Word Board

[pamh]

I was just wondering if any of you keep up a word board in your "classrooms?" My 1st son went to ps Kindergarten and from the beginning his teacher had a word wall (actually covered the whole classroom by the end of the school year) with sight words. When the kids first entered the classroom (each morning, after break, lunch then break again) the teacher would lead the class in reading the sight words. Do any of you do this along with your phonics program? My four year old would really like to start reading and is slowly learning the phonic sounds (yet he still can't sing the ABC song....go figure cause I can't figure that one out). However, I would like to introduce him to everyday words and maybe put up a word board/wall. Any suggestions if I should do this or just stick with phonics first? Let me give you one more piece of background on my 4 yr old. He can recite the pledge of allegiance without any problem but looks at me in bewilderment when I ask him to sing/say his ABC's, like he has never heard of it before (he even can sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and it's the same tune...this one makes me want to hit my head on the wall sometimes ).

Pam

[inHistiming]

I had to smile when you said your son can't sing the ABC's. My ds 6 has told his grandma he doesn't know his ABC's numerous times. It turned out that he just didn't know what she meant. He finally was able to sing it for her....I don't know if I had been calling it something else or what. Anyway, it just made me smile when I read that.

As far as a Word Wall....we are going through the Reading Made Easy program and around lesson 20 (I think) they have you start a Sigth Word Worm. We now have about 15 words and he knows them all so I'd say it's been very helpful. I know a lot of pre-k and K classrooms do put words all over the rooms...on chairs, doors, etc. If you want to do that it may be helpful. Are you using a phonics program?

[shaffer96]

I used to do that when I taught reading in the ps. Sight words are more difficult because they don't follow normal phonetic rules, so we would read our word wall several times a day. The kids did really well with it. Thanks for reminding me about this! I am going to start doing it again with my dd who is 41/2 and just starting to learn to read. I worked with my daughter on her letter sounds for ages and she never really grasped all of them until she watched Leap Frogs Letter Factory and Word Factory DVD's that I rented from the library. After watching it twice she knows all of the sounds! I would highly recommend these videos to anyone teaching a beginning phonics program! We sing the catchy little songs in the car about the letter sounds and even my 2 year old tries to sing along now!

[pamh]

We're not using a formal phonics program....using Abeka but not in a formal way but between us working with him, speech and The Letter Factory, he's doing pretty well phonetically. However, we'll start to sing the ABC's and it's like we were asking him to do an Algebra problem. We also have an ABC bingo game that he loves but he can only point out some of the letters. My son is a younger 4 (late Dec. birthday) so he still has another full year before Kinder. but he is begs us to show him how to read but how can we if his ABC's aren't sticking? I know I'm not suppose to compare but his older brother knew all his ABC's when he was 2 1/2 and learned them within 2 months and knew how to write all his letters by this age. This is all probably just God teaching me patience.....ohhhhh that's a hard one!!!

I am thinking of getting The Reading Lesson (after using Abeka w/older son, it was very simple for him, yet it seems to hard for my 4 yr old due to speech problems). We already own, Reading Made Easy but compared to Abeka it was horrible for us. I keep reading great reviews about The Reading Lesson here on the board so I can't wait to try it!!!

Blessings,
Pam

[my3sons]

We did the word wall when I taught in ps, and that worked just fine, and for some dc, it worked very well! You could certainly do this at home too. One thing that made me sad with the word wall is some of the dc never did commit those words to memory and instead began to use the wall as a crutch. I realized this when I had a mom that was helping take a group of dc out of the classroom to work on their writing and when they wrote for her they shared they couldn't spell the words right because they didn't have their word wall to look at. Likewise, when we covered the wall up for standardized testing, there were still a fairly sizeable number of dc that missed words on the spelling portion of the test, as well as the writing prompt portion of our testing, that were on our word wall all year.

Those are just a few disheartening experiences I had with the word wall - but I don't want to say the word wall doesn't work at all. It worked great for some dc, as they were able to use it at first, and then once committing the words to memory, were able to stop using it. I think it just depends on the child. Whether you do the word wall or not, you can be encouraged that this concept of seeing words spelled correctly is later reinforced by CM style skills such as dictation and copywork. I do think that doing dictation accomplishes the same thing in a better way, as it puts the same words in front of dc each day (in a building manner), but then after studying the words, the model is taken away and dc must write them from memory, and also within context. So, you have that to look forward to as well. HTH!

In Christ,
Julie

[GinainMD]

I had my 3 year old help me paint a huge tree that we then taped on the wall. Every week or so we've been adding an apple with a sight word on it. Since she has just turned three, I started with a blank tree. You could certainly start with say five apples for an older child and add more quickly. As dd gets a little older I may speed it up a bit. Depending on the size of your tree and how long you would use it, you could possibly end up with a whole orchard. HTH