A grade 4 teacher just came to me asking for ideas on how to help one of her students who is having some difficulties with phonemic awareness. The mother has asked for some activities that can be done at home to help the student. C is quite bright and has a good sight word vocabulary and developed reading strategies, so is coping very well with much of the material in class. The parent is concerned about difficulties as she progresses through the grades and material becomes more complex. So much of what I find is very, very babyish. Does anyone have any suggestions of activities or websites that may be of some help? I should add that she is not a candidate for any testing or Special Ed support.
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It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop
Confucius
If she's reading fourth-grade material well, and if she can unpack unfamiliar words, she may not really need work in phonemic awareness.
How is her spelling?
The spelling is almost indecipherable at times; this is what led to the parent request. I haven't had an opportunity to really take a look at her work, but want to honour the parent's attempts to help, in the short term at least. I sense that there are some concerns that she may have plateaued in her ability to deal with unfamiliar words and that is going to severely impact her in the content areas.
This is all new to me, so I'm trying to learn as I go along.
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It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop
Confucius
The spelling is almost indecipherable at times; this is what led to the parent request. I haven't had an opportunity to really take a look at her work, but want to honour the parent's attempts to help, in the short term at least. I sense that there are some concerns that she may have plateaued in her ability to deal with unfamiliar words and that is going to severely impact her in the content areas.
This is all new to me, so I'm trying to learn as I go along.
Ah. There are some links that might help here (http://www.readingrockets.org/article/c52). In addition, Barron's Painless Spelling might be a good resource - it's aimed at a middle-school audience, but the middle-school vocabulary doesn't kick in immediately, and it's good on word patterns and word families.
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Education isn't what you know. It's what you can do (and fake, intelligently) with what you know. http://www.testmaven.com
