Julia Manns

CIRG 653
Module 4 discussion
Children demonstrate awareness as they attend to new aspects of their world, and their
comments from time to time on the printed language around them provide us with good
examples of what they are attending to. (Clay, 2014, 39) As a kindergarten teacher I am often
presented with many opportunities to witness moments of awareness as described by Clay in this
chapter. One that particularly sticks with me is that of a little girl in my class who has been
having difficulty with letter identification and sounds. When assessing her on the alphabet, she
was often inconsistent, and hesitant to answer. She is definitely lacking confidence in this
department. One day while assessing her I pointed to the letter N. She scrunched up her face,
tapped her forehead a few times, and stated, That begins with my Nanas name. I was so
excited that she was able to make this connection, yet disappointed when she was still unable to
identify both the letter and the sound.
This same exchange took place for the letters C (cat), M (mom), and L (like). Though I
was disappointed that she was not able to identify the letters and sounds, I felt like it was a small
victory. She was beginning to notice that the letters were not just individual things floating
around in spacethey were also in words and names of other people! Another similar experience
just took place for me this week with a different student. She has always done fairly well on
alphabet assessments, but has had difficulty attaining the last few letters and sounds. Knowing
that she had the knowledge and was just not confident enough to take a guess, I prompted her,
asking if she could think of a word that began with that letter. She came up with have. Next, I
prompted her by saying, What is the first sound you hear in that word? To which she was able
to respond, /h/. This showed me that the awareness of her letters and sounds is there, she just
needs a little boost to help her get the answer out.

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Another rewarding experience for me took place today when finishing up with report
card assessments. A boy in my class has struggled with inconsistency in all academic areas. This
student also has some other issues which interfere with his learning and consistency on occasion;
he has been diagnosed with ADHD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, has had some traumatic
events in his past, and is currently in the process of being tested for autism. Despite the heavy
medication he consumes every day, he is still able to function within the classroom, both in
academic and some social settings (however, he prefers the company of myself and our
classroom aide to his fellow peers). Today as we reviewed his sight words I was thrilled when he
was able to look around the room, spot them on our sight word wall, and identify them both in
various places around the room and on our assessment page. This student went from knowing
13/53 sight words to 38/53 sight wordsin one six week period! To see his awareness of letters,
sounds, and sight words all begin to come together was such a rewarding experience, and gave
me some validation that all of the differentiated activities I complete in my classroom are
reaching the students who need it the most.
phonemic awareness is only one part of a larger range of phonological awareness of
the features in a language that allows speakers to signal differences by varying the sounds and
sound patterns of oral language. (Clay, 2014, p.53) This is such a difficult concept to get across
to young students. Any sort of awareness that can be gained at this age is a win in my opinion.
Our text provides some interesting information on activities that can be helpful in this area:
Teachers provide children with opportunities to play with and focus on sounds in such
preschool activities as: rhymes, jingles, poems, songs, and choruses; stories read aloud, some
selected for their play with sounds; rereading aloud that emphasizes rhyme, alliteration, phoneme
substitution, or segmentation; games like What Im thinking of begins with?; manipulative

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activities with buckets of letters, magnetic letters and boards, and masking cards, and
demonstrations and shared activities that call attention to sounds as one kind of naming letters
(Chomsky 1975); any message writing the children do in which a teacher asks What can you
hear? What else can you hear? At the beginning? At the end? In the middle? (Clay, 2014, p.5354) This are all amazing suggestions that I feel could also be utilized in the early grades of
kindergarten and first grade to help promote phonemic awareness.
Quality teaching interactions can sometimes be the difference between a student having a
passion for learning, and despising it or feeling uncomfortable. When I ventured out in my first
year as a kindergarten teacher I was often a bit too harsh at times, simply correcting my students
if they phrased something incorrectly or wrote something the wrong way. As the weeks and
months passed I found I was able to relax a bit more, and allow my students the freedom to
experience learning however they deemed necessary. How can the natural response to tell, and
have the child echo the instruction, be more profitably turned to revealing with a gain in
understanding? It is easy to tell but hard to reveal. (Clay, 2014, p.67) This quote from our text
accurately describes my previous statement! It was so much easier to just tell the student they
were incorrect and fix it for them. Allowing them the opportunity to try and discover the solution
themselves makes it meaningful, and so much more memorable. For example, the student who
provided me first with a word, then the sound the beginning letter made is now much more
confident in her abilities, and can remember if she does not know the sound a letter makes to find
a word she recognizes that begins with that letter and sound it out. She refers to it as her word
trick now, and loves to try and show her classmates how to do it.

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Self-corrections are common, as if children even at this early stage are aware of, or have
a sense of, mismatch or error (Clay 1969, 1991) and try to make repairs. Within a year of
entering school the learner may be able to chat with a stranger in quite knowledgeable ways
about some aspects of his or her writing or reading. (Clay, 2014, p.68) I love watching my
students interact with each other, and try to explain their reasoning for doing something a
particular way. I have several special education students in my classroom, and really enjoy
watching the other students interact with them. Two of my students take it upon themselves to
explain to one student how to complete his center work when he returns to our class after his
special instruction time. Hearing how they interpreted the instructions and assignment really
shows me if they have a good understanding or not. For example, during math centers this
student was struggling with addition. I heard one of his group members trying to explain to him
how to solve the problem: Here buddy, hold up three fingers on this hand. Okay, okay, now,
now you need to hold up 4 fingers on the other hand. Wait, no, look at my fingers, okay now
make yours look like mine. Now count them all like this: 1, 2, 3, etc. The fact that they can
jump right in and begin explaining what they are working on really shows me they have a good
awareness of the concepts being presented to them.

References
Clay, M. (2014). By Different Paths to Common Outcomes. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.