Phonics to Fluency & a Reflection on Field Experience

Readings: From Phonics to Fluency: Effective Teaching of Decoding and Reading Fluency in the Elementary School

And Teaching Phonemic Awareness

            These two readings focus on helping teachers expand their knowledge on phonics, fluency, and phonemic awareness and how to teach these concepts to their students.  In the reading of From Phonics to Fluency, I realized that some of the definitions given were some that I’d never really thought of.  I knew what the words were and I could put my own definition to them, but the authors worded them perfectly.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that they made me understand the concept of phonemes and the meanings of the words in a different way and better than I had before.

However, I haven’t written about my time at University in a while so I want to share that experience with you all.  In the past couple of weeks I have made a lot of progress.  My case study student has now exceeded my expectations and I couldn’t be more proud.  Two weeks ago I brought my laptop to field experience to introduce the iMovie idea and he didn’t even hesitate.  He wrote for me! I got a whole page of dialogue for his sports cast iMovie [which is a huge step up from the 3 sentences I got the first week of writing samples].  I then had him read his independent reading for me.

This is an entirely different experience.  My case study student is a great reader.

·       Fluency. CHECK.

·       Comprehension. CHECK.

·       Good-fit book. CHECK.

Before he started reading, I asked him to summarize what has happened in the book so far.  Assuming he would give me a short and sweet summary with all of the main events, I got every single detail—all the way to where the character was sleeping for the night.  I think it’s great that he gets passionate about the book he is reading and wants to tell me every detail about every character and event but I would much rather him tell me about the important things that I need to know to understand the book.

SO FASTFORWARD—this past week I wanted to work on Determining Importance—one of the many strategies we have worked on this semester.  I quickly grabbed a blank piece of paper before we left for our classrooms.  I made two columns: 1) What’s Important, and 2) What’s Interesting.  I had him fill these two columns out but for some reason he didn’t put ANYTHING under the “What’s Interesting” column.  He has started a new book over his fall break so I thought it was a bit weird that he didn’t have anything to share in that column.  Well, we ended up talking about it and as he was reading his “What’s Important” column, he started adding in little details to his summary just as he had done the week before.

That was quite a long story for such a short revelation.  Anyways, shortly after this 10-minute conversation with my student, I realized that instead of putting “What’s Interesting” in the second column, it might’ve been more beneficial for me to write “Supporting Details” so that he could’ve organized his ideas and thoughts in a more efficient way.

The next opportunity I have to work on determining importance with him, I think it’d be cool to see what he does with different activity.  I was thinking about doing a web so that we could both visualize his thought process about what is important and what is just another detail:

….so on & so forth.

Thoughts?