This year in #keyrocks we have decided to pilot a phonemic awareness program written by Michael Heggerrty, Ed.D. You will hear me reference this program as "Heggerty lessons" throughout the school year. It really prepares kinders with different phonemic awareness skills to be prepared to manipulate, segment, and blend words with ease. This will help them become fluent readers and writers! We are currently working in week 2 of the program and the kids are already rocking these skills! I am excited to see how this translates to our everyday routines, Guided Reading, Writer's Workshop, and our formal assessments such as the state mandated FAST testing of early reading skills. Such an exciting time to have a #KFkinders in the trenches! Thank you to the #bentoncsd administration for supporting this request to implement this program. A couple of teachers from #keyrocks went to a professional development training last year that highlighted this program. They brought the idea back to Mr. Junge too possibly use it in Kinderland, and now we are piloting it this year!
To give you a better picture of what is included in this lesson (because the term "phonemic awareness" is not a term I use outside of education...fancy jargon!) I have recorded a typical lesson for each workstation group. This is just one of the lessons we do throughout the day, so this is not the whole lesson...just a taste! Click on the links below to watch your #KFkinders in action!
In these lessons you will notice that we were focusing on letter names, letter identification, letter sounds, rhyme repetition, beginning sounds, blending words together, final sounds, segmenting and (breaking) words. You will notice that we do some fancy things with our hands when we are identifying beginning/ending sounds (we swipe our hand from left to right because that is how we read and write words, then we target either the beginning or the ending sound to identify it). With the blending and segmenting words, we use our hands to either put the parts together to make a compound word (blending) or use them to identify the parts of the compound word (segmenting). Please feel free to do some of these activities at home. Good times that I like to fit these skills in are when I am cooking (or when Mr. Fisher is...I am no rock star in the kitchen), driving in the car, or before bed when we are tucking each kiddo in! Find a couple minutes here or there to fit these skills into your routines and your #KFkinders will benefit greatly. Doing them at school and home helps generalize these skills and allows them to transfer them to other settings and situations.
If there is ever anything you would like to touch base about, please don't hesitate to email me or pop in!
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