Little did I know how wrong I was! Asking students to recall how to read and spell a word based on letter names rather than sounds was like asking them to memorize a suggested password. I truly believed my word wall and the practice students were engaging in was helping them become strong readers and writers. While my word wall was interactive and added to throughout the year, I saw many classrooms with a word wall that was more like wallpaper than a learning tool.
I would explain these words were “rule breakers” - we needed to “know them by heart/sight” and not sound them out. For example, listening to the word ‘she’, we heard /sh/, not /s/ or the word ‘know’, we heard /n/ not /k/. Many times, a word would begin with a letter that didn’t make the sound we heard.
Now, did that process always work? Not exactly. As we placed the new word on the word wall, we would listen for the first sound in the word, find that letter and staple the new word on the word wall. During the week we would chant the letter names, frame the words, play games and on Friday I would assess students and we would place the new words on the word wall. It played a very important role in my classroom and I truly believed I was helping students learn to read and write words.
0 kommentar(er)
