| Teaching Student Teachers How to Use Shared Reading as a Positive Teaching Strategy
Phonics
At Key Stage 2, there is generally a stronger focus on word level work within the context of shared and guided writing where attention is given both to word choice and spelling. However, student teachers need to recognise the value of continuing to develop children’s grapho-phonic knowledge within all reading contexts, especially for those who are not yet securely within the orthographic stage of word recognition (Frith, 1985). Research with a Primary Focus provides essential reading.
| Children learn about the relationships between sounds and symbols in different ways at different stages, and their learning is more effective when teaching is based on their current understanding. |
Texts and teaching and learning strategies
Ensure student teachers are critically familiar with the Rose report, ‘the simple view of reading’ and its phonic teaching at http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/phonics/earlyreading/.
- Explore how phonological awareness develops successively at the levels of syllable, onset + rime and individual phonemes + alphabetical knowledge (Frith, 1985).
- Demonstrate teaching strategies (including ICT) that help children to develop this knowledge e.g. teaching that directs attention to regularities in sound/symbol relationships, encouraging children to draw analogies.
- Explain and use appropriate technical vocabulary. Spot test using white boards!
- Develop knowledge and understanding by asking for groups/pairs to devise appropriate activities and teach given phonemes to the class.
Model how to make close observation of the means children use to identify written words, e.g. through miscue analysis (Goodman et al, 2005; Reading schemes)
- Teach children to articulate how they identify words during shared/guided and individual reading.
- Teach children to predict words during all reading contexts (where this is not to the detriment of the construction of meaning) using graphophonic knowledge to confirm their predictions.
Poetry can provide a rich and rewarding context for the revision and consolidation of phonic knowledge e.g. They can identify and discuss the effects of:
- common onsets and rhymes;
- the number of syllables in the rhymes;
- the choice of long/short long vowel sounds.
These activities help children to both identify poetic devices such as rhyme, assonance, sibilance and alliteration, and to recognise how and why they are effective in conveying atmosphere and meaning. Such approaches can add a new and valuable dimension to phonic work and to understanding of the conventions of poetry. They are often best valued if group readings of poems are prepared and shared.
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