Over this past weekend, I came across a reading literacy test at: http://www.nrrf.org/readtest.html
I printed out the passages, and thought it would be a good way to see where my daughter is at with my efforts to deprogram her from whole language reading methods. I don't know whether it was because I took her away from a TV show on a Saturday or she just didn't know how to read the words in the passage, but we did not get past test passages "A." Based upon how we have been doing, I would guess (hope) it is more of the former. So, I will wait and try again another time.
In the meantime, I decided to move my efforts for awhile to individual "challenge" words that my daughter can not read with any whole language method because I write each word on its own with no connection to any story. The first word I gave my daughter was marshmallow and the second was escalator. These are both words I am not sure I would give to a first grader to sound out normally, but because of whole language my daughter has memorized a lot of words and I have to be sure that I am giving words requiring sounding out on a regular basis.
I gave her escalator because we read Corduroy (the bear with the lost button) recently and my daughter read the word escalator without a problem and no sounding out either. So, I asked her whether she sounded the word out or she guessed based upon the picture and she told me she guessed based upon the picture. So, I had her look at the letters briefly and showed her the sounding out and filed away that word in my mind for revisiting when there was no picture. We also read elevator. I have also given her some smaller words that I thought she may not have read in a story yet. Each time my daughter read a challenge word successfully, I gave her a high-five and a great deal of praise.
Another night earlier this week, I had both my children (my 6 year old daughter and my 4 year old son) together in front of one of their easel white/chalk boards. I did multiple challenge words for my daughter and I had my daughter help teach my son some sounding out of words like car, and truck. I let her pick some words with the "ar" sound that we gave to my son to read.
I have determined that my daughter is not breaking up her phonics of big words by syllables as well as she should. But we're doing some pretty big words. So now, I'm considering how to better help her with that. We'll get there though.
I was recently trained in a program called EBLI (Evidence Based Literacy Instruction: http://www.ebli.org/). In order to get students into the habit of breaking words into syllables and saying each sound, we give them a word (orally) and tell them to first write the syllable lines on the white board. (ie for escalator, they would draw four lines: ____ _____ ____ ____). Then we have them write the sound lines on top of each syllable lines:
ReplyDelete-- -- -- ---
__ ___ ___ ____
The final step is writing the letters on the sound lines. Of course there can be up to four letters on a sound line since four letters can make one sound. The student first writes the letters he/she thinks are correct while saying the sounds. The instructor immediately corrects the spelling and has the student write it correctly on the lines once or twice and then once without the lines WHILE saying each sound as he/she writes the word.
I have found this to be the best way to teach students to break down words and to stop guessing. Let me know if you have ANY questions.