Phonics in the classroom!

I chose the two readings by Clark and Yopp & Yopp. The former reading really hit home to me because I have been involved with sports my whole life, from participating in Rec leagues at home, to playing here at UT competitively for a shot at 2 National Championships.  In having this background I am completely at home with the notion of "coaching" children as an aspect of teaching.  The method almost comes naturally to me because I have been around it for so many years of my life.  As I was reading about it, I noticed many similarities between the coaching in sports and coaching in the classroom.  


As I read about the different cues of facilitating children to read I really came to like certain ones.  Some of my favorites were: "take a running start", "throw away the gh (like the word through)", and "breaking a word into two parts".  The first cue I had not heard of before, and I really liked the idea behind that, the other two however were significant to me because they were used to help me read as a child and in my case, were best for my style of learning. A very distinct quote in this reading hit home to me and made the most sense to me when thinking about teaching children to read [in regards to three key factors that make a teacher a highly skilled coach]: "third, the teachers were aware of students' individual strengths and weaknesses". I am a true believer that knowing my students in this way will most help me as a teacher tailor their learning experience and help my understanding of how to teach effectively. 

Fun chart for learning phonics "chunks" weekly.

The second reading focused towards more activities that you could do in the classroom to help with phonics and reading as well.  This reading seemed more informational to me than the first one, being as we are reminded of what each aspect of phonics is again.  Being completely honest, this reading was hard for me to really get into until I got to the different activities. The songs "The Ants Go Marching", and "Down By The Bay" were a couple of my all time favorite songs to sing as a child, and until now it hadn't even dawned on me that they were songs built for working on rhyme! I loved learning that about the songs because at the time it didn't even seem like I was "learning".  I thought there were many great games and activities for phonics in this reading!

I absolutely love this video [minus the accents! ha] but I think this would be a cute to show the children initially to learn the song and maybe sing along with after they have learned the words!