One of my word study lessons involved my learners writing in the ending letter of a word based upon the ending sound. For example, the learners were given a picture of a bear with “bea_” next to it. Learners had to orally stretch out the word bear to identify the end sound and than write the letter that is associated with the end sound. I first did this whole group, with three pictures. The learners helped me to stretch out my pictures for the ending sound. Afterwards, my learners got their own page with pictures and they had to supply the end letter, based on the sound, independently. The intent of this lesson was for learners to start stretching out words for the sounds, focusing in on the end sound. Furthermore, learners were learning to associate specific sounds with their corresponding letters. During large group, I heard all my learners stretching out the words with me, and the majority of them were eager to tell me the letter or the sound at the end of the word. My class got them alright. One little boy, however, struggled. When I asked him to help me with one of the words, he said k. The letter was a g and so I kept saying, /g/. He kept saying the letter was a k. I then provided him two choices, saying, does it sound like gate or fish. At this point, he still said that the sound I was making was that of a /k/. Similarly, he was my only learner who struggled with the task. As I walked around, during my lesson, I heard the learners orally stretching out the words and enunciating the end sound. They independently wrote the end sounds and correctly got the write letter. Child M, however, did not. My teacher and I supported him, by providing choices for each word, but he could not even identify the end sound in any of the words on his page. This was interesting to me, because he was able to sort pictures based upon end sounds. What I have come to believe, from watching him during Writer’s Workshop, also, is that he hears things differently than he produces them. He thinks we are often saying things incorrectly, for example, his last name, when he says it the same way we are saying it. I think that he has some hearing difficulties with certain sounds. During this lesson some of my learners, who are still working on beginning sounds, did the same activity but with the first sound missing instead of the last. Three of my four friends did great. My fourth friend, who struggled, struggles because though he can associate letters and sounds and vice versa, he does not know what the letters look like. Thus, having him write in the beginning letter was extremely challenging, because he doesn’t even know where to look on an alphabet chart to help him.
I cannot say for certainty, however, that all my learners could successfully complete this task. Since the learners sit so close together, and since they often talk amongst themselves during word study, it is hard to know if they copied off of each other or not. I cannot catch everyone and sometimes it is hard to monitor. Regardless, from this lesson, I learned how confidently the majority of my learners are with letter/sound associations. I also learned that not only can they identify what letter goes at the end of a word based upon the sound, but they are able to independently write the letter. At the beginning of the year, a good portion of my learners did not know how to write every letter, so it was really good to see that a lot of my learners were able to supply the end letter without looking at any alphabet chart.
For those learners who seemed to struggle with the lesson, for example, Child M, I will pull him during times like the Daily 5, to do more practice with ending sounds. Furthermore, I will put a lot of ending sound activities in the word study bin for the daily five. These will be activities open to all my learners to strengthen their ending sound knowledge. I probably would not do to many more lessons on direct ending sound lessons though, because the majority of my learners have ending sounds down and are exhibiting writing ending sounds in their writing. However, I will continue to foster learners stretching out words for as many sounds as they hear.
If I were to do this lesson again, I would move my learners around the room, so they would not be tempted to copy down what the person next to them did. This way, I would be better able to assess what they, as an individual learner, knew. Overall though, I would not change anything else in my lesson, because I felt that for the most part, the lesson was very successful and the learners did well.
I think the /g/ /k/ difference is very interesting. There is a student in my class who goes to speech specifically for those two sounds. They are made in the same part of the mouth and he has a lot of trouble saying them. When he tries to say /k/ as in cat, he will say tat, and when he tries to say /g/ as in guitar, he will say ditar. Another strange similarity between my student and your student is that my student seems to struggle much more with the /g/ and /k/ sound if they are at the end of a word. One thing i might wonder is if your student is able to successfully make blends. The speech pathologist at my school told me that student J is much better at making blended sounds like /gr/. Does your child receive speech help at your school? It would be interesting to know if there is a similar pattern between our students. I did not notice this at first because he makes so many other strange sounds I assumed he went into speech for one of those, but you should listen carefully to the way your student pronounces words because they may be doing the same thing!
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