Ideal Reading Paper for First Grade
“The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn, the
more places you’ll go.”
This inspiring quote was written by Theodor Seuss Geisel in his book,
I
Can Read with My Eyes Shut!
Dr. Seuss was on point with his assessment of reading.
Without
the ability to read, students will become severely limited in the process of learning.
Students
must not only have the ability to read, but they must be inspired to read!
Teachers have the
opportunity to foster this inspiration and love for reading from the very beginning.
The program
or curriculum a teacher implements in her classroom must certainly focus on the technical
aspects of reading, but it must also involve the students in the learning process allowing them
to become enthusiastic readers!
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is, perhaps, the most important technical aspect of teaching
reading.
Phonemic awareness is defined as “the ability to notice, think about, and work with
the individual sounds in spoken words” (
Ambruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2001).
Although
the terms
phonics
and
phonemic awareness
are used interchangeably in the
classroom today, they do not have the same definition.
In contrast to
phonics, phonemic awareness focuses only on the sounds of words and has
nothing to do with written symbols.
Teaching phonemic awareness means
teaching children that the sounds of each individual letter work together to
form words (Ambruster et al., 2001).
A common way to teach phonemic
awareness is teach children how to manipulate one sound in a word to give
that word a new meaning.
Other common ways of teaching this pre-reading
strategy include: looking at a picture and finding an isolated sound such as
/d/ in dog, building words by connecting sounds such as /d/ /o/ /g/, and
matching the sounds in a series of multiple spoken words.
In my research, I have come to the conclusion that phonemic
awareness is the first step to a solid foundation in any exceptional reading
program.
When students are taught the formation of letters first and
required to write them with no knowledge of their meaning, they merely
become useless symbols.
By teaching phonemic awareness first, teachers
are providing their students with knowledge that can be built upon in the
following processes of a reading program.
Although there are many ways to
teach phonemic awareness, there are a few ways that seem to stand out
from the rest.
An excellent reading program engages students of all abilities
and beginning to learn phonemic awareness through the manipulation of
sounds (Ambruster et al., 2001) allows all learners to be involved and to feel
valued.
Students love to learn new sounds and make up non-sense words
and most of the time they do not even realize they are learning!
The next
step would be to use finger plays, poems, or short children’s books with
rhyming words to increase the students’ ability to discriminate sounds
(Tompkins, 2014).
Finally, students should learn to break apart the sounds in
