What is a Word?

This article told us to think about our own vocabulary. I sat and pondered and thought about all the words I have accumulated in my vocabulary. I have broadened my vocabulary by hearing different words in my environment and this makes me think about deaf education once again. It is so important that we receive our vocabulary for the most part in an auditory sense. For the children that I teach, it is best to label objects around the room and constantly use different vocabulary when I am signing. This helps them get the words visually and the labels help them put names with objects. This helps them get a sense of why words are what they are. Also for children to notice words that are often used. In my classroom I am in right now, these words are called "High Frequency Words." These are words such as "a," "an," "the," and "with." These are important words that the students need to recognize because they are often used in many sentences they produce.
Think about:
How did you acquire new words in your vocabulary?

Phonemic Awareness Instruction

This concept immediately made me think of deaf education and visual phonics. First when I was reading the article it talked about younger students using different songs or chants in order to focus on different aspects of the phonemes in the different words. Rhyming is also an important aspect of phonemic awareness and can help students predict what the word will be next based on the rhyming scheme. This is a great tool to use in your classroom. As far as visual phonics goes, this technique is used when you are teaching a child with a hearing loss what different sounds are. It focuses on using symbols that represent hand movements on the mouth. This helps the child visual what sound they will make and most symbols represent what movements your tongue makes. However, if some students have some hearing the techniques such as sing song, in the article and book can be used to teach the deaf students phonemic awareness.

Fluency: Echo Reading

I enjoyed the section about echo reading because it seems like it would make the passage that you are reading come alive for the students. Students can practice their voices and maybe you could ask your students what voice they would prefer and in turn this can incorporate the character traits. You can discuss with your students what the character's traits are and what their expression would be in the story. This can be applied to any sort of materials you read and can possibly make them more interesting to the readers. This can be used when reading poems, plays, or just a simple picture storybook. Also if it is a poem written by a student, this is where they can be imaginative and decide how they would portray their own character. Echo reading helps students with fluency as well because you as the teacher can model the passage and then they can repeat and in turn this will help them remember the readings. They will be able to hopefully replicate the reading later and comprehend the passage better.
This is a link of a video helps explain how to teach echo reading to your kids! Copy, Paste, and enjoy!

http://www.ehow.com/video_4402311_teaching-kids-echo-reading.html

Early Literacy

Some features of these articles really resonated with me because I do work with young children at a daycare. I do believe that there should be as much literacy and reading as possible during there day at daycare. They are there all day from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. which is such a long time and during this time their knowledge should be expanding. I like how in the article it focused on reading every day with your child. The ratio at daycare is 8 children to 1 teacher, so we have 16 children. It is so important to get them all focused on some sort of reading more than once a day. It should be any sort of reading materials such as just showing them pictures with the word on it, audio books, or just reading to the class. I have found that their attention spans are short so I think that reading one to two books is just enough. Inflection and animation in your voice is very important as well. I think that the teachers at the day care may not need to have a college degree because some of the workers that I work with are very capable and I have seen major gains in the children's reading abilities.
Question to think about:
What are different ways to incorporate literacy in your interactions with young children?