This video showed a teacher in kindergarten/first grade. The teacher focused on building students’ phonemic awareness by showing sounds and the letters that corresponded with them. She worked in small groups and whole group to focus on phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is vital for learning how to spell and read. I agree that it is difficult to understand the smallest units of speech especially since the English language has a large number of different sounds. Students will build their phonemic awareness as they gain more understanding and control of the sounds and language.
This video demonstrated how the teacher used blocks to break up phonemes in basic words. However, within the first minute, I found something that I would change. The teacher used the blocks facing her. The teacher pointed to the blocks from right to left instead of mirroring what the student should do which would be left to right (the way we read). It was almost like the student was spelling the word backwards because she started with a block to the right then built it to the left. I was excited when the student enunciated the second word “shop” and realized that “sh” made one sound because it is a blend. As the video progresses, the child starts to manipulate the blocks to her liking. She started to move them right to left because it is the way we read but the teacher took the blocks back up to the middle of the table. At times, I felt that they could have use a different manipulative that would have been less distracting. The child had difficulties with shorter words that had more blends like “flew”, “chalk”, and “bolt”. This video reminded me of the Fundations program that is offered at my school for primary grade students. Overall, this video helps teachers distinguish if students have the basic phoneme segmentation.
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