Day 6 - Let's Talk Phonics

Welcome to Day 6, our last scheduled day for Let’s Talk Phonics. Please feel free to continue the dialogue developed in earlier discussions as you prepare to interact over our last video in in our Let’s Talk Phonics series.

Today, we will be discussing strategies in the video - Decoding - Part 6: Tutoring Phonics Using a Multisensory Approach.

After watching the video, please reflect and comment on the following:

  • How would you use the multisensory approach in your reading instruction?
  • What was the most helpful, interesting or valuable thing you learned during this six-day discussion?
  • Would you like to participate in additional discussions dealing with the other three reading components in addition to alphabetics: vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency? If so, share your interests so that we can pursue them in future forums!

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to review other videos in this great series. Please share your recommendations and impressions from that exploration.

Farewell, for now, and a big thanks to Kathy St. John, moderators, and all participants in this discussion! This “farewell” relates only to the "Let's Talk Phonics" event, sponsored by our three LINCS Communities of Practice and guided by our guest expert, Kathy St. John. It is NOT a farewell to the discussion relating to recommended best practices to be implemented among adult beginning readers!

You are encouraged to continue this discussion, sharing ideas on (1) what you are doing to accelerate the acquisition of reading skills among adult learners, (2) the challenges you are facing, (3) the resources you are finding, and (4) what you are experiencing in the process. Let's keep talking!

To our Guest Expert: First, a hearty thanks, Kathy St. John, for your amazing contributions to this discussion throughout the week. We are very grateful!

Final Guest questions: How might we induce more adult beginning readers to trust our services and risk asking us for help? What final comments would you like to share with this wonderful community of learners who also teach?

Reminder: If you would like to apply for a certificate of completion, please don't hesitate to contact Kathy Tracy, Moderator, PD CoP, at Kathy.tracey1997@gmail.com.

Thank you One and All for your immense contributions to this learning dialogue! The Event Team.

Comments

Thank you Leecy, Susan and  Kathy for inviting me to participate in these thought-provoking discussions. I've enjoyed sharing information and ideas with everyone. What an impressive bunch! I've learned so much from everyone. Thank you for your very thoughtful, insightful and helpful posts. 

Here are my responses to the Day 6 questions:

How might we induce more adult beginning readers to trust our services and risk asking us for help?

This is a timely and challenging question as I hear from programs across the country that enrollments are down, especially for native English speaking beginning readers. Certainly in California it seems to be getting harder and harder to attract native English speakers. Many programs have long waiting lists for English language learners but can't seem to recruit native English speakers who want to improve their reading and writing skills. 

I think in some places with a high cost of living, like in California, part of the answer lies in learners who work two or three jobs and/or live far from where they work. They have little to no time to devote to improving their reading skills, even if they really want to. In those cases, the answer may be to make programs as flexible as possible so that it's easier for adult learners to squeeze in some time for learning while juggling work, family, and personal demands. If we stress convenient and flexible hours, convenient and safe learning environments  plus a learner-centered approach that will enable learners to work on what they need to, when they need to, it should be easier for busy adults to make time to attend class or meet with a tutor. Some programs I know have found success in marketing their services in a different way so that prospective learners are attracted to their programs by a draw of getting a high school equivalency certificate or gaining skills that will allow them to get a job or advance to a better job.

Most programs still recruit new learners by word of mouth so ensuring that current learners are happy and feel like they're making real progress is key to learners encouraging friends and family members or co-workers to join the program. A program's first interaction with a prospective learner can make or break the likelihood that a learner will trust a program enough to ask for help. Programs that are friendly and homey and housed in a welcoming, comfortable environment really put their learners at ease and begin building trust from the moment the prospective learner calls or comes to the office to ask for help. Programs that treat their learners respectfully and as equal partners in the learning process are more likely to induce adult beginning readers to join their program. Prospective learners will be more likely to risk asking for help and trusting programs that can demonstrate to learners how the time and effort they invest in themselves to improve their basic reading skills will have a real impact on their real lies.

What final comments would you like to share with this wonderful community of learners who also teach?

From the participant posts it's clear that many teachers and tutors across the country have created and implemented some really successful strategies for teaching beginning  readers. It's also apparent that the participants in these discussions are thinking very deeply and reflecting on their own teaching/tutoring practices and how they can enhance the positive impact they have on their learners. By sharing our insights, perspectives, ideas and experiences we're engaging in a powerful professional development opportunity that has the potential to enhance our field significantly. So much of how we can improve our teaching practice depends on networking and exchanging ideas with our peers and with subject matter experts. Many teachers and tutors don't realize that the strategies they're using with their learners are unique and exemplary and should be shared with others in the field so the greatest possible number of adult beginning readers stand the greatest possible chance of meeting or surpassing their reading goals. That process of building reading skills based on a firm foundation often begins with solid phonics skills. So I hope everyone really will continue discussing and sharing and cheering each other on as we all learn from each other. And I hope everyone will continue to explore more videos in the phonics series and in the other components of reading as well. Here's that link again:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKEZxGu-wMvQ-pYXbB7qGTw

Thank you for all you've taught me this week. I'm so delighted that I've added so many tools to my toolbox because of your willingness to share your brilliant ideas. So much to think about! So many opportunities to enhance our teaching and tutoring! 

Kathy, among other good points you made regarding building trust among beginning readers, I appreciate, "Programs that are friendly and homey and housed in a welcoming, comfortable environment really put their learners at ease and begin building trust from the moment the prospective learners calls or comes to the office to ask for help."   I think that we often forget that all of us want to belong. We want to be part of a community. We focus so much on student skills that we sometimes ignore the fact that many students come back only because the feel that they are starting to belong to a healthy and supportive community, maybe for the first time! Once that happens, they become far more open to the rest that we have to offer.   I am also glad that you emphasized our own need to belong to a professional community. You said, "So much of how we can improve our teaching practice depends on networking and exchanging ideas with our peers and with subject matter experts!"   Hopefully, those who participated in this discussion in different ways will feel led to return to this wonderful, friendly group of professionals to continue dialoguing. We are a learning community, and, in my view, there is nothing more fun to do than to learn together! As new people join us in our LINCS communities of practice, I know that they, too, will return because they like the way we talk and act as a collaborative group of lifelong learners!  Leecy

That's great news, Kadidia. Please don't wait for others to post responses or to start new discussions. Keep asking, sharing, and participating, and we'll be there to support you in every single way! You'll be a spark that lights great fires.  Thanks! Leecy

You're very welcome and thank you, Kadidia. I'm delighted to hear that the videos and ideas we've discussed this week will be helpful to you. I remember you from one of the LINCS online courses I facilitated so it was very nice to see you participating in this too. I wish you the best in trying out what you've learned with your learners. Let me know how it goes!

Thank you to both of you.

I have not been strong at using Phonics in the classroom and this week long training has certainly given me the support I need.

I will use all the teaching strategies offered on the various videos and hope to improve the learners' reading skills. I am glad I took this training and I hope that you will offer more on this subject.

Have a blessed weekend. 

I like the multisensory approach.  I will need to think how this would look in the classroom.  With the number of students, I will need to create and idea of centers which will allow me to make a few multisensory tools and not a compete set for every student. 

If I broke my class into thirds, one set could be reading/sorting, writing, and another utilizing the sensory tools.  The multisensory tools could also be used by the volunteers when they come.

The most helpful information I gained was to relook at the student’s ability to produce the sounds of the letters.  I have reinstated a letter sound review prior to beginning phonics practice.  I have become more intentional on the letters we review to help the students focus on the letters in the words we will work with in the classroom and in the stories created.

I would be interested n the other three reading components even though my students are at the beginning of literacy it is always helpful to understand fully where they are headed to insure my instruction helps to smooth the road for the journey.

 

Final Thoughts:

What have I learned and how will I apply it in my classroom:

 

I have learned how to utilize 6 different approaches in teaching phonics.I realize they are not necessarily sequential but a solid memory recall for the letter sounds makes the approaches easier for the students.

Implementation for a class will look different than how this would be implemented when working one on one.I have a better idea on how to set up volunteer binders for volunteers who might be working one on one with my students.Assessment of each students’ strengths will also help me to determine how I can help this student progress.

Diana, you are sharing model practices on how to take one-to-one strategies and adapt them to classroom practices. Thanks!    I know that, based on the response to this event, we will, indeed, consider having similar discussions that deal with research-based strategies for developing the three other components among adult learners. After all, as you note, your students are bound in that direction!   Thanks for sharing some of your learning journey with us. We hope that you will continue to participate in our communities by continually asking questions, posting items to consider, sharing resources, and motivating the kind of dialogue that we all need in Adult Education. Let's keep talking and learning together! Leecy

Thanks for yet another thoughtful and thought-provoking post, Diana. I've really enjoyed reading your posts and have learned a lot from them that I will use with my own learners and will share with other teachers and tutors in my trainings. It sounds like you are so on course with how you're teaching reading, especially phonics, to your learners. I'm so happy you think you can use and adapt some of what we've explored this week in our discussions. Have fun trying things out!

I received an email via LINCS from someone who had trouble posting her question to this discussion. We'd hoped her difficulty would be resolved so she could share her question about the phonics cups with everyone, in case others may have the same questions. Here it the question and my response.

Question: 

I love the phonics cups technique and I was just wondering how you pick the inside and outside sounds.

Response:

For the one cup, you just write all of the consonants of the alphabet equally spaced around the cup's rim. Those are your onsets.    For the other cups you choose common word patterns (or families) like /at/, /ig/, /ob/, etc and write those on the rim of a cup. Those are your rimes.    I'd just choose the rimes you want to focus on during your phonics activities. You can have different cups that have different rimes written on them or you can have as many rimes as will fit on the cup rim.    You can also add additional rime and onset cups to make consonant and vowel blends and digraphs once your learner has mastered single vowels and consonants. For example, once your learner can sound out /f/ /o/ /g/ using one cup with /f/ and one cup with /og/, you can add a third cup with /r/ to make /f/ /r/ /o/ /g/ or you can move from fond to found by adding another vowel cup.

Thank you for the response Kathy. . . I am able to post now. . . I just had a little glitch in figuring out the site with regard to posting comments. I have really appreciated this whole week and the discussions that were generated from the videos. I hope it will stay up for a while so I can refer back to both the videos and the comments. Thanks again.  Renee
 

Thanks for the update, Renee! We are so glad to hear that these discussions were useful to you. So here's the good news. LINCS discussions never close. You can always keep going back for more goodies, and, hopefully, going back to comment more on the topics that are offered. We'll be listening! We've just uncovered the tip of this reading iceberg. Let's keep diving deeper! Leecy