It's About Time, Teachers!: using the context

Sunday, May 13, 2012

USING POETRY IN THE CLASSROOM – Part 3 – PHONICS INSTRUCTION

It's about time, teachers, to describe more ways I use poetry in the classroom . . .

Poetry is absolutely wonderful for phonics instruction. Consider the following poem:

By drawing your students’ attention to the rhyming words at the end of the lines, you can quickly establish an understanding of rimes. For example, dressed rhymes with best. The rime, however, is spelled quite differently. Similarly, cheer and hear illustrate 2 rime spellings for the same phoneme.

Certainly, phonemic instruction with poems is not limited to rimes. I use the following poem to focus on vowel sounds:

I’m a big fan of anchor charts that remind students of phonemes we have studied. Using an enlarged copy of the poem, I ask the children to find words with the long /e/ sound. We record them on a chart. Then I have them find the words with the short /e/ sound and we record those words. We collaborate to add more words to each side of the chart and, thereby, extend the learning.

/ea/ as long e	/ea/ as short e
sea hear eat bead	dead spread sweat deaf

I use the following poem to work on consonant blends.

Given the number of times it appears in this poem, /wh/ would likely be the focus of my instruction.

Hopefully, it is now clear that the possibilities for phonics instruction are nearly limitless!

Building on phonemic awareness naturally leads to another important reading skill – using the context. The following poem is great for exploring the sounds of /ow/:

After conducting a guided reading lesson on the 2 sounds of the vowel digraph /ow/ and making an anchor chart,

*/ow/ as in know*	*/ow/ as in cow*
grow snow thrown bow	how now frown bow

I have the perfect opportunity to introduce or review using the context to decide which sound of /ow/ is appropriate.

Next time, I will explore grammar lessons that can be taught through poetry.