Kindergarten Strategies to Meet Everyone's Standards was posted by Reading Today online. I was anticipating that the article would be about how we are way too hardcore in our academic instruction in Kindergarten and that we need to let kids play more. I don't disagree with that at all, but I was pleasantly surprise to find that this article actually talks about instruction and teaching beginning reading.
More particularly, the article attributes reading & writing success to mastery of
phonemic awareness (the ability to hear individual sounds in sequence in the spoken word).
This video is really long, but I want to watch it in its entirety at some point.
The author of the article cites research by Marie Clay.
"Clay discovered that in order for the beginning (emergent) reader to use the alphabetic principle and become an early reader, he/she must learn to inter-relate 4 emergent behaviors: language abilities, concepts about print, attending to visual information, and phonological awareness. Clay’s research, along with Don Holdaway’s application of it, changed New Zealand from being one of the most illiterate countries in the world to being one of the most literate. It also launched Clay’s most successful Reading Recovery Program—now I call that “evidence-based research” worth trying!"
I have not read any of Clay's work (hard to believe after writing a dissertation in the area of reading), but I am interested to add it to my summer reading list. That list is getting longer, I hope I can keep up!
We definitely work on phonemic awareness a lot in Kindergarten, but what I noticed right away in the part of the video that I watched was that the teacher was using the children's names for the phonemic awareness activities. I think that's a great way to engage kiddos and have them become invested in the exercises. It's also particularly appropriate for the beginning of the year to build classroom community and help the children learn each other's names. Even though phonemic awareness is included in the core reading program we use, I always like to read what research actually says because it's really important to understand why we do what we do. I am excited to watch the whole video and read Clay's book.
An interesting side note... while working on my master's degree in special education, we were asked to practice a phonemic awareness activity with someone for homework. I did it with my husband. It was totally mind blowing to me because I learned that my incredibly intelligent husband struggled with the skill that we call "say it fast" which is essentially hearing the discrete sounds of a word and being asked to put the sounds together in order to say the whole word.
teacher: /c/ /a/ /t/
student: cat
I subsequently learned that individuals with dyslexia struggle with phonemic awareness. It made total sense to me because my very smart husband grown man of a husband struggled with this "simple" skill. Wow. So now, when students have particular difficulty with phonemic awareness it is a little red flag to me.
Anyway, this article left me appreciating when the words of wisdom given by a veteran teacher don't completely bash the way things currently are and focus on methods of excellent instruction that can be fun and engaging for kids.
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