What Is In A Letter?

Letters are made up of big lines, little lines, big curves and little curves. In order for children to be able to identify a letter, they need to recognize its many parts.

Exploring with the parts of letters in a 3D way helps many students solidify their understanding of letters. Having new experiences with letters can also help consolidate their learning.

The following pictures show children exploring the parts of letters as they simultaneously share the sounds letters make and talk about words that begin with that letter.

Thanks for stopping by!
Ms. Gladman

Reading

Hearing what good reading sounds like is very important for the developing reader. We are finding many ways to Listen to Reading in the ESL classroom. Ms. Hashimoto's students have been using Online Books to have many opportunities to listen to different stories read. The program that they are using also gives the children an opportunity to read books at their own reading level.

In the small group setting, we are also working on reading, using songs and familiar rhymes. We use our Songbooks to begin to connect songs and rhymes that we know to the print on the page. You can see this process in action in this short video clip. as well, notice how focussed on the text the child in the photograph is as he sings a familiar song.

Another important way children learn to read is by reading every day. Here is a student who is spending his reading time wisely, exploring both the words and the pictures on the page as he tries to read a new book.

The children are learning that there are several ways that they can read a book: by looking at the pictures, reading the words and retelling the story. When they read the pictures in the book, they pretend that they are detectives looking for clues about what the story is about. They ask many questions of themselves and wonder what is happening in the story. When they read the words (or someone reads to them) they can add in new information to their understanding of the story. Good readers are good problem solvers.

In the coming weeks, we will be building our reading muscles (stamina) as we read for a little bit longer every day. So far, we have been able to read for 10 minutes without stopping!

Best,
Ms. Gladman

Letters and Words

Learning to read is a complex process. So many skills are needed to be able to crack the code and translate the lines and squiggles on the page into words and messages that convey meaning.

We have been exploring with letters and words, the building blocks of what we find in the books we read. We have become very familiar with a rhythmic and repetitive stories. So familiar, that the children can recite some simple stories from memory, and are now beginning to connect the words they have heard to the words they see on the page in a book.

Here are two students, listening to the familiar story and reading along with a familiar story:

We are learning the difference between letters and words. Letters are the parts that make up words, this is not always obvious to children. Often, we need to teach the concept explicitly. Using the familiar story, we are learning what words look like. Here we are deciding whether each strip of paper is one word or two words:

A very easy way to start learning about the differences between letters and words is to use a very familiar word, a child's name. We can call the name a "word" and then count the number of letters that are in that word:

To solidify our ability to quickly identify letters and talk about the sounds letters can make, we work together and individually to sort and classify letters:

Another way the children are inspired to talk about letter sounds, the shape of letters, expand their English vocabularies, and explore with spatial awareness (a little math never hurt anyone!) is through the use of puzzles:

We will continue to hone our letter and word awareness as we move into reading by ourselves, with a partner and with the teacher in the coming weeks.
Stay tuned!
Ms. Gladman