Education
FUNdamental’s action reading reflective paper
Vanessa Graper
EDU371: Phonics based reading and decoding
Prof. S. Brownson
August 4, 2008
Introduction
“I can read that!” A student who can read these words may be talking about a restaurant sign or a local sign in their community. Children first begin to recognize images and words in the world that they are accustomed to; this lesson first has students read logos beginning in color, following with black and white, and finishing with the logo word without having the pictures to help them out. Once a child has learned to recognize items in their community they then move from whole-word identification to alphabetic decoding by sorting the logos according to their initial letters. This processed is aimed primarily at first time readers in kindergarten and first grade, but it can also be used with older struggling readers.
We were fortunate in this class to have a firsthand experience with a phonics program entitled FUNdamentals and it was taught by the developer Jeanie Eller. It is a research based, phonics tutorial learn to read program. What is phonics?
Phonics is simply the system of relationships between letters and sounds in a language. When a child learns that the letter B has the sound of /b/ and your more advanced reader learns that "tion" sounds like /shun/, they are learning phonics. When children learn phonics it helps them to learn to read and spell. As we were taught, written language can be compared to a code, so knowing the sounds of letters and the different letter combinations, this will help the student decode words as he reads. Knowing phonics will also help them to know which letters to use as they begin to write words. This is what we were taught on the CD’s. Children first need to know the sounds before they are taught words. That is something that is emphasized and that I will discuss.
FUNdamentals CD 1 & 2...
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