly, tell students that sometimes 2 or 3 letters join together to make only one sound.  In order to make them understand better we can show picture like “keep quiet “sh” sound.

3         Teach students word chunking especially multisyllables words.  eg e-le-phant.

4         Teach students to see the relationship of the word eg magic and magician.

 

Preparing for Floss Rule presentation was exciting as I get to explore new IT tools. Working with Jason was great as we get to bounce ideas on our own free time. We are exposed to flexible discussion platform and time. I like how laying our expectations clearly, helps in the team’s processes.

I love the how Amalina, Stephenie and Radhiana presented Multiple Spelling. 

My content takeaways from the presentation are:

I like the idea of using the Elkonin Box to separate the letters. 👍🏼

However, I find the introduction of spelling rule very overwhelming.

Hence I agree with the reading article that says ‘rather than teaching children rules, expose them to lists of words that all follow a particular pattern’.

Example: MIxed the words consisting of ‘ai’ and ‘ay’. Get pupil to highlight the ‘ai’ and ‘ay’ then categories them according to ‘ai’ and ‘ay’ so that they can see the pattern. =)

I liked how the team introduced the game from Genially. Excellent site for me to explore. They explained the rules very clearly. Simple and easy to understand. The quiz at the end is a good way to summarise and to check understanding of the student.

The usage of Elkonin boxes for auditory drill is useful for students to hear the sounds and identify the letters of the phonemes. It is good when teaching monosyllabic or multisyllabic words. Good use of guiding questions and praises. The rules for 'ai' and 'ay' are simple to understand too.

In English language, there are many complicated words with many exceptions to the rules. As an adult, to remember the rules is a bit daunting, what more our students. So, to have a list and follow a particular pattern is easier for our students to follow and remember. 

1)      Focus on sound-letter pattern eg. look, cook, book. 

2)      c & g 
– soft sounds followed by e, i or y. 
– hard sounds followed by a, o or u.
3)      Usage of gestures when teaching th (thumb), sh (quiet sign) and ch (cheeks)

4)      Any vowel can be a schwa – teach students words they already know that has a schwa sound in it.

The online game for floss rule is a great tool even for HBL. Students learn well when they are engaged. Iza and Jason did a good job in explaining the floss rule well. The scaffolding was done in such a way that the student will need to ask themself if it is a one-word syllable, if it is a short vowel or if there is a consonant f, l, s, or z after the vowels.

The use of Elkonian boxes were used to make the sounds of the alphabets. It was confusing for me to at first to know when to use ‘ai’ and ‘ay’. How I remember which one I can use for words towards the end is, the alphabet y is towards the end. Hence, ‘ay’ is used at the end. I think English have more rules than Maths formulae. Like when to use ‘ch’ and ‘tch’.

Expose children to pattern using example such as cook, look, and book. This is because learning English is well organized.

Some letters represent different sounds in different words. It comprises of 2 sounds. Hard and soft. When the student is reading loudly and is uncertain of which sound to apply, the student can try both sounds and eventually pick on the word that sounds right and makes sense. This approach is at times described as vowel flexing when used with vowels.

1.       The FLoSS rule

Amazing job done by Jason and Iza! They really picked the right tools to use not only to teach, but also to engage us as the students. They listed out what were the conditions for the floss rule, before putting it in a table form. I love how systematic the entire lesson was. The game was also done up professionally and I like how Jason and Iza integrated the game with the table. This dual-mode of teaching was seamlessly done. This is definitely going into my repertoire of teaching strategies, though I am not very IT savvy, but some necessary adjustments need to be made to keep up with the times and probably to engage our students.

2.       Multiple spelling

It was a very smart move by this team to leverage on our prior knowledge of the Elkonin box to teach the /ch/ and /tch/ sound. As the presentation of the Elkonin box was a few tutorials ago, this presentation was like a refresher for us. It also showed us the versatility of the Elkonin box such that it is not necessarily used only for blending, but it also helps in segmentation and giving us a clearer picture of the letters before the /ch/ or /tch/ sound. In addition, like what you pointed out, Steph was also able to ask Radihana guiding questions that contributed to her successfully choosing the correct phonogram, even though both phonograms have the same sound. This will help Radihana to gain confidence in trying out the question of the new concept she is learning. 

1)      Systematicity does not necessarily mean simplicity

-          Often times we treat English like a math subject, we apply certain equations and expect almost every example that fits into this equation to follow the same rule. But from the various tutorials and this article, it showed that there are many anomalies in the English language. The language itself is a mixture of different languages and origins. Perhaps, a better way (or how I will do it in the future) will be to expose the students to words that follow a similar pattern (the example given was words with oo like book, look, took) before introducing the rules. Giving them some prior knowledge to these words might perhaps help them to associate and understand the rules better.
 

2)      Sometimes sounds can be represented in more than one way

-          From this short segment, my takeaway would be to validate the student for his effort. Just like how Jelani wrote uv for the word of (I tried to sound it out and uv indeed sounds like of), Mr. Acker did not disregard and tried to correct him, instead, he validated and then just taught him the correct spelling. Many times, I will jump straight into correcting the student and give him/her that ‘are you sure’ look. Next time, I will seek to understand first, before showing the correct spelling of the word to my student. 

On a side-note: From the entire learning and teaching of phonics experience thus far, I realised that I am someone who is not that sensitive to sounds. It is hard for me to pick out certain distinctions in sounds that are similar E.g. /m/ and /n/. I really rely a lot on prior knowledge to sound out the words accurately. But the learning has also caused me to be more aware of the way I pronounce certain words (or how I speak in general). It really does feel like I am relearning something all over again and being more aware of myself. Perhaps, only when you are more aware and reflective, will you be able to think from the perspective of your student and assess not only their needs but also how you can support them overall as an individual. 

Lots of Love, Clare

- Jason further emphasised on the “l” in “doll” after Iza identified the picture - good to re-emphasise on the ending sounds.

- The table is a very good checklist, brings student through the process in a systematic manner. It presents steps in a manner that isn't too overwhelming either, and makes it easier for the student to remember.
- The game was a really interactive way to get student to practice what they learnt! I was very engaged myself even though I wasn't physically playing it. 

Key takeaways from Multiple Spelling sharing
- The use of Elkonin boxes with this strategy was very clear, and gave me a clearer picture of how to implement it with students. 

Key takeaway from the tutorial:
- It's important to not merely have a successful withdrawal session. What makes intervention successful is when information taught can be related to class activities, so that students can feel empowered across all classroom/teaching & learning settings.