Reply to APS - Which Phonics Program did your school adopt?

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[quote=Anonymous]Thought y'all would be interested in this:

1.     How the teacher describes phonics lessons:  In a balanced literacy classroom, the teacher will describe phonics instruction as short lessons that are given as the opportunity arises, for example, when a child struggles with a word.  A teacher who  provides systematic explicit phonics instruction will  have daily classroom lessons on the sounds, sound patterns and rules of phonics, and will teach them in a sequence to ensure that none are missed.

2.     Look at the bulletin boards or classroom walls:  A balanced literacy teacher will have an A to Z alphabet-based “word wall” with lists of  words starting with the same letter.  A teacher who teaches phonics explicitly and systematically will have a sound wall of sounds represented by letters, with words with common sounds listed under the sound, e.g., “chair” would be under “ch”, not under “c”.

3.      Look at the little books your child  brings home and reads in the classroom:  A balanced literacy classroom uses little books (those 8 to 32 page books your child may bring home) that have pictures, repeat words or phrases, predictable sentences (“see the bird, see the horse, see the elephant”) and pictures.  Children usually can “read” the words by figuring out the pattern once it has been read to them and using the pictures.  The books will be organized by DRA or Fountas-Pinnell level, usually shown on the back of the book.  A teacher who emphasizes phonics will try to use decodable books or stories that emphasize the sounds the child is working on(e.g., ”the fat cat sat on the mat”), although the APS-purchased curriculum materials do not include these, so teachers have to make  an extra effort to find them.

4.     Look for posters, bookmarks, or handouts with reading strategies:  In a balanced literacy classroom, you will see posters, handouts or bookmarks with “reading strategies” for how to read a new word. They will say things like “look at the pictures, get your mouth ready to say the first sound, slide through the word, skip the word and read on, think about the story, reread the sentence to figure out the word, does it look right, does it sound right, does it make sense”.  They won’t say “sound out the word”.   A phonics classroom will have posters of sound patterns (e.g., long “a”) and phonics and spelling rules, like final “e”, and how to break words into syllables and parts.  They will not suggest guessing.

5.     Listen to how the teacher works one-on-one with children, or what they tell you about how to help your child.  When a balanced literacy teacher works with a child one-on-one, the teacher will encourage the child to look at the picture and context clues to guess at an unfamiliar word. The teacher may describe their method as reading strategies that encourage children to look at  “cues” or “three-cueing” – asking a child to look at semantic/meaning cues (what word might fit here given the subject of the text), syntactic/sentence structure cues (what word might fit here given the sentence structure), and graphophonic cues (the visual information such as the letters, word parts, or shape of a word).  In contrast, a teacher who emphasizes phonics will prompt the child to sound out unfamiliar words using the phonics rules they know. The teacher will not encourage students to look at pictures or context clues to figure out what a word is, but once a child has read the word using phonics skills, the teacher will encourage the use of context or pictures to figure out what the word means.

from:
https://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/phonics-vs-balanced-literacy-a-classroom-comparison.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news1&M=58951301&U=1830799&UUID=fb52d3b55bb50d6695adfe277e01e091 [/quote]

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