Literacy Week 3: Phonics/Phonemic Awareness

I observed some children reading to my MT in my second grade placement. My MT was administering some of her own reading tests to listen to each child read so she would know first hand which children are at, below, or above second grade level reading. She would then use this information to group students into reading and spelling groups.

During the test she could not help the child if they were stuck. She only took notes and listened to their reading, phrasing, animation, and any struggles. A couple of the children that I listened to where below primer and read very slowly without phrasing. Most all of the children self corrected when they came to a word they did not know or some skipped the word all together, some skipped the word and came back to it after they finished the sentenced when they could figure the word out by it's context in the sentence.

From what I can tell, I believe that I have seen all five methods of teaching phonics in form: synthetic, analytic, embedded, analogy-based, and structural analysis. In second grade, they are still learning to read by sounding out letters by their individual sounds. Much of the spelling work (depending on the group the children are in) are either grouped by prefix or suffix, families, short, or long sounds, and constant work with words.

There is a great length of work that my MT does with reading and writing in her room, along with great lengths of discussions of the many ways that children can decode words to learn new words in order to read and write better. I think that my MT has set a great example of "striking the right balance in [her] classroom reading program [by] considering [each] child's needs" (Fox, p. 9).