Supporting Phonemic Awareness in the

Classroom

Final Project Template

by

Donna Christensen August 18, 2014

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Final Project DirectionsAs a final project, you will develop plans for teaching phonemic awareness in your classroom, including plans for assessment procedures, analysis, and activities. This final project template will also include one example of a phonemic awareness assessment and analysis on a student.

Your plans should incorporate at least one of the technology tools explored in this course and include details for other types of phonemic awareness strengthening activities. See the Course Details on the home page top section to review the course layout, syllabus, and expectations.

Complete this template as the course progresses. This template is due to your facilitator at the end of Session Six. At that time, your facilitator will review your final project and provide feedback for you.

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Part I: General Information (Session One)

GRADE: 1

LESSON BLOCK LENGTH: 45 minutes

Is Phonemic Awareness currently being addressed in your classroom? If so, how? If you are not currently teaching in a classroom, please fill out this template as if you are teaching in the classroom of your choice.

Phonemic awareness is being addressed in my resource room classroom Grades K through 3. First the children are assessed through the WIAT II and CTOPP or Brigance Comprehensive Inventory of Skills. The results of these assessments are written about in an evaluation report. An oral presentation of this report is given at the special education team meeting to determine if there is a learning disability. Then as a child is identified, an IEP is written and the parent signs permission for the child to be taken out of class once a day usually every day for language arts. Phonemic awareness is taught through a variety of ways pulled from many different programs. The Wilson method of stretching a rubber band as the sound of the vowels is made is coupled with visuals from Reading Manipulatives. The sounds are also practiced as they are introduced in the LIPS method where the letters are grouped in pairs, one louder than the other but shaped in the same manor by the mouth. We use mirrors to look at the shapes and work with partners to look at each other’s mouths while saying sounds.I feel a variety of methods is needed to impact the working memory and hold the attention of the students, especially those with ADHD.

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Part II: Phonemic Awareness(Session One)

Reflect on one of the readings from this session. Some guiding questions could be: Why is phonemic awareness an important step in learning to read? Do you currently assess student’s phonemic awareness? If not, what are the early indicators that allow you to identify if a student is at risk of reading difficulty?

Phonemic awareness is the foundation for all other steps in learning to read. Without phonemic awareness the student has no understanding of how to segment and blend sounds in words. They must learn that each word is made up of individual sounds called phonemes. Once they understand that principle they can start to manipulate language and see connections such as rhyming. This understanding will not only build a good foundation for reading, but also a good one for spelling and writing. They go hand-in-hand. In my classroom we assess students formally with the WIAT III, CTOPP and sometimes the Readiness subtests of the Brigance Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills. Informally we use an assessment developed by Dr. Ilda King, an educational psychologist, who bases her assessment by expectations of grade levels. I thought the reading this week entitled “Phonemic Awareness Concepts and Research” was an excellent summary of the topic of phonemic awareness. I really liked the breakdown it gave of examples of phonemes in chart form. They also clearly differentiated the differences in terminology. They emphasized that phonemic awareness involved hearing language and phonics involved sound-symbol relationships. The lack of the five skills listed for phonemic awareness is especially helpful to a resource room teacher as a quick reference chart when teaching. To keep spiraling back and forth over these skills would strengthen a student’s chances of being a successful reader. I especially liked the quote from Shaywitz at the end of the article regarding research. He said “Phonemic awareness is necessary for reading, and reading, in turn, improves phonemic awareness still further.”

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Part III: Linguistic Components(Session Two)

From the Yopp article, which activities look promising and intriguing? Which ones might be easiest to incorporate into your current curriculum? Which activities, before assessing your students, do you think would benefit your classroom most? How could the activity address the standards?

There were many useful and intriguing ideas in the Yopp article. Addressing Common Core Standard RF 2a Phonological Awareness: recognize and produce rhyming words, the activity called “The Hungry Thing” would be very easy to incorporate into my lessons in resource room. Many of my children cannot hear rhyme and do not understand the concept. By using something they are familiar with (food), this activity in a playful way helps them to make the connection about what a rhyme is. Even though the concept is explained and samples shown, some children just do not understand what I am trying to get them to do. This game will definitely encourage growth in the rhyming area. It also will help my language-impaired children who have a problem with categories. After we play with the food idea, I could have the creature want to do things. For example the Hungry Thing wants to sump (jump), sead (read), glay (play) and then he could want to see animals foat(goat), lish (fish). We could incorporate some of the sounds that are most difficult for them to pronounce, very often being /f/ and /l/. I also like the reference to a collection of songs that Yopp has published. I would like to investigate those because the songs I have used for teaching vowel sounds have made a big difference. I think incorporating more music will reach more of Gardner’s 9 learning styles. In the activity suggestions for syllable manipulation, I really like “How Many Syllables in a Name?” and “Humpty Dumpty”. These address Common Core RF 2b: count, pronounce, blend and segment syllables. I have found my children are fascinated when you use their name for anything. We do an activity where the vowels are deleted from their names and they ask to repeat the game. Incorporating math by doing a bar graph at the same time is a clever idea crossing curriculum. For older students I would modify this activity by having them interact and form their groups by two syllable and three syllable names without the visual of the colored block paper to force them to listen for sounds rather than rely on the visual answer. The Humpty Dumpty activity gets the tactile sense involved as well as visual and auditory. So children with learning disabilities would be tapping into 3 different sources of learning. It also would help focus children with ADHD as would the “Going On a Word Hunt” described under “Activities with onset-rime manipulation.” I really like the suggestion made to use continuant sounds when sliding. The listing of letters that make continuant sounds will be very useful for me when teaching. Lastly out of the “Activities with phoneme manipulation” addressing Common Core RF 2d Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds, I can easily see me using the Bag Game. Again, the use of the visuals, the tactile and auditory input is ideal. Blending and segmenting are the hardest skills for my children to learn. I like the fact that the correct number of blocks is already connected for them. As an extra step for my youngest ones I might have them work with a partner and as they pronounce the parts, the partner would write the letter they think goes with that part. For my older students I might use this Bag Game for multisyllable word segmentation. This Yopp article definitely has widened my bag of tricks and has offered many positive, playful ways to teach phonemic awareness.

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Part IV: Audio Recording Practice(Session Two)

If you used an audio recording tool that provides an URL please share it here. If not upload it as an audio file here and in the discussion forum. You upload the audio file by: Clicking on Insert in the tool bar above, then pick Audio, then Audio from file or record audio.

Reflect on this practice. How do you imagine audio recordings will help you teach and your students learn about phonemic awareness?

This method of audio recording opens up a whole new avenue for me to assist children in gaining phonemic awareness skills. First it provides a fun activity that is going to hold the student’s interest. Secondly, the student can listen to the recording with the teacher and review the skill, both correct answers and errors. It can challenge the student to try a chosen activity again to see if they can get all the answers correct. Again, it helps focus the student on the skill. Thirdly, audio recordings could be shared between students having them work in pairs, listening to each other or to a sample student. They could predict if an answer is correct or incorrect and then check their answers with an answer sheet at the end. The more exercise they do with sound, the greater opportunity they have to improve their phonemic awareness.

What struggles did you or your students face or could face?

The struggle I find with the audio recording is having the microphone close enough to record clearly a response. On the other hand a different problem arose when the microphone was too close to the student’s mouth. A scratchy quality to the recording appeared. Unfortunately, the audio recording in my classroom would be one student at a time. Allowing each child an opportunity to record is going to take time. Classroom and time management will definitely play a role in successfully using this new worthwhile tool.

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Donna Christensen audio monologue.lnk

Part V: Student Assessment(Session Three)

Which assessment will you be using on your student?

I am using the Younger Student Pre-assessment provided in our course.

Insert the URL of your audio-recorded assessment with a student here or upload audio file here and in the discussion forum.

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Part VI: Analysis(Session Three)

After completing an assessment on a student or small child, you will reflect on their scores using the appropriate worksheet. Please upload the worksheets in the discussion forums if possible.

The Young Student Pre-assessment forms would not upload due to them being in “read-only” format.

What stands out to you most? Reflect on the areas of student strength. Reflect on the areas of student weakness.

For this week's assignment I worked with a little seven-year-old girl whom I have known since her birth.  She is going into second grade in a public school and is reading first grade material quite fluently. She appears to be able to tackle multisyllable words very well by sounding out and using her context clues and pictures.  I was very surprised when we did this assessment to see that she had trouble with the sound blending assessment.  The first four she got correct, but fell apart on the last four. On the ones she got incorrect, she was able to get the initial phoneme, but the long vowel sound on most of them threw her off. For /sh/r/i/m/p  she said /sheep/ getting the initial and final phoneme.  For /j/e/p/(jeep) she said /jet/, for /t/r/a/n/ (train) she said /tornado/ again picking up on the initial and final phoneme and lastly for /r/e/ch/t/ (reached) she said /edge/.   I tried not to let on that she had any incorrect so that she wouldn't lose her confidence and so that I could get a true picture of her abilities without her becoming hesitant.   I was equally surprised by results of the phoneme segmentation fluency test. It started out well, but Kiana reverted to giving me onset-rime instead of breaking down each sound.  I tried to check during the testing if she was concentrating by reminding her with questions that she should be breaking the words down by individual sounds.  For example when she said b -at for /bat/ I said how many sounds are in /bat/. She replied three. I said can you say it in parts for me? Can you break it up into sounds? Kiana responded correctly b-a-t. We continued to the next word but she reverted back to giving me two syllable sounds  gr -ound, th-ank, r-anch.  Due to this circumstance, she broke down 10 correctly out of 25 words.  She appears to understand the concept of rhyme as she identified 7 out of 8 correctly. For the Beginning Sounds Phoneme Isolation, Kiana did very well getting 16 out of 16 correct.  Based on this assessment, I would say Kiana has no trouble identifying initial and ending sounds or rhyme. If I was working with her in school, I would concentrate on identification of medial sounds and differentiation between short and long sounds.

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Part VII: Strategies(Session Four)

Kindergartners:

RF MA2 Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

a. Recognize and produce rhyming words.

Questions: Do these two words sound alike at the end – sat, fat? Can you tell me which pair rhymes? How-cow or jet-get? Can you tell me a word that rhymes with frog?

Products: School Specialty Intervention Lesson Pack: Rhyming Pictures: “ These four fun sets of activities use pictures to reinforce rhyming skills; they can be used as warm up, practice, or review.” quoted from http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources Extension / Modification: Enlarge, cut , laminate the pictures. Put one in upper pocket of pocket chart and put two below. Have the child pick up the picture that matches for sound and place it in the top pocket. Sing the Old MacDonald melody but put in the rhyming words that match the pictures instead. Old MacDonald had a whale ei, ei oh. He looked for a match to his whale ei, ei oh. Will it be a nail , spoon or box? Old MacDonald found his match. It’s whale and nail.(Original ideas).

b. Count, pronounce, blend and segment syllables in spoken words. c. Blend and segment onsets and rimes of single-syllable spoken words.

Question: How do I break up a word? Onset-Rime Blending vs. Body-Coda Blending http://www.readingrockets.org/article/273

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Part VII: Strategies, cont.(Session Four)

d. Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words. (This does not include CVCs ending with /l/, /r/, or /x/). e. Add or substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple, one-syllable words to make new words.

Activities: Bag Game (ex. In the bag is a dime and three connected cubes. The child names the object, breaks off a cube for each sound said in the word.) The Hungry Thing by Jan Slepian and Ann Seidler (ex. Play with language as the student listens for what the monster wants to eat. He has to find a rhyme for the word the monster mispronounces (feetloaf/meatloaf) Modify by using with language impaired children to not only substitute sounds, but also practice categories such as things the monster can do (jump, sit, sing), can cook, can play. Taken from “Supporting phonemic awareness development in the classroom by Hallie Kay Yopp and Ruth Helen Yopp , The Reading Teacher Vol 54 No 2 October 2000

Product: https://www.naeyc.org/files/yc/file/200901/BTJPhonologicalAwareness.pdf

Grade 1: RF MA2 Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

a. Distinguish long from short vowel sounds in spoken single-syllable words. b. Orally produce single-syllable words by blending sounds (phonemes), including consonant blends. c. Isolate and pronounce initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in spoken single-syllable words. d. Segment spoken single-syllable words into their complete sequence of individual sounds (phonemes).

Activity: Reinforce differences in vowel sounds (medial position) by visually interacting with The Phonemics Assistant http://cloi.commlearnonline.com/cloi/menu/phonemics/index.html

Product: Heidi’s Sound Cups http://www.heidisongs.com/blog/2013/04/middle-sound-cups-and-how-to-teach-kids.html

Product: Segmenting: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/BIG-Bundle-of-Sorts-Phonemic-Awareness-Sorting-Series-Sets-1-8-694322

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Part VIII: Common Core Standards(Session Four)

Please list all relevant State Standards here. (Please specify your state and provide state standards website URL)

I teach children with learning disabilities K-4 in Massachusetts. When I start with children they usually do not have kindergarten and first grade skills. So my phonemic awareness focus is in these grade levels, even with third and fourth graders if they are identified as nonreaders. The state standards website URL is

http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/ela/0311.pdf p26 Kindergartners and Grade 1 students

Kindergartners:

RF MA2 Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

a. Recognize and produce rhyming words. b. Count, pronounce, blend and segment syllables in spoken words. c. Blend and segment onsets and rimes of single-syllable spoken words. d. Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words. (This does not include CVCs ending with /l/, /r/, or /x/). e. Add or substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple, one-syllable words to make new words.

Grade 1:

RF MA2 Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

a. Distinguish long from short vowel sounds in spoken single-syllable words. b. Orally produce single-syllable words by blending sounds (phonemes), including consonant blends. c. Isolate and pronounce initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in spoken single-syllable words. d. Segment spoken single-syllable words into their complete sequence of individual sounds (phonemes). 11

Part IX: Technology(Session Five)

Include technology strategies you will use in your classroom here, noting also your access to computers and other required hardware. You may also consider using your newfound podcasting skills in a creative way to help students with phonemic awareness.

I have two student computers with internet access. I do not have a Smartboard or IPads. I can use my computer to project websites on to a television screen for group work. I find the following helpful:

http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/picturematch/ (Children see a picture, hear the word and match to short or long vowel sound)

http://pbskids.org/lions/games/blending.html (Good visuals creating words from parts chosen by student).

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ (Students can record their own voices blending and segmenting words for peers to decipher).

http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/Audio+Tools (Fantastic listing of audio enhancement sites including Yodio. This site allows you to add your voice to your photos or presentations. Voicethread allows you to create a slideshow of images or video and others can comment on each photo in a variety of ways. SoundsXtras provides royalty free sounds library to download for animation, games and various other uses.

http://www.slideshare.net (Great way for students to share their Power Point productions.)

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Part X: Reflection(Session Six)

Please use this section to reflect on your phonemic awareness plans and the process you have undergone in this course. Include the key points of your learning and how it will change your classroom instruction.

This course is my first all-online course and I was very nervous anticipating the requirements. Now that the end of the course is here, I am happy to say that I found the course and the instructors to be most helpful. At the beginning I was unsure of the order in which phonemic awareness skills are best taught and now I feel I have a better understanding of the progression. My suspicion that phonemic awareness cannot be rushed has been confirmed. It’s important to evaluate students for each of the skills we have studied in the course. The variety of ways each skill can be taught is endless. The videos demonstrating some of the strategies along with the scripts so we could test ourselves analyzing students was very helpful. My classroom plan including the lesson plan is now filled with technology references which was an area of weakness for me. This course pushed me to explore the possibilities. Creating audio recordings with Quicktime opened up a whole new area for me to explore for my students. I never would have known about all the tools readily available for classroom use without taking this course. I chose to set up the classroom plan by first stating the state standard and then the chosen activity under each one. In our school we have to post the standard and this plan will be a quick reference and tool in itself to help me in my classroom management. Having knowledge of so many resources will definitely be a plus in creating a more interactive environment in my classroom. It will increase the attention level of children who struggle with ADHD and make learning more enjoyable and memorable for all my students. Thank you to the CLOI staff for a productive experience.

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Part XI

The final part of the course work is to create a file of all the components of your lesson and upload it in the assignment section in Session 6 on the main course page.

This file should include but not limited to:

1. Formal Lesson Write-up

a. Including student grade and level

b. CCSS addressed in lesson

c. Goals and Objectives

d. Skills addressed

e. Clear presentation of the direct instruction

f. Materials and Resources

g. Follow-up and Assessment

2. All printed materials used in lesson

3. Provide a short explanation of the purpose of the lesson based on prior needs and assessments.

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