Week 7 - Assignment 5

I conducted the assessments on a first- grade student who native language is English but overall language and literacy development is considered lower than her peers and, according to her teachers, is falling behind. Her print awareness seemed on target and she identified all aspects of the book we read correctly. She seemed able to identify the alphabet letter names with appropriate sound associations such as /d/ is the beginning sound in ‘dog’. She had difficulties differentiating between similar vowel sounds in similar words like ‘cut’ and ‘cat’. Seeing the words visually in front of her helped make the some associations of individual consonant sounds however she seemed to have trouble with her overall phonemic awareness and blending the sounds on her own to read words not yet learned or seen before. She identified most of the letters but couldn’t string the sounds together properly and form the actual word as a blended whole. I suggest that practice for the student, when learning read, write, and spell words that are taught in her class, should be conducted both in isolation and in context so comprehension will be achieved of how the word is used as well. Activities should focus on beginning blends so she can learn to combine sounds to make a new word. Other phonemic awareness activities, such as those incorporating segmentation, deletion, and addition, will help increase student awareness of how to manipulate the individual sounds to form complete words and this will then hopefully help her with her overall phonological awareness and reading and writing the words as well. The following is a few websites that have games that help with phonemics and phonics instruction.

http://www.sadlier-oxford.com/phonics/student.cfm - great variety of games that focus both on letter sounds, consonant blends, and over all phonics.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/clifford1/ Clifford is always fun and motivating and these games which focus on phonics, reading, and constructing words are really interactive as well

http://pbskids.org/lions/games/- t his is a great game which focuses on beginning blends and sounds.

http://www.starfall.com/n/level-a/learn-to-read/play.htm?f - this game provides activities for phoneme blending to make a word by dragging and dropping letters, and by phoneme isolation where students identify and categorize words by their onset.