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Friday 22 October 2010

Tomas reading with Miss Mary.avi


This is a Reading Comprehension lesson in Year 1 CSA. Children are reading a text from their Literacy Letts books and answering some questions.

Thursday 21 October 2010

Last session of Synthetic phonics teachers gathering at ESSARP

It was a wonderful and very enriching experience! We shared teaching practices, we learned more about how to develop reading and writing, we saw the videos of different schools and everybody participated with very thoughtful and intelligent comments. 
This time the group received two lovely Uruguayan teachers from Woodlands School in Montevideo. They shared their teaching experience and brought a lovely video of How they do Reading at Woodlands. 
Again wonderful and enriching experience that we will certainly repeat in 2011!

Monday 27 September 2010

CSA Reading Time in Year 1 August 2010

Reading Time in Year 1 takes place twice a week. The class is divided into reading groups according the reading strategies the children need to develop and practice. This is our "Guided reading" where the teacher reads with one group for 15 minutes while the rest do some "reading cards". These reading cards aim at each group´s needs so they practice while they are waiting for their turn to read.

Sunday 19 September 2010

WOODLANDS SCHOOL Montevideo, Uruguay. September 16th, 2010


Woodlands School is a 15 year old bilingual school in Montevideo. During my Follow Up visit on September 16th, I was able to observe and share Kinder 4 and Prep 1 classes during their phonics sessions. By this time of the year the children had covered all of the 42 sounds and done the alternative sound vowell digraphs! They all participated actively in their teachers` lively activities and were very willing to read everything that was in front of them! These photographs are evidence of those enriching moments in the classrooms.
After the intervention in the classes, we had the feedback and some training catering the school`s needs.
It was a wonderful experience where we all worked hard!
Congratulations to all the lovely staff of Woodlands and Thumbs up to teachers and Ines, Head of Primary, for the excellent job!
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Colegio Stella Maris Montevideo, Uruguay. September 15th, 2010

Colegio Stella Maris Montevideo started using Jolly Phonics in 2010 with Kinder, Prep 1 and Form 1 children. All staff was trained in 2009 so as to launch synthetic phonics in 2010. The school will progressively grow in Phonics and will apply Phonics international from Form 2 upwards.
In my Follow up visit on September 15th, I was able to observe different classes from Kinder (4 year olds), and  Prep (5 year olds). The children showed a sound knowledge of the alphabetic code and were very engaged and enthusiastic about learning sounds and reading. Teachers are doing a wonderful job! And I can forsee outstanding results in the coming months!
It was a long and intense day, but very rewarding and enriching!
Congratulations to all the wonderful teachers at Colegio Stella Maris and its great Headteachers!

Saturday 18 September 2010

Intervention programme


Juana is 6 years old and she is in Year 1 at CSA. 
She learned the alphabetic code with Jolly Phonics and this lesson took place in August having started the school year in March. It is important to say that Juana´s mother tongue is Spanish.

This is Juana during the intervention programme planned to make her gain fluency. Her regular sessions take place from 2 to 4 times a week and they last 8 to 15 minutes the most.

Resources used for this session: Phonics International and Jolly readers. 
The session starts with individual letter sounds, passing then to words, then sentences to finish up with text and  a decodable book.

And this is Juana reading after 2 weeks!

ST PAUL´S

St Paul´s working with magnetic letters practising and applying the strategy and revising sounds doing the actions.
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Sunday 12 September 2010

'problems', 'hurdles', 'mountains' or whatever you want to call them SOME children face when learning to read and spell in English?

DIANA POTTER sent me this email, which I found most interesting that is why I have posted it here to share with you all.
Have your saying!

Hi Grace,
Just a quick (early morning!) mail from me to ask you if you can do me two huge favours. I am trying to write up an 'internal' paper about the problems faced by second language (Spanish) children beginning to read in English. As I said this is for 'home consumption' to help me and also teachers at school, but I also thought that, once written, it might be usefful as part of your training sessions as it would be a pooling of many brains and differing situations (as they say, all happy families are the same or have similar traits, but all unhappy ones are different ....)

With this in mind, could I ask you to:

1. jot down any 'problems', 'hurdles', 'mountains' or whatever you want to call them SOME children face when learning to read and spell in English?
2. Maybe ask for contributions from other teachers (the ones who attend your courses) to be sent to my mail address .... potter@arnet.com.ar

Thanks and regards,

Diana

Hi Diana!

It looks that both of us are hardworkers.....I am in two things right now, on the one hand I am writing my "paper" about ESSARP Conference to share in school at our Heads meeting on Tuesday and a shorter one to post on the school blog, and on the other hand preparing and adjusting the existent JP presentations for my Uruguay training tour ( I am seeing 4 schools there..this week)

Answering your question:

1. jot down any 'problems', 'hurdles', 'mountains' or whatever you want to call them SOME children face when learning to read and spell in English?

I think that children reproduce what they hear, therefore what they pronounce is what we teach them, i.e. we teach them a sound and they will imitate what we say. Saying this I believe that if they pronounce the letter sound with a spanish hyothesis either the teacher`s pronunciation was a more "spanish" like sound than an English one (which might not be the case in your school) or the teacher didn`t correct the child`s sound right on the spot, just because she didn`t realise in the whole lot response...(this can be a very sound possibility)

If a child gets to produce the wrong sound, it is very difficult afterwards to correct it as it goes into the process of deleting and reseting/relearning it (you know about that a lot!)

There is another issue that bears importance, in that our children are not exposed to the English language as we were exposed when we were in our "English" schools as opposed to our current "bilingual schools". We were surrounded by a natural English environment where all of the teachers were native english speakers, so not only did we hear the real English but all of their accents...we were so very immersed that we just picked it up naturally and accurately. Our children`s reality is not that anymore, they might have %50 of it some of them, and believe me Diana that makes a difference....and that is why we have to be very conscious of it and teach with more accuracy without overdoing pronunciation....It sounds tough doesn`t it? but as long as we are aware, it is not a big deal!

However that is not an excuse for not acquiring correct production of a language but it is a drawback. That is why teachers don`t have to take things for granted when teaching children especially in reading. Teachers schould be very careful, attentive and aware of the right acquisition on the spot, on the moment in order to correct the child. They should be very strict in this point, and spot any child who is not producing the sound correctly (with a spanish hypothesis) The danger of not doing this is, that then the child will not take the correct spelling. He/she will be hearing one sound for a letter that he pronounces differently...he will get into the grey zone of confusion and start coming up with different mispelling and muddling all the sounds similar to the incorrect acquired one...

Another cause for incorrect pronunciation and spelling might be a mixture of child`s capacities and having started late or child`s attention problem. And this is something that needs another encounter as we get into the SEN realm. Sometimes it does not have to do with deep child`s special needs, but just contemporary phonological stage in the child where he can`t still reproduce some specific sounds such as sybilant "s" or fricative "f" or the "r" sound, in this case it is just a matter of a "Fonoaudiologa" treatment help. That is very common with the 5 to 6 year olds in Year 1 or even in Preschool.

The main reason why I brought Jolly Phonics into my school, was that I had a bee in the bonnet about pronunciation and spelling, my pupils were not pronouncing and spelling well in spite of all our efforts! So it wasn`t entirely our fault, but the method used was not working for us driving us to overdo sounds (such the case of "h" as a "jota" in spanish...or sounding the digraph with spanish pronunciation like "ai" as "e i") making it more confusing! With synthetic phonics the children learn the letter sounds correspondences in the most accurate way and individually, so the risk of mispronouncing is minimal. The perfomance at school has changed dramatically since using JP and PI. However, teachers are very careful to spot the children who are not producing the correct sound "on the spot" and they insist on correcting for the proper sound.

In conclusion, I truly believe that teachers should identify right from scratch the children with this problem so as to remediate it immediately by all the strategies we know and have in hand.

Well Diana this is it! You have planted a very interesting query here, and it would be very nice to hear the rest saying about it.

Hope I have anwered your question! And definitely can carry on talking about it and develop it in our next October 20th gathering!

Lots of love and good luck with your paper!

You can ask the teachers in your school why they think some of the children don`t get the right pronunciation and spelling...

Grace

Sunday 22 August 2010

CSA Year 1 Tomas reading "before and after" August 2010

This is Tomas, a Year 1 boy, he was video taped reading and then
followed after 15 days to see his progress after working specifically in
blending for automatic recall gaining fluency.
He was asigned a reading buddy to help him develop the necessary skills, this
reading buddy took him out for regular 10 minutes one to one reading sessions for two weeks.
The results are really very good!

Thursday 12 August 2010

We are all synthetic phonics teachers!



School Board


On Wednesday August 4th, we had our first gathering at ESSARP centre. We were 16 enthusiastic teachers sharing our teaching experience with Jolly Phonics and we decided to have this blogspot so as to share our evidence of learning.

WORKING PHONICS INTERNATIONAL WITH YEAR 6 CSA 

Last Friday August 13th, I worked with Year 6 on Phonics. We worked on the "wa" spelling for the /wo" sound.
Here you can see them working on the sound activity sheets of Phonics International. They are working in groups reading words with the spelling "wa" as in water, wasp, swatch, and finding meanings in the dictionaries.

After doing the sound activity sheets, they read the "I can read" texts, spotted all the words with the sound /wo/ and then answered the questions on the text.


SOME MORE PHONICS AT CSA
A Year 1 girl working with the magnetic letters practising segmentation
Reading Buddies in action. Year 3 children helping Year 1 develop fluency. 
Reading Buddies: Year 5 girl helping a Year 1 boy reading. She is using the lists of words in the Jolly  Phonics handbook and helps the boy with his blending skills.