"That's right," says Kathy. "Does anyone see another word that begins with h? Keesha, come and point to the word. Good! That word is his, and it begins with h. Let's all say his and hat out loud. Can you hear that they begin with the same sound?"
Kathy is taking advantage of a shared reading session to teach her students a lesson in decoding, the process of identifying the written form of a spoken word. She uses three types of cues. Semantics (meaning) and structural analysis help the students identify the word hat; phonics (letter-sound associations) help them learn to recognize hat, he and his. "All three ways of learning to read are essential," says Kathy. "Phonics can't stand alone."
Teacher TipTeaching Phonics in Sequence
Try this progression when teaching phonics:
Ideas for Teaching Phonics
In Julia Carriosa's fourth grade class, word skill instruction focuses on structural analysis, the process of using familiar word parts (base words, prefixes, and suffixes) to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.
"By fourth grade, most of my students are already skilled at letter=sound associations," she says. "But they're now dealing with harder words, and even when they've pronounced a word correctly, they might not know what it means. So we focus on context clues and whatever meaning clues the word itself might contain."
Be sure your students understand that many prefixes and suffixes have more than one meaning, as in inactive and inroad, and that even when they know the correct meaning of an affix, they might still come up with an incorrect definition. Emphasize the importance of checking a word's context to see if their guessed meaning makes sense.
These checklists may be helpful in assessing your students' decoding skills.
Teacher TipStructural Analysis and Phonics
Have students raise their hands during
a second reading when they hear a word
that contains a certain sound.
After finishing a story, have students
review it for compound words.
Have students compose a rhyming poem.
Have students think aloud as they predict
how a word is spelled.
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