Hello, and welcome to another episode of blooming curious.
Today I want to talk about the power of explicit instruction.
And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll
know that I am a big fan of inquiry based learning, but you'll also
know that I talk a lot about inquiry dovetailing with explicit instruction.
As educators, we need a whole arsenal of strategies that we can
draw upon for given situations.
Let's talk today about learning to read.
We want children to be curious.
We want them to ask questions and we want them to be able to find
the answers to those questions.
And to be able to find the answers to those questions,
they need to be able to read.
And if we want them to be able to read, which unlocks a whole world of knowledge
and imagination, we need the correct tools and strategies to teach them to do that.
Now for the longest time children have been failing to read because
of a whole language approach.
There have been, and still are, people that think that children
learn to read through osmosis.
Through a whole language approach.
But science has proved them wrong.
As humans we learn to talk from copying those around us.
But reading is not something that we do naturally.
We learn to read by being taught to read.
To be taught, to read effectively, we need to learn how to decode the symbols and
clusters of symbols that we see on a page.
In other words, the graphemes or the letters of the alphabet.
The science has been very clear.
For children to learn, to read effectively, they need daily,
systematic, explicit instruction.
And explicit instruction is telling kids exactly what they need to know.
And then giving them opportunities to practice what they've just learned.
Think about it this way.
If you want to teach someone how to cook or bake you model
and you show them the process
step-by-step.
You show them exactly how to accurately measure using measuring cups or a
scale, and then you show them what it means to fold or to whip or to saute.
You don't just leave them to it.
They don't know how to do that.
Then they have a go and they repeat the process several times until
it becomes automatic, until it becomes easy and natural for them.
And it's the same with reading.
We need to explicitly teach children
the individual sounds in the language, the letter or the grapheme a, is a
symbol that represents the a sound.
That two letters together, make one sound.
It's like a diagraph.
We call those.
And when you see, for example, an -ay in a word, it represents an a sound.
And along with that, you teach them the rule that -ay is
always at the end of a word.
So it helps them to decode the minute they see -ay they know ay.
Teaching children, the relationship between letters and their corresponding
sounds is what we call phonics.
And it is essential that we teach phonics not only well, but systematically
and daily, so that it becomes embedded and automatic for children.
When they see that letter B, they should immediately know that the
sound associated with that letter is b
Simultaneously, we need to develop children's phonemic awareness.
And this is when children can identify and manipulate the sounds in words.
To develop phonemic awareness, we provide and focus on activities where
children can identify the sounds.
Not the letters, but the sounds in words, So, for example, if you said the word dog.
Then you might say, what sound do you hear at the beginning of the word dog?
And the child should respond with D. Then later on, you might say, what sound
do you have at the end of the word?
And the child should respond with g and later on, you might say, what sound
do you hear in the middle of the word?
And the child will say, o. Now when you play with those sounds.
You'll do phoneme substitution and deletion.
So you'll say if I take away the D in dog and I put a l
instead, what do you hear then?
And the child will say, log.
Similarly you can play with end sounds.
And if you say, if I take away that gut in dog and I put a
t, what will the word be then?
And the child will say dot.
Phonemic awareness should start early.
Simply by reading lots of rhymes to children, getting them to
give you words that rhyme.
So you could say, give me a word that rhymes with dog.
And they might say mog and that's perfectly acceptable because
we're simply teaching them how to recognize the sounds in words.
And when it comes to teaching phonemic awareness.
They are many parts, but the place to start is with wordplay.
That's your rhyming,
that's the sounds you hear in words, but you also want
children to understand syllables.
Because that's going to be important later when they're learning
to spell multi-syllabic words.
Syllables or something that you do every day.
You just included for a few minutes every day.
Or just accidentally in your day to day activities.
You might say, clap the syllables for the word carpet or whatever the word is.
I often used the children's names and then also words associated with whatever we're
learning about in science for example.
Then you focus on onset and rime that comes next, the breaking
apart of syllables, and later on, on segmenting and blending.
So in going back to the word, dog, once children can identify the individual
sounds, or the individual phonemes, then you start putting them together.
That's when you sound out d-o-g, and they blend those sounds
together and you hear dog.
And you're still not writing.
You're still doing your pre-writing skills and you're developing
their fine motor skills.
And you're developing their pencil grip and you're giving them lots of
activities that build those muscles, including gross motor activities.
But you're still just playing and recognizing sounds.
You can use magnetic letters.
You can use sound dominoes.
You can play games where you fish out pictures that start with
a f sound for example, or you match pictures, two letters that
represent the beginning sounds.
This is what we call intentional playful learning.
Where you're set up activities that are play-based and have a purpose of
teaching the child, something in this case, letter or sound recognition.
But it's important to remember that these play experiences come after
you've explicitly taught your phonics.
So explicit teaching means that I do, we do, you do model.
So first you teach them
that, when you see this letter and you hold up the letter D
for example, it makes a d sound.
Then you might use flashcards and altogether the children
repeat the sounds and then they practice the sound on their own.
Perhaps they'll draw three things that start with a D sound.
And if they feel like having a go at sounding out a word of their drawing
and writing it, they can otherwise they just tell you what the picture is
that they've drawn, and you write it, but as you write it, you model and you
sound out each individual letter so that they start to see how these things
work and they start to make connections between writing and letters and sounds.
Now I use flashcards, which included the letter name.
Like a D for example, it's sound d, and an associated movement.
And often I would see children writing and sounding out words and you'll
see them doing the action because that helped them remember the sound.
These phonics lessons were quick 10 to 15 minutes, max.
But they take place every single day and they will also at pace, not
slow, at pace because that ensures that there is no time for boredom.
They were quick.
So keep me to, to focus.
And then after that, you will have activities in small groups that children
rotate through over the week that gave him opportunities to practice identifying
and manipulating the sounds in words.
And once children's started writing, then you would get out a little
mini, white boards and children can practice as part of the phonics lesson,
that's the, we do part.
So that's where I would say the word dog and they would write it down.
But I wouldn't just say dog, I'd say d-o-g.
Or.
Eventually just dog.
And they would write it down.
And this is a powerful approach because you can see straight away
who were successful and who still needed more help and practice.
And after that phonics lesson, you pull out those kids that you saw needed more
help and you give them some more explicit instruction and more time to practice.
Children, are successful readers when they have strong phonological awareness and are
able to manipulate the sounds in words.
And by the way, when children can do this, they can even read nonsense
words, which essentially means that once they have these skills,
they can read any word provided
they've been taught all the letter sound combinations.
As early childhood teachers, our responsibility is to ensure that
children leave our classroom with these foundations well established, so that we
can open up a world of exploration and imagination to children, because once we
give them the gift of reading, then you also give them the gift of independence.
And that's when they are able to use the skills of reading and comprehension,
to go off and read about things that interest them and eventually participate
in inquiry and project based learning.
And this is why I say that inquiry and explicit instruction
dovetail with one another.
We need both strategies in our classrooms.
Explicit instruction to teach them what they don't know.
And give them the tools and strategies that they need to be able to read
and solve mathematical equations.
But then we simultaneously need to get them curious and interested in learning
by marrying these two strategies together.
We give children the best chance to succeed.
Not only at school, but in life.
Now I have created a resource for you.
That shows you in a step-by-step way, how to integrate inquiry
into existing lessons.
You can get that at resources dot blooming, curious.com
forward slash inquiry.
Underscore 1 0 1.
And I've written a blog post in two parts on how to teach a child to read.
I will in both of these, in the show notes for you.
So if you want to know how to effectively and explicitly teach a child to read and
be curious and love learning, you need to do three things when this episode
ends, which is in less than a minute.
One is read the blog posts, which I have written in detail, breaking
down the process very easily for you, of how a child learns to read.
Two.
I also would like to draw your attention to a fantastic book called Explicit
Direct Instruction: The Power of a Well-crafted Well Taught Lesson.
It's by Hollingworth and Ybarra, and that is in my shop.
And I'll leave a link to that in the show notes too.
And lastly, get my free e-guide that shows you how to integrate
inquiry into your existing lessons.
I leave all three of these links for you in the show notes.
Thanks for choosing blooming, curious to listen to today, and if you enjoyed
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is published and until next week, take care and stay blooming curious..