1a Sound Drill

These short videos are best looked at with a lesson plan in front of you, 

This is the student's fourth lesson, and we are working on Lesson 1.1. Prior to these lessons, he has never had any formal reading instruction.

We are starting small -- just working with the short vowel A, and a few consonants.

I start off the Sound Drill reviewing the Key Word Page, because he needs that extra aid.

Then we go to the tiles, and he does the same thing from the tile letter A.

I make sure he makes the movement. This comes in handy later, as you'll see.

1b Reverse Sound Drills

You'll notice I don't correct everything. He says "D make duh."

I could correct his verb agreement, and I could ask him to cut off the extra sounds at the end of /d/. (It's /d/, not duh.)

But I am trying to stay focused on the sound drill. We have enough fish to fry, and I'll get to those things later.

Some of you saw videos of an earlier lesson with this student. He's improved, right?!

1c Writing

We have this extra challenge: this student does not know how to write his letters.

We have been working on writing outside of these lessons, but within the phonics lesson we just deal with it as it comes. I model for him, and guide him. And we keep going.

2a Reading Words with Tiles

As always, I am tailoring the lesson to his needs:

- Starting out by asking him to say the sounds, one at a time, which he is still shaky on.

- THEN going to tapping and blending when needed.

- Only using a few words within our already limited choice of letters: mat, sat, fat, rat.

- Later in the lesson, because he’s doing well, we add N and then D.

2b Sounding Out Tiles

Notice how when I say the word fat, I say it so he can hear every sound.  Especially important for this student, who drops so many of his final sounds. (But important for all students!)

...But then I should have asked him to write on the desk with two fingers. (The two fingers aids in memory!) 

Also note that when the student puts the tiles back onto the board, we want him to put them back in alphabetic order. This is tricky in the beginning, when we just have a few letters. But that is the direction we are going in: a neat board with tiles in alphabetic-order at all times. 

2c Writing

Because he is still learning to write his letters, the writing sections are labored.

Notice that we want him to know all the sounds in the word before he starts writing.

(Also, his tapping and stretching skills are still off. I will probably work more on this with him in the next lesson. It is essential that he be able tap, stretch, and blend well.) 

3a Word Cards - Reading

Progress! He's getting it! And you can see it on his face. :) 

Is fad a useful word for this student? I don't think so. I do like to focus on useful words... But we have a very small selection of words at this point, and it's useful to go back and forth from fat to fad. 

3b Word Cards - Writing

For this section we get the Dictation Sheet out, and I dictate from the cards.

If the student gets stuck writing the word, we go back to the sounds.

I'm still choosing the same words we worked on earlier in this lesson. I want him to master the small selection of words we are working with - sad, mad, fad, sat, fat, mat.

In general, we don't want to ask a student to spell something we haven't asked them to read earlier in the lesson. As they become more proficient with the spelling patterns, this rule loosens up. But at this level, we want to set up the student for success.

4a Sight words - Reading

Please note a change:  I placed Sight Words ahead of Phrase Cards. Before this student in the video, I had never worked with a student who didn’t know any sight words. We need to work on sight words, like the, before we go to phases, like the rat. The new improved lesson plan that is about to be unveiled will reflect this.  

This is definitely not the best example of how to work with sight words. When he gets stuck, I just give him the answers, and then I move on to the next one. I'm going way too fast.

What could I have done better? Post your suggestions in the comments!

Also, I'm using these giant sight word cards, which I happened to have lying around. If your student really struggles with sight words, you could make your own giant cards (lower-case, written in print). But normally we use the small printed cards. 

4b Sight Words - Writing

Again, so much effort in forming the letters, and, again, I'm going too fast.