Introduction



Literacy Review Week:Phonological Awareness and Concepts of PrintKindergartenTheresa Blackwell and Haley PowersPiedmont CollegeIntro to Technology Educ. 250Professor Kenyon BrownApril 22, 2012 Abstract Literacy, the ability to read, is a vital part of early childhood education. Studies show that children’s reading fluency can be predicted by the age of seven. Therefore, as educators, we have a responsibility and a goal to design and deliver an effective lesson plan that can produce and facilitate fluent readers of the future literacy instruction. In order to bring about fluent readers, Kindergarten teachers must follow state standards and guideline to follow. In Georgia, these guidelines are called the Georgia Performance Standards (GPS). For Kindergarten students, GPS mandates that teacher have content and instruction for many standards; however this lesson focuses on phonological awareness and concepts of print. This five-day lesson plan aligns with each standard and is implemented and assessed through whole and small group, as well as independent centers. The goal is to outline the yearly instruction while thoroughly assessing each student’s cumulative learning. To conclude, the lesson is followed by an evaluation of curriculum and student instruction. Table of Contents TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u Introduction PAGEREF _Toc322962973 \h 4Instruction in the Classroom PAGEREF _Toc322962974 \h 4Evaluating the Product PAGEREF _Toc322962975 \h 10IntroductionPhonological awareness builds the foundation for effective reading readiness for a child's future. ?Therefore, it is vital for educators to effectively build and instruct content and lessons, and accurately assess student progression. These skills are crucial because they are necessary to foster a foundation of literacy for today’s students and those to follow. ?In order to accomplish this, educators must design their instruction to cater to the literacy needs of the students they serve. Many of today’s public school classrooms consist of an array of academic diversities, including small groups. ?Each group is differentiated to adequately meet the needs of all students learning capabilities. As a part of Georgia’s Performance Standards for Kindergarten students, teachers are required to include phonological awareness (ELA.K.R1) and concepts of print (ELA.K.R2) in their instruction. These standards are taught all year long and in our unit plan we are reintroducing these standards as part of the fourth quarter review week. The purpose for review week is to reinforce and assess overall cumulative learning during each student’s Kindergarten year. ?Measuring each student overall cumulative learning provides a precise assessment for the academic placement according to the learning needs of each child for the upcoming year.Instruction in the ClassroomThe review week in Phonological Awareness and Concepts of Print will begin with the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom written by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault and illustrated by Lois Elhert. This book is an informative book on letter recognition. ?As a whole group, the entire class, students will come to the rug to listen to the story read aloud. ?The teacher will present the front cover of the book. Children will be asked to identify the author (the person who writes the words) and illustrator (the person who draws the pictures) by raising their hands before beginning the story. ?The teacher will begin reading the text left to right while emphasizing the letters through speech and pointing to the words. Students become more aware of the little, yet vital concepts of building a fluent literacy foundation. ?Once the story is complete, the teacher will review the main ideas, characters and present questions pertaining to the story to assess the student listening comprehension. ?For example, what was the story about? ?Students’ responses should consist of letters, a tree, coconuts, chicka chicka boom boom. Their answers will reveal their ability to retain and relate to the story. ?This activity will refresh their letter awareness knowledge. Letter awareness should be further implemented. Therefore, we will turn focus to the Smart board and continue the lesson. There, the students will engage in identifying upper and lower case letters as a whole group. These shared activities in whole group help many students retain their prior letter knowledge as well as strengthen students who need extra support naming letters and recognizing their sounds. ?Literacy centers will be another exploration for students to engage in identifying and recognizing their letters. ?The groups will rotate around so that they all have time at each center. Literacy centers consist of guided reading, seatwork, and free-- reading, word/sentence building and, whiteboards, and smart board. At the guided reading, students will play Spin a Coconut game to focus on letter identification. ?The teacher will spin the wheel, wait for it to stop, and instruct children to locate the matching letter. ?Once the wheel has stopped, students will color in the matching letter with a marker on their provided worksheet. At small group, students will participate in letter Bingo to reinforce letter sounds. The paraprofessional will call out letter sounds and the children will respond by placing their Bingo chip on the matching letter. Board games, such as Bingo, Go Fish, and Memory Match are ways for children to actively engage in learning and will explored in the classroom alternatively.Seatwork is a center for children to work independently as a daily assessment of academic learning. Here, children will be provided a worksheet that aligns with the lesson for the day, such as letter identification or syllables. This activity presents a different instruction as well as assessment of the students learning. Free centers allow each child to visit a different center throughout the week. Whiteboards and reading centers consist of the same principle each day throughout the year, though it can be subject to change as each unit does. ?For example, books at the centers may be added to or altered according to the classrooms reading abilities. The whiteboard center will require slower learners to write weekly sight word 5 times each and the more advanced learners will complete the same activity while being challenged to construct sentences using each sight word.Tuesday’s lesson is comprised of a morning message containing many words, sentences, and punctuation errors to concentrate on identifying concepts of print while expanding on letter and sound recognition. ?Creating a short story message with errors promotes students to reflect on prior concepts of print, punctuation, capitalization, finger spacing, and enable them to identify mistakes, familiar words and sight words. ?Once the children have come to the rug, table by table, the instructor will ask them to read with her as she points to each word. ?They will be asked to raise their hands if they see any errors or corrections. ?While reading the passage, students should identify errors, if the students are unable to do so, the teacher will provide clues to enhance their critical thinking. Once all of the errors are corrected, the teacher will expand on sight word identification. ?Students will be encouraged to participate by raising their hand to come forward and circle each sight word in the message.Guided reading will build on letter awareness to enhance words awareness. ?Student will be prompted to sound out, build and segment words using small letter tiles. For example, /m/ /a/ /p/ the phoneme identifies letters have sound and each sound can be blended to make a word. ?The paraprofessional will implement her instruction through power point lessons. Children will identify, manipulate and isolate words. Each PowerPoint slide is composed of pictures, beginning sounds, and audio to enrich learning. Hands on activities typically encourage students to eagerly participate.In order to continually keep this group of young, active learners engaged in the activity, it may require the instructor to offer a new approach to instruction. The use of technology by incorporating childhood songs, nursery rhymes, video/audio, etc, into a Smart board or PowerPoint lesson can regain the attention of easily distracted children. ?Therefore, Wednesday will start with a smart board lesson with rhyme and syllable awareness through song. As a group, the teacher and students will watch and listen to Five Little Speckled Frogs on YouTube. ?The video will be played one time for an introduction and the second time for a sing along. ?After listening to the song, the instructor will inquire about rhyming words by posing questions for students to answer, for example, “Did anyone hear any rhyming words in the song? If you heard rhyming words in the song please raise your hand”. Students will come to the smart board and circle the two rhyming words with a blue pen. Each group of rhyming words will be circled with a different color pen. Moving forward to syllables, the class as a whole will listen to the teacher as she introduces a word within the song and follows it with claps. The words little, clap it with me “lit” (clap) “tle” (clap). One and two syllable words will be the primary focus for this lesson. ?A song, such as Five Little Speckled Frogs, engages students of young ages to participate while learning rhyme and syllable awareness through three of the five the senses, hearing, speaking and sight, implemented by the beat of the music which can often be a challenging concept for students to attain.It is important to promote reading short stories at a young age. In guided reading today, each young learner will read a short story according to each group's level of reading. This book will be read aloud beginning with the teacher, then students will take turns reading each sentence using their voice and reading finger. Reading fingers or whisper phones are great ways for children to gain their attention, engage within the story, and discover new concepts of reading, like new words. ?Reading will be followed by discussion to assess the listening comprehension of the story. ?Moreover, guided reading books are sent home to encourage reading outside of the classroom.At seat work, students will be given a syllable worksheet. ?The directions are, to say each picture name and clap the syllables as you say the word. ?Often, students need to say and clap the word several times. Once they have determined the number of syllable in the word they will write the number of syllable on the line provided. ?Syllable worksheets promote independent work and encourage the student to attempt the lesson without help. Each worksheet will be handed back to the teacher to assess their instruction and students’ comprehension.Many schools are encouraged to incorporate new technology within the classroom such as Ipads. Ipads are small portable computers, and are operated by touch screen features. This accessibility allows instruction through small groups. Not only are students engaged within instructional curriculum application, but they are learning to navigate technology within their socially wired society. ?Although computer technology can be exciting, teacher-student interaction remains a vital part of a molding children’s learning and social character. In order to continuously maintain this balance and foster student learning, the teachers and parents need to be involved in the total learning process and monitor technology use.The rhyming lesson will precede will the teacher reading aloud, turning the pages, and interacting with the students. The selected book is Sheep in a Jeep, a fantastic children's book that is focused on rhyming comprehension. ?Before the teacher begins, he/she will create word webs using the word families -ud,- ug,-elp, -out, and ?-eer. ?Students will remain in their seats as Sheep in a Jeep is read aloud. ?As the story is read students will raise their hand when they recognize a rhyming word. ?Each rhyming word within the book will be placed alongside the corresponding word web. Grouping the rhyming words enables students to visibly see the correlation of the rime (the ending sound) and strategically manipulate the beginning sound in various words. ?As a whole the class will orally recall each rhyming web to reiterate the concept of rhyme. As it was stated earlier, young children love games, so what better way to incorporate word awareness than through a board game? In a small group, students will construct words using the game Scrabble Apple. ?Children who possess the skills to build words independently may begin, while the children who need further letter awareness will work together with the teacher sounding out and building words. ?For the students who are fluent in this content area, they will be challenged to construct their own words using their prior knowledge of letter and word awareness.After reviewing letter identification and sounds, word and sentence awareness, Friday will conclude with constructing short sentences. To do so, sentences will be written on sentence strips then segmented by words. Each of the 4 tables will receive a Ziploc bag of sentences retelling the story of Sheep in a Jeep. ?Each academically diverse table will work together to properly construct complete and logical sentences beginning with the capital letter, sounding out unfamiliar words, and ending with a period. Once all of the students have completed the activity, the teacher will then instruct them, group by group, to retell their sentence by reading left to right and sounding out words in front of their peers. ?Small group activities are great for student collaboration as well as social interaction.To conclude review week, the class will be directed to their weekly literacy centers. Guided reading and the paraprofessional centers will be combined into a small group at the Smart board. The Smart board lessons will be composed of sight word review, beginning and ending sounds, and rhyming word games to review the weekly lessons. ?At seatwork, children will independently work on constructing sentences through a worksheet lesson. ?This will allow teachers to assess each student's ability to identify and execute complete sentences with the use of correct sentence structure including, capitalization and punctuation. ?After the conclusion of this five day lesson plan, the student will have received an extensive review that will also provide the instructor an accurate cumulative learning for each student within the class.Evaluating the ProductTeaching literacy to young children can be a great challenge but rewarding. ?Like most children ages 5-6, they are busy exploring the world around them. Therefore, it is important to develop a lesson plan that is equipped with various hands-on activities, short and differentiated instruction, as well as goals of learning achievement. After evaluating our works it is concluded that each day of the five day lesson plan met and touched on each of the criteria. The lessons and activities aligned with the standards and were supported with added small group and independent instruction. Although the lessons introduced vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and digraphs ( sh-, th-, br-, tr-, etc) further instruction ?incorporated within our center activities or smart board lesson would have been effective in student learning and teacher assessment. Another area of focus is the goal for our lesson plan- assessment. There were many precise and beneficial assessments, like observation, worksheets, and activities that are vital in measuring students learning at these early ages, designed and executed within the lesson plan. ?But after taking a further look, educators looking for lessons of instruction and assessment are determined not only in the design but the effectiveness of the lesson plan. This evidence would be an asset to the lesson plan. The design of the lesson plan not only encompassed the classroom but reached out to the home through homework and a literacy weblog. The weblog was designed to enhance parent-teacher communication and provide instructional resources for fellow educators. Overall, the lesson plan aligned with the standards, supported diverse teaching tools, engaged student learning, and offered teacher and parent resources. ? ................
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