As I began to read through the article by Bell and Jarvis I was shocked. I remember having a letter every week and doing different activities related to that letter such as the macaroni projects. I never thought how detrimental that could be for developing readers. Young readers do not retain the meaning of the symbols that they are reading when they are sounding out letters one at a time. It makes much more sense for them to use context clues to build upon words that they already know. I also really liked the example with the journals. I would like to incorporate a mail system in my classroom so that my students can use it to communicate.
I remember spending a whole week with this book.
I was also reminded of my time tutoring a small group of first graders. They were often very confused by large words when we were reading together. My initial strategy was to sound the words out with them, but I now realize that they did not retain any meaning for the words that they were reading. They were very upset when they didn't know a word and when asked to write out their thoughts they did not feel like they knew how. It is very important to realize that young children's self-esteem is very fragile and they desperately want to be grown up like their parents and siblings. I think it takes a strong commitment between the parents and the teachers to build and nourish the self-esteem of a developing learner.
How do we as educators stay on the same page with parents about modeling encouraging behavior?
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