Becoming Readers

A large portion of our day is spent on working towards becoming readers.  We work on many reading skills in our daily centers, but there are also two other important parts of our day designed to get everyone reading and working with letter sounds.

Zoo-Phonics:
Zoo-Phonics is a program designed to teach children letters and their sounds through a whole brain approach.  There is a zoo animal character associated with each letter, which I've found makes it much easier for the students to enjoy and remember the letters as we work with them.  Each letter also has a sound and signal attached to teach letter sounds.   

 

My favorite thing about Zoo-Phonics (other than I see kids learning and recognizing letter sounds very quickly!) is the way it combines movement with letters and sounds.  In our classroom, movement is so crucial!  I also like that with the students who may have difficulty with speech or making certain sounds, I can still tell that they recognize the letter by their ability to signal it. 

We practice the letters and sounds each day with flash cards, but I also have several games and activities which usually show up in our reading centers.  The kids' favorite game involves a collection of beanie babies that represent each letter.  They each choose a beanie baby, then I call for certain letters or sounds and we look for who is holding that letter's zoo character.

Students from last year are very familiar with the zoo-phonics program, and those students who came to us from ECSE also worked with this program last year.  In our classroom, we teach lowercase letters first for two reasons.  First, when we are looking at print in books the letters are mostly lowercase letters.  If the students are going to move towards reading, they need to recognize lowercase letters and their sounds fluently.  Second, children are exposed to uppercase letters constantly (puzzles, games, manipulatives, etc.).  They seem to come more easily to children than the lowercase letters because they are already being exposed so frequently.

Here is a video of the letter cards with their sounds and signals.  The woman in the video is a bit boring, but this is pretty close to what we practice each day.  (If you search for Zoo-Phonics on YouTube, there are more interesting videos.  This was the best model of the true signals and sounds.)  In our classroom, I include the letter name in the characters name (ex: Bubba Bear = Bubba B Bear.  Or, Inny Inchworm = Inny I Inchworm) to help teach letter names too.

Word Study: We are also working on recognizing some basic sight words.  This year I am teaching the words in families.  This week we are finishing up our work with the "it" word family.  We focused on 5 words:  it, hit, mit, pit, sit  Since we are learning so many of the letter sounds with our zoo-phonics practice, the children are doing a great job with using the signals and sounds to decode the words.  We spend time each day working with our words before adding them to our word wall and moving on to the next family.  One word study activity from this week was to create a book of the words using cereal pieces.  The children had to trace each letter in glue and then cover the shape of the letter in cereal.

Placing the cereal on the glue helped work on our fine motor skills too!

We also practiced how to use glue, it can be a tricky (and messy!) skill to discover.

I am adding a box to the right of the words we are currently practicing.  I will update the list as our words change.  I am planning on every two weeks at this point, but it will depend on whether or not the students need more or less time with a family as we move along.  Keep in mind that your child may be able to read or identify words but not able to vocalize it.  For example, if I write the word "sit" on a piece of paper and ask some students to "read" it, they would be unable to vocalize that word aloud.  But, if I write the words sit, mit, and hit on a paper and then ask them to point to sit, they may be able to show me that they can identify the word.  This activity also becomes an instant "game" if you can find a small toy to replace just pointing.  For example, I found some small rubber frogs at the dollar store who like to "hop" onto the correct word.