Today
Catriona and I went on a Phonics and Early Word course taken by Yolanda Soryl.
I wasn’t too
sure what to expect from the course as I have never done any training in this
area. However I was amazed at how much I learnt about the first two years of
school and the importance of giving children the tools to help them work out
words.
The first section of the day was focused on Stage 1-3 of the
Phonics progress. It was really interesting to see that children should be at
Stage 2 by the time they reach school. By the end of Stage 2 children should be
able to identify one sound in the word, Stage 3 they need to identify two
sounds in a word, and Stage 4 they should be able to identify three sounds in a
words. By the age of 7 years students should be able to know the long vowel
phonemes (e.g. ‘book’ and ‘put’ have the
same ‘oo’ sound but the letters to make that sound are ‘oo’ and ‘u’). I can
safely say that I have 8 or more students that are not working at Stage 7. I
have two learners that I will be starting at Stage 1 and some that will be
starting at higher Stages. I am not too sure when I am going to include this
into my programme as Yolanda said it needs to be separate to the literacy time.
At this stage I am thinking I will do it first thing in the morning or after
lunch.
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| Developing Phonological Awareness by Yolanda Soryl. |
The second
course was the Early Words course and it was really good to see how it is run.
I am going to start this on Monday with my two lowest learners. I think it will
be quite easy to implement and work into my routine once I can efficiently run
it as it only take 5 minutes per child.
The
programme it set out very clearly in the book Early Words by Yolanda Soryl
which I am lucky enough to now have in my class.
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| Early Words by Yolanda Soryl |
The programmes help set our
lower level students up for success for word recognition and graphic knowledge
of the high frequency words.
The
structure of each 5 minute lesson goes as follows:
- A probe test – gives the score from the word learnt yesterday. Students are given the words and then the teacher tests the errors and the time taken to complete and then scores them accordingly.
- Teacher decision – after testing with the probe the teacher decides whether the student goes up a word or remains at the same for another day.
- Word cards – this is the time spent teaching the student the word using a range or games and having the word in isolation (out of text).
- Worksheet – this is either a reading or writing worksheet where the word is transferred into text.
- Probe test – as above, gives the score from the word learnt.
- Revision – an activity not needing adult supervision usually completed for homework.
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| An example of the probe test. |
I have
attached a link to Yolanda’s website which I recommend having a look through.
I will
update my progress through my weekly reflections on how well I have implemented
the programmes and the progress of my learners.
They were great courses weren't they Katie. I thoroughly recommend them to all teachers. I have been teaching over 20 years and learnt so much.
ReplyDeleteI am thinking about running the Phonics Training in small groups so we could look at how to split your class up and I can take a group or two.
I just think this is going to work really well for our students to fill gaps and accelerate their learning.
This course looked quite good Katie. It will be interesting to see if it does make a difference to your students. Our Junior children - new entrants - have word cards they take home to learn. Once they know the word they get another one added which looks similar to what this lady was doing with her student. It all comes down to ensuring they are doing the words each day whether it is with you a parent or another adult.
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