Even words have families in the magical colors of autumn. (Coaching Word Recognition)

Dear Diary,
 This week's readings discussed how to teach phonics and spelling patterns. In Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write, Patricia M. Cunningham and Richard L. Allington emphasize teaching children to use words they know to "decode and spell" many other words (71). They argue that children will begin to see patterns in familiar and new words. Recognizing these patterns will help them to read and is a better alternative than the traditional, "Sound each letter out."

 While volunteering at Green Magnet Elementary School during Education 100, my mentor teacher, Ms. Roberts, helped her students to recognize patterns by identifying word families, a collection of words that use a common base in which different prefixes and suffixes may be added or taken away to create a new word. Ms. Roberts' students had the best literacy scores on the kindergarten hall, and she adamantly stressed the importance of word families to me. Observing her use of word families in the classroom caused me to further see the importance of helping children identify common word patterns since, "good readers and spellers do not sound out every letter but rather try to think of a rhyming word and read or spell the word using the pattern in the rhyming word" (73). Recognizing word patterns may also be achieved by the word families system.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/80361174570462245/

 Friday night I spent about an hour reading the books in the children's section at Barnes and Noble. All the fall and Halloween books were displayed because we have finally reached this beautiful autumn season. I thought I would give an example of a fall word family activity. In this activity, students add different prefixes to the "in" family. By adding different prefixes to "in", they can may many different words such as fin, tin, skin, bin, chin, and kin.

 Also, I have included a video demonstrating a word family lesson. This lesson also uses elements of movement to engage students with the subject material.

  
 Some questions to think about:
1. Do you think teaching word families help children to identify word patterns?
2. Can you think of other ways you might be able to help children identify word patterns?
3. Do you think there is still a place for sounding out when teaching children how to read?

'Readingly' yours,
 Juliet