Phonics - Yolanda Soryl Literacy

The last couple of days I sat in an online PLD by Yolanda, where she demonstrated and shared her way of teaching phonics and assessing reading and writing. More importantly, I learned there are many skills required to read and phonics is one of four. It is a skill that is not taught in isolation but together with the other skills necessary to enhance student reading, writing, and spelling levels. After all, reading is not a natural thing like talking or eating, but rather a skill that is taught.

The searchlight model she discusses shows how the four skills are needed to decode a text (word level, text level, and sentence level)

*Blending - putting the sounds together of a word

*Segmenting - breaking up sounds of the word

I was overwhelmed by the knowledge Yolanda was sharing. It seemed like a lot in such a short amount of time, it was very dense. In saying this, I have realised that I was lacking so much in teaching literacy.

                  

The way that Yolanda has presented is to teach phonics outside of reading and then transfer that skill/ learning straight into reading and writing, rather than teaching it during reading. I thought this was an effective way as children can learn explicitly about phonics and phonemes rather than read and look at images and then guess the word, where they initially are guessing and no learning about sounds is being retained. 

I learned about the left and right hemispheres of brains and how research has proven that teaching phonics explicitly and effectively and creating experiences can accelerate struggling readers.

The English language is complex with the different ways some letters can be said or sounded out when written in words. I found that with vowels, I have been saying sounding them out how I would pronounce them in te reo. I need to get myself familiar with saying the vowels in English and sounding them out the way they should in an NZ accent.

The learning I will definitely take away from this PLD is the Hear - Read - Write model/ approach that Yolanda demonstrated. It was very explicit and instructional. 

"15 minutes a day of that explicit systematic teaching of these alphabetic coding skills when children are learning to read is way more effective than not doing it or trying to just to drag it out of the big book so we really want that set dedicated time and what I normally do is go from phonics now into shared reading so then I can transfer it through".

With the learning I take away from this PLD, I will try and implement it into my teaching how I see fit.