Yolanda Soryl phonics training

 Some take outs from phonics training with Yolanda Soryl. This was an excellent course, packed with information and all you need to get started teaching a quality, effective phonics programme.

-data showing students' accelerated development of phonemic awareness skills as a result of being taught phonics in first year of school - especially for boys, ELL students, Māori, Pasifika, students from lower socio economic backgrounds and people with learning and literacy difficulties. (p7 of manual).

-students need an 'integrated literacy programme' that includes handwriting, spelling and oral language. And it is important hearing our students read aloud (including older students)

-'teachers who taught sounding out and blending explicitly accelerated reading attainment' (p10). I noticed doing recent GKR phonemic awareness tests that none of the group of 5.6 y students I'm working with could tell me f-u-n was fun. They are not able to blend and this is a skill required to decode fluently so something we need to work on.

-There's a handy phonics glossary on p11 and Yolanda encouraged us to use the terminology as appropriate with children. 

-I've noticed children have confusion with the 'name of the letter' and 'the sound the letter makes'. This is something we need to address in our phonics teaching - is it being explicitly included in our teaching?

-It was good to get clarity around the pace of the lessons - ie by end of first year at school working at stage 5. A simple way to get an indication of stage if in a writing sample you can see child has used one sound then stage 2, two sounds stage 3 and three sounds stage 4. Don't teach stage 4 twice - usually vowel confusion > do 'vowel drilling', dictation. (And it can 'spoil it for stage 5 and 6' which I wrote down in my notes but can't remember why - anyone??)

-Teach phonics systematically. Use the lesson plans. the lessons are the same every day. Teach it. Model it. Demand it. Importance of repetition of experiences. Pepper the day these experiences - little and often. Have a learning assistant repeat the phonics lesson in the afternoon for students who need more repetition (at a time outside of literacy time - we don't want them missing any literacy teaching, it's a double up). It's awesome that all our learning assistants and all junior teachers have done this training.  A good idea to ensure we're teaching all of stage 1 is to copy pages 18 and 19 then just highlight as you teach.

-Importance of READING TO CHILDREN. At least five times a day in junior classes. Doesn't need to always be books - also poems etc. 

-Something I think we must do that Yolanda discussed is build in a peer check in. After we've had a few weeks practise, get someone to come in, give them a copy of the lesson plan and get them to see if you're meeting the mark. I'll have opportunity to teach phonics when I am doing release in Karaka. Be good to have some 'buddy check' sessions in a few weeks when phonics up and running. 

-Yolanda recommended following Dr Sam Bommarito.

-it would be good to talk more with our early childhood educators about how they teach phonics (and if they do the Yolanda Soryl pld for ece...) and also think how we could share some of the info from this course about the power of early literacy experiences (ie singing, rhyming books etc.) with whānau.