I’m wondering, like I’ve wondered many times before, how I can fit in more time for phonics instruction for the beginning readers I teach. I know my students need more than the 90 minutes of literacy instruction allotted to master skills. Within these 90 minutes, it is suggested that 10 minutes be spent on phonics instruction. I need more time to teach concepts than what is on the curriculum maps.
Getting creative with how to use materials to teach more than one skill is part of the answer to how to fit it all in each day and layer in additional phonics instruction and practice. Planning units while thinking about how I can use one resource for many skills was a new way of thinking. No longer would I use one resource for just that day or just one lesson. I would think critically about how I could reuse resources throughout the day and across content areas.
Using Poetry with Phonics Instruction
Each week on the reading curriculum map is a poem that supports the unit of study. The poem is part of the shared reading component in our literacy block. Students have enjoyed the poems, quickly noticing rhythm and rhyme. The students find humor in many of the poems with silly animals and ideas that could not happen in real life. The poem selected might relate to the topic in our unit of study or a comprehension skill. The shared reading component in the literacy block is typically quick—lasting only about 10 minutes each day.
Taking a closer look at the poems we used in shared reading led to some questions with my grade-level team partners.
- Could we use these poems, which our students really enjoyed, to teach and practice additional skills?
- What skills could we review with students that we typically teach in the beginning of the school year but can’t find additional practice time for later in the year?
We made a list of skills our students needed to acquire, and the poems seemed like a great place to pause for a few more minutes and notice additional skills. Looking at our data from our dyslexia screener, NWEA scores, and beginning-of-the-year assessments, our thinking was supported in terms of the phonics skills where students needed additional support. Using poetry as our resource, we began to plan.
We easily divided the brainstormed list into the sections of our phonics instruction (early literacy concepts, phonological awareness, letter knowledge, letter-sound relationships, spelling patterns, high-frequency words, word meaning/vocabulary, word structure, and word-solving actions). Planning with these ideas in mind made the task of reviewing essential phonics skills more manageable with the resources already provided. Looking closely at our data, reviewing the skills through the lens of poetry made the task of combining shared reading and review of skills intentional and efficient.
After several weeks of using the poems as our shared reading experience and phonics review, we were hooked. Using the poems from our shared reading resource saved us time in the classroom; we didn’t have to introduce a new resource to our students. Students were familiar with the poem. The additional phonics practice often took just a few minutes, and many days we found we could review several skills in one day. Targeting skills with intentional phonics practice became part of our planning and collaboration process each week.
An Example
One poem we used is shown below along with a planning tool to organize our thinking about possible phonics skills to reteach and practice.
| Jack, Be Nimble
Jack, be nimble. Jack, be nimble, |
|
Areas of Phonics Instruction |
Lesson Possibilities |
| Early Literacy Concepts | Skill: Understand the concept of a word.
Using one line of the poem, count how many words are in that line. Repeat with different lines of the poem that have a variety of words. |
| Phonological Awareness | Skill: Hear and say rhyming words.
Select a word from the poem, and provide students with a word that rhymes with it. Continue with students, generating a list of words that rhyme with the target word. |
| Letter Knowledge | Skill: Recognize the distinctive features of letters.
Highlight a letter that is used repeatedly in the poem. Discuss the shape of the letter. Is it a capital or lowercase? |
| Letter-Sound Relationships | Skill: Understand some letters represent consonant sounds.
Highlight a letter (consonant) used in the poem and talk about the sound the letter makes. Find other examples of the letter in the poem and repeat the sound. |
| Spelling Patterns | Skill: Recognize letter patterns.
Look for words that have the same spelling pattern, like the ck digraph. What other words have this same digraph? |
| High-Frequency Words | Skill: Find and read high-frequency words.
Look for high-frequency words that have been previously taught. Students can highlight the words on their own copy of the poem. |
| Word Meaning/Vocabulary | Skill: Recognize and use new vocabulary words.
Select a word from the poem that might be unknown to the students (e.g., candlestick). Show pictures to support the new word. Share a definition to help make meaning of the word in the text. |
| Word Structure | Skill: Identify syllables in one- and two-syllable words.
Using the words from the poem, find words with two syllables, three syllables. |
| Word Solving Actions | Skill: Recognize and read unknown words quickly.
Review previous skills like open and closed syllables with a closed sort, using words from the poem. |
Download
Download the Planning Tool for Phonics Lessons and give this a try in your classroom.
