Reading Instruction at TWLS, Part 2

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Post by Ann Rooney

Welcome back for Part 2 of our ongoing series on TWLS’s Core Academics and reading programs.  Last week we talked generally about the five areas of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and text comprehension.  This week, we’re going to start delving into each of those areas and discussing how they are taught in the TWLS classroom.

First up, we’re looking at phonemic awareness - the ability to notice, think about and work with individual sounds in spoken words. Before reading can occur, children need to know how sounds work in words.  For example, changing the first phoneme sound /s/ in “sit” to /h/ changes the word from sit to hit.  Phonemic awareness is the understanding that sounds of spoken language work together to make words.  It’s important to note that phonemic awareness is not equivalent to phonics (which we will talk about next week).  Phonics is the understanding of the relationship between a sound (phoneme) and the letter that represents the sound in written language (grapheme).  To benefit from phonics instruction, children need phonemic awareness.

At TWLS, we teach phonemic awareness through a multi-sensory approach and direct instruction from experienced teachers.  Children can show phonemic awareness in several ways including recognizing which words in a set of words begin with the same sound, isolating and saying the first or last sound in a word, and combining, or blending the separate sounds in words to say the word (/s/, /i/, /t/).

Using all three learning styles: auditory, visual and tactile/kinesthetic, students develop a strong phonemic awareness that prepares them for phonological awareness, a broader focus that includes identifying and manipulating larger parts of spoken language, such as words, syllables, and onsets and rimes, as well as phonemes.

Next week, in part three of our expert’s series, we’ll be discussing what science-based research tells us about phonics instruction.

(Go back to Part 1)

Ann Rooney is Head of School at The Whole Learning School.  She has worked in special needs education for 16 years after receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree in K-12 special education from St. Cloud State University and Master of Education degree from St. Mary’s University of Minnesota. She holds licensures in Specific Learning Disabilities, Developmental Cognitive Disabilities and Emotional Behavior Disabilities.

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