Anonymous Notes

note_sds

Poor articulators may have phonological and phonemic awareness problems. They should be referred for screening by the school nurse and speech therapist as soon as possible. Meanwhile, in the classroom the teacher should consisteitty provide very clear and distinct modeing of pronunciations, calling attention to what she is doing with her fps, tongue. breath, and sound bo:c (Therapists have a repertoire of strategies to share.) All students need multiple opportunities daily for hearing texts read aloud. discussing them, and reteling. These texts should represent many genres and should definitely include many works of nonfiction. Reading aloud helps all students to add to their listening and speaking vocabularies, to extend the levels of sophistication of their grammar and sentence structures. to develop their sense of text structures. and to develop and use other comprehension strategies. In the best of situations. those experiences of listening, discussing. and retelling are part of routines at home as well. Teachers should do all they can to enlist parents as partners to read with and to children at home. When reading aloud does not happen regularly in the home, the gap widens. Teachers need to provide opportunities for those children to hear more texts read aloud. especially nonfiction. (Vicarious experiences cannot make up for all the disadvantaged students have missed, but they can help.) Enlisting volunteers to read to them one-on-one or in small groups or using books on tape are two possible strategies. Some of the texts can be classics such as Goodnight Moon, Caps for Sale; The Napping House, along with nursery rhymes and fairy tales that some of these children may never have heard but that are old friends to their peers, and other texts that provide background for curricular studies.