DEAR TEACHER,
Welcome to our website and thanks for stopping by! This Language Arts learning resource is to support you in navigating through the book: Finn’s Feelings with your Grade 2 learners. It revolves around Phonics and Literacy. Here you will find material that will assist you in utilizing the book as a springboard to teach the following:
1. Phonics
2. Morphology
3. Sight words
4. Vocabulary
Feel free to browse around and enjoy the discoveries while reading this book with your class.
Warm regards,
THE FABULOUS TEAM
TEACHER GUIDE
OVERALL OBJECTIVE
By the end of the four weeks, each child will have made progress in their phonics and literacy development by using the book “Finn’s Feelings” as a springboard. To measure their improvement, a teacher undertakes different steps of evaluating activities, tasks, practices, and conferences as well as students´ final application of transdisciplinary knowledge in week 4.
FOCUS
Phonemes/Graphemes (th & ng)
Morpheme (ing)
Sight words (Finn, happy, sister, love, rain, cloud, feeling, usually, misses)
DEFINITION
Phoneme/ Grapheme
A grapheme is a written symbol representing a phoneme (sound). This may be a single letter or a set of letters, such as ai, sh, igh, tch, and so on. So when a child makes the sound /t/ it is a phoneme, but it is a grapheme when they write the letter 't'.
We concentrate on digraphs, a group of two letters representing a single phoneme or sound. We chose the graphemes “ng” and “th”. (“Primary literacy glossary for parents,” 2020)
Morphemes
A morpheme is the „smallest unit of language that has its own meaning, either a word or a part of a word” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d). It is essential to teach them to students because it will lay the foundation of their decoding abilities since they recognize a word as a complex built up of different components. This understanding will broaden their vocabulary knowledge, comprehension skills and reading abilities.
(Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary, n.d.)
Sight words
Sight words are words that appear most frequently in our reading and writing. These are words such as “how”, “and”, “come”, “who” etc. They are high frequency words that don’t follow the conventional rules of spelling as they are often phonetically irregular – thus, their sound does not always consistently match up to the letters.
These words are to be memorized because decoding them is very difficult. Moreover, they may not be able to be pictured. For example, words such as “how” and “who”, are not easily represented by pictures. Learners are taught to memorize sight words as a whole, by sight, so that they can recognize them immediately and read them without having to use decoding skills.
Because of their high frequency, readers need to be able identify, read, and understand these words almost immediately upon seeing them. By easily recognising sight words, young readers are more likely to approach a text with confidence. They are then able to read with more fluency and better comprehension of the text.
In this resource, we focus on the most frequently used words in Finn’s Feelings that are not part of the 100 high-frequency list. These words are also important words to comprehend as they give meaning to the story.
NOTE ON USING THE GUIDE
Phoneme/ Grapheme
We planned activities for children age 7-8.
In order to do these activities the students should have completed phase 1 and 2.
Children should already be able to read and spell out certain vowel-consonant (VC) and
consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words. The phonemes/ graphemes chosen are “th” and “ng” as they two of the leading graphemes in the book.
Phase 3 presents the remaining, more complicated, less used phonemes. There are about 25 of
these, primarily consisting of two letters such as /ch/, /ar/, /ow/ and /ee/. These sounds are necessary in order to read and form useful words.
Phase 3 takes about 12 weeks for most children. At the end of phase 3 the children, when given an example to copy, they should be able to
determine the sound produced by most or all of Phase 2 and 3 graphemes, combine and
read CVC words made from these graphemes, read 12 new tricky words and correctly copy
letters. (“Phonics phases explained,” 2020)
Morpheme
"Children have already investigated grapheme- phoneme correspondences with the context of morphological word sums in grade 1. (Assessing Your Spelling Out!, n.d.)"
Sight words
At age 7, learners are expected to already be comfortable recognizing the 100 high-frequency words and sight words learned at Grade 1 level.
What is the difference between sight words and 100 high-frequency words?
Terms like sight words and high-frequency words are often used interchangeably. Although many high-frequency words are also sight words, there is a difference.
Sight words, as before mentioned, are words that don't follow standard
phonetic patterns and must be memorized. High-frequency words are words that are most commonly found in written language. Although some fit standard phonetic patterns, some don't.
For teaching purposes, sight words and high-frequency words are treated as the same. Both types of words are regularly used in spoken and written language and constantly appear in books, textbooks, and stories. Once students learn to quickly recognize these words, reading comes more easily.
**In the process of these next four weeks, it is advised to create a 'wonder wall', which is the same as “word wall” in your classroom, as learners need to see sight words regularly. In addition, they provide reference support for children during reading and writing activities.
(Dolch Sight Words, n.d)
(3P Learning, 2020)
(100 High-frequency words, n.d.)
This is the link to the sight words that are expected to be learned in each grade: https://www.sightwords.com/pdfs/word_lists/dolch_group.pdf
REFERENCES
Assessing Your Spelling Out! (n.d.). Retrieved November 08, 2020, from http://wordworkskingston.com/WordWorks/Assessement_for_spelling_out_challenge.html
Classroom activities to develop grapheme/phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and decoding. (2015). Retrieved from https://pdcinmfl.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/primary-phonics_reading-classroom-activities-handout.pdf
Definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved November 08, 2020, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/morpheme
Different kind of hats vector image on VectorStock. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2020, from https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vector/different-kind-of-hats-vector-6657491
Dolch Sight Words. (n.d). Retrieved on November 7, 2020, from https://www.sightwords.com/pdfs/word_lists/dolch_group.pdf
Ellis, E. S. (2019, July 02). How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities. Retrieved November 01, 2020, from https://www.readingrockets.org/article/how-now-brown-cow-phoneme-awareness-activities
Onset/Rime Games: Classroom Strategy. (2019, December 26). Retrieved November 01, 2020, from https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/onset_rime
Phase 3 'sh' Phoneme Roll and Read Mat. (2015). Retrieved November 01, 2020, from https://www.twinkl.co.uk/resource/t-l-4044-phase-3-sh-phoneme-roll-and-read-mat
Phonics phases explained. (2020). Retrieved October 31, 2020, from https://www.theschoolrun.com/what-are-phonics-phases
Primary literacy glossary for parents. (2020). Retrieved October 31, 2020, from https://www.theschoolrun.com/primary-literacy-glossary-for-parents
Reading Rockets. (2020). Anticipation Guide. Retrieved on November 5, 2020, from https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/anticipation_guide
Scratch Garden. (2018, October 16). The TH Sound | Phonics Video | Scratch Garden [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-cvlZLNEBM
Sight words: Teach Your Child To Read. (2020) Sight words Bingo. Retrieved on November 3, 2020, from https://sightwords.com/sight-words/games/bingo/
Susan Jones Teaching. (December 8, 2019). No Prep Sight Word Games [Video file].https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T8lyowZQ8g
Van Huffelen, L., Karner, M., Schmidt, L. & Veneman, M. (2020). Finn’s Feelings. Meppel: n.p.
3P Learning.(2020). What are sight words? Retrieved on November 4, 2020, from https://readingeggs.co.uk/articles/2012/08/06/what-are-sight-words/
100 High-frequency words. (n.d.). Retrieved on October 15, 2020, from https://www.highfrequencywords.org/hfw100fp.pdf