Very soon, on the PARENTS side of your student’s homework folder, you will find phonics work coming home.
Today’s blog post is a brief guide to what you will find — and a key to deciphering it!
WRITING IS HARD
When it comes to the verbal aspects of language arts — speaking, listening, understanding — most every human being acquires the necessary skills to communicate. The brain is pre-wired for this.
The brain is not pre-wired for reading and writing.
Reading presents a challenge for many, and most newspapers and magazine write to a 6G level, such is the general reading level in the US.
Writing is one step harder. Many adults who read well find writing a chore. If adults find writing difficult, so much more so will young children just learning to write.
It’s important that we — teachers and parents alike — make writing a pleasurable, joyful experience for students. If we don’t, they’ll do everything they can to write as little as is humanly possible.
PARENT-TEACHER ORIENTATION: REVIEW
At the Parent-Teacher Orientation, we looked at the BILLIONS of new synapses your student is creating as s/he builds her/his brain’s reading/writing module. Before COVID, if you looked at writing samples in the windows of K on up to 6G, you could SEE the growth of this module.
K and 2G students can’t write like 6G student — yet. (They will soon enough!)
Whenever an adult looks at — and “judges” — a young person’s writing, it’s helpful to remember the writer in question is working at the growing edge of her/his reading/writing brain module construction. We cannot ask a child to do something s/he is not yet brain-wired to do!
It’s also helpful to bear in mind the developmental order of reading/writing competencies.
Phonemic awareness is key.
If a child cannot hear and manipulate the 44 sounds in the English language — a phoneme is a basic sound unit — s/he will struggle learning to read and write. Thus, sound comes first, correct spelling way, way later.
The child who hears /chruk/ and not “truck” will likely have an easy time learning to hear the difference between /ch/ and /t/.
The child who cannot tell you the three sounds — sounds not letter names — in a word like “cat” or “kit” — or trick — may need extra help learning to hear phonemes correctly.
Thus, if your child spells “school” s-k-u-l CELEBRATE! S/he has not only heard the four sounds in “school” and ordered them correctly, but has made perfectly good letter selections to represent those sounds. SCH is a non-phonetic way of getting the /sk/ sound, and two Os giving you the /ew/ sound is something that children learn over time with repeated exposure.
“The use of invented spelling by emergent writers leads to longer stories, better vocabulary, and more complex grammar structures.”
—Teaching the Brain to Read, Duncan Milne, Ph.D. (2005)
When we see invented spelling — provided it demonstrates accurate phoneme awareness — we make sure the student knows s/he has “good ears!” The child who can hear the four sounds in the word “school” will learn to spell it correctly more quickly than the child who cannot break the word down into its component sounds.
5 SENTENCES
At the end of every phonics lesson, students choose 5 words from the lesson with which to write 5 sentences.
Should you look at the last page of a lesson sent home and lurking in the PARENTS pocket of the homework folder, it might look something like this:
As an adult with decades of reading/writing experience under your belt, you may be quick to notice all sorts of issues.
Were we to mark up these sentences with a red pen and show the new write all the “mistakes” s/he’d made, we might find our young writer writing as little as possible. This is a good strategy if the experience of being repeatedly “wrong about everything” is something you’d like to avoid.
What we do is point out everything that is great in these sentences.
You thought up 5 sentences! (This is far from easy in the beginning — 5 sentences at the end of EVERY lesson!)
Nice handwriting! (Also not easy, especially when the writing muscles are still strengthening)
You have good ears! Spelling “kitten” k-i-t-i-n tell me you are hearing all the sounds in the word and selecting appropriate letters to represent those sounds
You remembered to capitalize the first letter in all your sentences!
You started each sentence next to the number (1) through (5)
And more
Do we ignore what’s not yet standard English and standard writing practice? No.
But we use what we see diagnostically. Where does this writer need 1 or 2 pointers? (We do not want to overwhelm a young writer with 27 pointers, giving her/him the sense that “everything is wrong.”)
We also separate what needs to be practiced from the sentences.
OF ROUGH DRAFTS & FINAL DRAFTS
We consider the 5 sentences students write at the end of each phonics lessons as a “rough draft.” Students are to “do the best you can by yourself — we can make it perfect later.”
As my mother taught me, “Writers WRITE!” We can always make it perfect later — which is exactly what professional writers do!
We make it “perfect” with our “final-draft corrections,” which students receive a day or two after writing their sentences.
A final-draft correction for Book 3, Lesson 2 might start off like this:
Chances are when student Cat turned in his 5 sentences, he wasn’t producing true sentences, but sentence fragments like “Look sky” or “Bird fly home.” We read through the final draft corrections so the student understands the idea — and it looks like handwriting practice (which it is!) rather than an admonition that s/he “still doesn’t know what a sentence is!”
The (1) relates to the students first sentence. Student Cat’s parents, looking through his final draft correction, would rightly guess that there son had forgotten to capitalize!
The could, also, rightly conclude that student Cat’s first sentence was something like, “My dog is big.”
It looks as if student Cat is also forgetting to “put something at the end of every sentence.”
Sentences are “gently corrected.” Ofttimes students will say, “I wrote that!” with a big smile on their faces. “Yes you did!”
We keep track of student’s final draft feedback. This allows us to track progress, and to reinforce certain things.
While we do have some ready-made “macros” for common issues — capitalization, punctuation — every final draft correction is tailored to individual students and the sentences they are writing “now.”
As your student’s time in 2G progresses, you may notice that her/his feedback progresses from handwriting practice and reinforcement of key phonetic lessons to something like the “macro” below.
Once students can easily generate 5 sentences — I like cubs. I like cubes. I like tubes. I like caps. I like capes. — we challenge them to add “fun words” to make their sentences more interesting.
Be prepared for some silly sentences — and some big smiles from your young writer!
