I wrote a letter yesterday to inform my parents of their
student’s progress in language skills. There are only five that really matter
right now:
1. Recognize all letters of the alphabet.
2. Know all letter sounds, including long/short (a,e,I,o,u).
We are beginning to work on soft/hard (g,c) sounds.
3. Blend sounds to read and write words.
4. Listen to and interpret combinations of sounds in order
to spell. r-a-t = rat
5. Write words in a logical order to form sentences.
Of course my students must also know about fifty common
words “by sight” without going through the procedure of sounding them out. But
that is an ongoing process and most will know over 100 before the end of the
year. We work on at least ten per day, and some stay on our chart for weeks at
a time if necessary. The “w” words- who,
what, when, where, why- are often the most difficult to differentiate, followed
by “to, too, two, there, they, the, that, this”.
Most of my students are quite proficient in skills 1-3. The
sounds of w, y, u, and g are the last ones to be learned with
confidence. The sounds of i and e are the most difficult ones for my
“Okie” kids to hear correctly because of regional language idiosyncrasies. If
they grow up hearing “I’m fixin’ to
git me a pin to write with”, that’s what they will most likely also read and
write. And as someone who grew up in another state I have also learned to be a
bit tolerant of “he done it”, “me and him” and other phrases commonly used by
children and adults in our area. You
fight the battles you can win.
Spelling is still giving some of my students a great deal of
difficulty. I should mention for those unfamiliar with kindergarten spelling
that we do not memorize word lists.
Instead, I sound out consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words such as hog, cat, pop, man, ten, etc. and my
students write down the sounds they hear.
Most of my students can now spell almost anything I sound out and are
merely expanding their skills to include such things as k vs. c, and s vs. soft c. Such details will drive some of them crazy for the rest of their
lives and others will have a great memory for the peculiarities of our
language. I used to have a high school classmate who routinely turned around to
ask me to spell words like whether, separate, desperate, and specific,
because she simply could not remember them and I could. Spelling is a memory
function based on our understanding of a few basic rules and a whole LOT of
exceptions to those rules.
That brings us to
number 5- writing a sentence- the
nemesis of kindergarten students everywhere. We begin this lesson in August
when I ask students to answer questions in complete
sentences. The automatic answer to anything is one or two words at most, so
we spend weeks practicing the following procedure:
“What is your favorite food?”
“My favorite food is pizza.”
Then we advance to talking about a photo. I give each child
a photo of a familiar object or animal and they tell me something about it.
During this process my goal is to change their speech from “It’s yellow.” to
“The bird is yellow.”
We read and copy sentences written on the board. We talk
about different ways to say things. We read and copy sentences from our story
books. Then I start reading and writing sentences with key words left out that
they must supply. I have a whole series of readers that tell a story emphasizing
four specific words. At the end of each book there are ten sentences with
blanks and students must supply the words to finish the sentences. We read one
of these each day during our reading hour and the children love to respond to
them.
At this time in the year we are writing sentences using a
word bank, sight word chart, and basic phonics skills. Here is yesterday’s
assignment:
My pet is a ______.
_____ can _______.
____ is __________. (color or size)
I like my _______.
Word bank: run, jump, play, eat, he, she
My students can all spell dog, cat, or fish. I
wrote horse and hamster on post-it notes for two children. They can write big. Little is one of our sight words. Color words are on their desk
tags. I explained that the first blank in
sentences #2 and #3 was for he or she since I did not know what their pet
was. Some filled in the last blank with the animal type, others wrote pet. One child asked me how to spell bark for sentence two. All in all it
was a successful assignment and only three children were unable to complete it.
The next four weeks will be more of the same. We will
continue to learn something new, review what we know, learn something new,
review what we know. Everything in kindergarten is woven tightly together.
That’s why it has been so stressful for me to have four to six children absent
each day since we returned from holiday break. Yesterday was our first day to
have perfect attendance again. Now we can resume our regular pacing and
hopefully stay on task.
