Hello  colleagues, At a recent workshop on teaching emergent readers, I shared the following story about Josefina, who had been one of the learners in my class a few years ago. Josefina was a woman from Puerto Rico who retired after working 25 years in a chicken processing plant. While Josefina had strong listening and speaking skills in English, she never had the opportunity to attend school as a child in Puerto Rico. In this class, we were all writing about our everyday heroes. Josefina came to my afternoon class after her work as a cook for a children's summer camp. As you can tell from the story, Josefina is a remarkable woman.

My Hero, Josefina, the SuperWoman!

Josefina cooks for the children’s summer camp at her church. Today she made 200 pancakes for breakfast. For lunch she cooked 80 pounds of chicken and 150 ears of corn, and she made 48 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Josefina is the only cook! She is a volunteer. The church does not pay Josefina. She works hard because she loves the church and the children. Sometimes Josefina feels tired, but she is a strong woman!

We shared this story with the whole class, and the other students in the class had many questions for Josefina. 

During the emergent reader training, we talked about using a Whole-Part-Whole approach to teaching reading to emergent readers. This means that we start with a meaningful text and look for patterns in the text to teach phonemic awreness and phonics. We then return to the whole text to practice reading.

How could a teacher draw from this story to teach phonemic awareness and/or phonics to Josefina? What patterns do you notice?

Cheers, Susan Finn Miller

Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP