Hi Nan,
I was reading through some of the older messages about Reading Reflex and Phono-graphix, and I came across your post mentioning that you use the 4 Blocks philosophy along with PG. I teach first grade at a small private school. This coming year I’ll have between 12 - 15 students. We don’t have any testing programs or pull out programs. I’m it.
I also use the 4 Blocks philosophy. This summer I discovered RR and feel that it would be a wonderful addition to my program. But, I’m not sure how to go about incorporating it.
Do you still use the word wall approach? If so, what words do you put on there?
Thank you for any help or ideas that you can offer. I’d especially like ideas on how to do it whole group. Do you have the classroom kit from ReadAmerica? If so, is it worth $150?
Laura/First/Texas
Re: Nan - Reading Reflex/4 Blocks
Last year I started the year with a regular word wall and as I found PG and my approach changed I redid my word wall into one that looks more like the one in the PG material. Next year I am going to make my word wall by sound picture and add example words as I introduce new sound pictures. So, for example when I do the /oe/ sound I will have all of the different sound pictures for that sound with words to be used for anchor words for those sounds. I think it will really work. I am actually not going to be doing 4 blocks again because now I am only teaching reading and not language. I loved the integration of 4 blocks but it only worked for me when I had the same students for both reading and language. My students used the word wall a lot so I am hopefull that the PG wall will be very useful to them.
Nan
Laura,
This is very interesting, but my child goes to a charter school where the second grade teacher has been using 4 blocks. Now I have no problem with the philosophy for scheduling purposes, but I definitely have a problem with the materials published for the “systematic explicit phonics” portion. Anyway, the school will be having PG training at the end of this month and I am hopeful that the teachers will leave the training understanding the areas they must now change. I think the word wall does need to go because it would not fit with the PG philosophy. I have heard one PG teacher say that they made a PG word wall where there were sample words for each sound…which would cue the child if thye got stuck decoding or spelling, as opposed to a 4 blocks word wall which is more of a sight word wall, I think. Anyway, I’ll be interested in Nan’s answer, too.
Janis