Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Otay Elementary: An Update
Six months ago, Otay Elementary School of southern California received accolades for their ELL population’s improvement, made possible, in part, by Imagine Learning English. To see why teachers and administrators alike attribute this success to Imagine Learning English, and to see how Otay Elementary continues to improve today, click here.
Rhyme on a Dime
As part of your Imagine Learning English package, two guides are included to make your life easier. The Resource Guide (for Level 1) and the Supplemental Guide (for Level 2) are each packed with printouts and activities to use in the classroom. Access them through the Imagine Manager icon on your desktop.
Look for future Resource Reminders in Imagine This! to highlight dozens of fun activities—all readily available and in your Resource Guide. This month’s reminder: rhyme books. They’re hands-on for your students and handy for you.
Rhyme books are a fun, easy, and inexpensive way to teach vocabulary and word families. Students learn principles of print as they fold their printouts into mini books with four rhyme sets each. Once students go through each rhyme book, they can create an original book using the same layout. See what kind of rhymes they can come up with on their own!
Download rhyme book printout
Look for future Resource Reminders in Imagine This! to highlight dozens of fun activities—all readily available and in your Resource Guide. This month’s reminder: rhyme books. They’re hands-on for your students and handy for you.
Rhyme books are a fun, easy, and inexpensive way to teach vocabulary and word families. Students learn principles of print as they fold their printouts into mini books with four rhyme sets each. Once students go through each rhyme book, they can create an original book using the same layout. See what kind of rhymes they can come up with on their own!
Download rhyme book printout
Letter Shapes and Sounds that Stick
Whether your students are learning letters in pre-K, in kindergarten, or as English learners later on, you know how tricky those letter shapes and sounds can be.
Letter charts with coordinating icons, ranging from apples to zebras, teach by association. But, according to Marilyn Adams' book Beginning to Read, this method achieves relatively slow progress. Rather than stick with something slow, try a new method—one that works overtime by incorporating sight, sound, formation, and speech.
Name, or No?
The original battle in teaching letters was whether or not letter names should be taught. Should the first letter in the alphabet be introduced as ‘A’ or as /ă/? Teaching the letter name is convenient, thanks to alphabet songs, but it also adds to the amount of information a student must learn—information that is at times counterintuitive. (If B is “bee” and D is “dee,” why isn’t F “fee,” and where did “aitch” come from?)
Dropping the letter name from curriculum may eliminate this confusion, but it introduces its own problems. Many letters have several sounds associated with it, so which phoneme becomes the identifying sound for each letter? Also, if some letters aren’t given a name or title, addressing them becomes problematic. (How do you refer to ‘Q’ or ‘X’ by sound?) Chances are high that someone—teacher or peer—will refer to letters by name, so students need to learn them or be left in the dark.
New Method
In their study, Pictoral Mnemonics for Phonics, Ehri, Deffner, and Wilce discovered that both beginning and struggling readers made the best progress using the very same method taught in Imagine Learning English. In Level 1, students are introduced to a letter that is formed by an object or animal that begins with the target letter sound. They see turtles in the shape of a ‘T’ and a zipper in the shape of a ‘Z.’ Then students trace the letter, hear the letter name, and say it out loud.
This method incorporates both the letter name and letter sound philosophies while adding another visual and tactile element. As noted by Adams, when students see the letter later, “they will automatically be reminded of its pictured keyword which will, in turn, evoke its sound and reinforce its shape.”
Check out Letter Shapes and Sounds in the Level 1 Review Menu to see this method in action. You’ll start to see those letter shapes and sounds really stick.
Letter charts with coordinating icons, ranging from apples to zebras, teach by association. But, according to Marilyn Adams' book Beginning to Read, this method achieves relatively slow progress. Rather than stick with something slow, try a new method—one that works overtime by incorporating sight, sound, formation, and speech.
Name, or No?
The original battle in teaching letters was whether or not letter names should be taught. Should the first letter in the alphabet be introduced as ‘A’ or as /ă/? Teaching the letter name is convenient, thanks to alphabet songs, but it also adds to the amount of information a student must learn—information that is at times counterintuitive. (If B is “bee” and D is “dee,” why isn’t F “fee,” and where did “aitch” come from?)
Dropping the letter name from curriculum may eliminate this confusion, but it introduces its own problems. Many letters have several sounds associated with it, so which phoneme becomes the identifying sound for each letter? Also, if some letters aren’t given a name or title, addressing them becomes problematic. (How do you refer to ‘Q’ or ‘X’ by sound?) Chances are high that someone—teacher or peer—will refer to letters by name, so students need to learn them or be left in the dark.
New Method
In their study, Pictoral Mnemonics for Phonics, Ehri, Deffner, and Wilce discovered that both beginning and struggling readers made the best progress using the very same method taught in Imagine Learning English. In Level 1, students are introduced to a letter that is formed by an object or animal that begins with the target letter sound. They see turtles in the shape of a ‘T’ and a zipper in the shape of a ‘Z.’ Then students trace the letter, hear the letter name, and say it out loud.
This method incorporates both the letter name and letter sound philosophies while adding another visual and tactile element. As noted by Adams, when students see the letter later, “they will automatically be reminded of its pictured keyword which will, in turn, evoke its sound and reinforce its shape.”
Check out Letter Shapes and Sounds in the Level 1 Review Menu to see this method in action. You’ll start to see those letter shapes and sounds really stick.
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