I believe that the
part of literacy that students have been missing in the last ten years is
from good old-fashioned nursery rhymes and phonetic awareness. To begin the
year I ask parents to aide their children by assisting them to sound out their
name by touching their bodies as they say each sound. I want students to be
able to hear the sounds in words before they begin kid writing and I think
the parents in turn need to understand how phonetic awareness and phonics
plays such an important step in early literacy skill development.
I have
found pictures of people touching their head, shoulders, waist, hips, knees
and toes. Then I write the word I want the student to sound out at the top
of the paper. (I have asked our Speech and Language teacher to help me with
the correct spelling of the sound by its pronunciation.) Next, I write each
sound next to the appropriate picture. The first word I start with is their
name. I am sending this paper home with any new word I want students to use in
their kid writing sentences for homework.
We use DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of basic early
literacy skills) as our progress monitoring tool for students who fall below
the benchmarks on the PALS. I thought informing parents on early
literacy skill development might help my students achieve benchmarks.
Informing parents on how
his/her child begins to write might help parents help their child to learn
how to kid write. I hope
by keeping parents informed with the process, we will make greater gains.
Before your child begins writing, have him/her sound out the words
that he/she will use in his/her sentence by following the pictures on the
" Sound Me Out"
poster,
Download the word document here.
(Sound Me Out)
When they have finished writing, the adult then writes the
sentence correctly once again below or above the child’s ‘Kid Writing’.
Lastly have the child read the sentence to you by touching the words as they
read. When using the Discovery Bags, your child can use the words in the bag
to tell about their favorite character in one of the books, or they could
draw a picture of what they did with their math manipulative, and then write
about that. Perhaps they made a pattern. Have them draw the pattern then
write "I see a red and orange pattern."
In the
classroom the children use the Kid Writing
Crowns and the Everyday Word Wall that contains the words needed to
sufficiently write during our Kid Writing sessions.