FLIP THE SOUND.
USE BEGINNING AND ENDING SOUNDS. BLEND SOUND; STRETCH and REREAD. CHUNK LETTERS AND SOUNDS. Gail Boushey and Joan Moser incorporate myriad elementary-level vocabulary decoding strategies on their CAFE Menu under "Accuracy." "Flip the Sound" involves teaching students to try out the different sounds a letter can make until they hear a word they recognize or that makes sense. "Chunk Letters and Sounds Together" teachers kids to recognize familiar word patterns, like compound words, prefixes/suffixes, digraphs, etc. "Blend Sounds; Stretch and Reread" teachers readers to blend individual sounds of letters/phonemes and not see them in isolation. Lastly, "Use the Beginning and End Sounds" teaches students to slow down and look at an entire word - not just its beginning - to start sounding it out.
Boushey, G. & Moser, J. (2009). Ready reference form: Strategy - Use the beginning and ending sounds; Blend sounds, stretch and reread; flip the sound; chunk letter and sounds together. In The CAFE book: Engaging all students in daily literacy assessment & instruction (p. 172, 173, 174, 176). Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
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"DECLUNKING VOCABULARY" CARDS As a spin-off of the traditional "click" and "clunk" self-monitoring cards for reading comprehension, these have a more specific focus and goal: helping students solve unknown vocabulary words independently during reading. Each of the four cards serves as a reminder to students about what to do when they come to a word they are unfamiliar with. Each card provides a vocabulary "fix-up" strategy (i.e. rereading, context clues, prefix/suffix, etc.) for students to go through once they stumble on a unknown word, or "clunk word." Klingner, J. K. & Vaughn, S. (1999). Promoting reading comprehension, content learning, and English acquisition through Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR). The Reading Teacher, 52(7), 738-747.
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PREFIXES and SUFFIXES with "KIDSPIRATION" COMPUTER SOFTWARE
Teaching students common prefixes, suffixes, and base words - a.k.a. "word parts" - is a "word learning strategy" that will enable them to decode many vocabulary words. Therefore, it is a more effective use of classroom time than teaching students individual words. When a student comes to an unknown word, aside from context clues, only morphology - the meanings of smaller units within the complex word - is the major source of information immediately available for independent decoding. Because it is a graphic organizer creator, Kidspiration allows students to connect words that they already know that have a specific word part to other, unfamiliar words with that same word part via "word webs" (as pictured to the left). In "root word clusters," students will see the core word part in the middle of the diagram with its derivatives branching off it. Students can choose from a large library of pictures when creating their word webs to ensure that the written text has a relevant and beneficial visual aid.
Gill, S. R. (2007). Learning about word parts with Kidspiration. The Reading Teacher, 61(1), 79-84.
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CYBER VOCABULARY DETECTIVE As a way to integrate student enthusiasm to work with digital technology into a vocabulary decoding lesson, students could be taken to the computer lab and given a set of vocabulary words that they have to find in selected websites (hint: "Ctrl" + "f"). Students record the sentence, take an educated guess at the meaning based on sentence context, then look up the word on selected definition websites to confirm meaning. The definition websites are an especially helpful follow-up because they allow students to instantly check their understanding and also gives English Language Learners the option of hearing the word, since many come with an audio pronunciation option. Students could replicate this chart in their reading notebooks/logs as a way to organize their decoding while reading their independent books. Example dictionary websites include: - Dictionary.com - Etymonline.com - Word.com - Wordsmyth.net McKnight, K. S. (2010). 33: Cyber vocabulary detective. In The teacher's big book of graphic organizers: Grades 5-12 (pp. 72-73). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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