At the beginning of this year, I noticed a common problem across my year 3 class:
Many students did not have the confidence or strategies to attempt to read or write new words.
I spoke to Jocelyn, who teaches the other year 3 class at Pt England School. She noticed the same problem amongst a number of her students as well. Between our classes, we identified a group of 19 students (that sat between the reading levels of red to blue) who all had similar struggles:
-Lack of confidence to write initial letter sounds
-Lack of confidence/strategies to read initial letters sounds
-General letter confusion (unable to associate a letter with the sound that it makes)
As a result of these problems, many of the students in this target group struggled to write one-two sentences independently in their Easttle test. Five of the students in my target group wrote four or less words in their test because they didn't know how to give tricky words a go. As I worked more with them, I learnt that they were hesitant to make an attempt because they just didn't know where to start. During reading, this same group of students guessed words without looking at the initial letter sound. For example, one student read 'I can ride my car like this' when the word should have been bike instead of car. It was a common habit to gloss over words without attending to the first letter. Other times, they would reach a word, for example, we, but struggle to read it because they were not sure what the first letter sounded like. We identified that the most commonly misread letters were g, y, w, b, d and h because the letter name either doesn't match up with the sound that it makes, or the letters look similar.
So, here is the question we asked ourselves as we began our inquiry:
How can an integrated approach to reading and writing impact learners decoding and reading fluency?
Jocelyn and I have established repetitive daily tasks that our target group can do during reading and writing. We decided to be more intentional about the tasks that students do when they are not with the teacher. Instead of question-answer activities, we created tasks that meet their visual, audio and tactile learning needs. Students need to have the opportunities to 'read it, make it, write it, say it', as often as possible, so we decided to create a collection of hands on resources to share between our classes. These resources help students to build confidence in letter/sound knowledge, blends, sight words and word families. These include an assortment of fun letter sound games, blend games, sight word games, chalk, playdough, lego, moulding sand, magnet letters and iPad EE's that students can use with or without the teacher.
As seen in the video, we are also consistently making a connection between reading and writing through the use of our yellow alphabet cards and orange blends cards. We use these while reading books as well as during writing time.
After one term of being intentional about integrating reading and writing through fun tasks, we have already noticed a huge improvement in confidence in letter sound knowledge as well as blends knowledge. Students are really enjoying reading and writing time as there is now a wider, more engaging range of activities to do.
Please see below screenshots of some of my reading pages on our class site.
