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When helping your child read at home, several strategies may be used to aid in decoding unknown words. 1. Tell the child to look at the picture. You may tell the child the word is something that can be seen in the picture, if this applies to the text being read. 2. Tell the child to look for chunks in the word, such as it in sit, or at in mat, or and and ing in standing. 3. Ask the child to get his/her mouth ready to say the word by shaping the mouth for the beginning letter. 4. Ask the child if the word looks like another word he/she knows. Does cook look like look?, for example. 5. Ask the child to go on and read to the end of the sentence. Often by reading the other words in context, the child can figure out the unknown word. 6. If the child says the wrong word while reading, ask questions like:
Does it make sense?
Does it sound right?
Does it look right? Spelling & VocabularySpelling is a very important part of our Second grade writing program. Our society expects well-educated, literate people to know how to spell correctly. I want my students to understand that spelling is NOT for a spelling test on Friday, it is for improving their writing! I use 2 methods of teaching spelling to my young students.A Phonetic Method:
This method is used from the first week of school to the end in June. I use the phonics method to enable them to write on their own, getting their thoughts down on paper. If we expect developing writers to spell every word correctly in their rough drafts, we would find they would be writing much less! I have found that by teaching them how to write by sounding out words...many students transfer that ability over to reading and are thrilled when they've made that connection.
