Wednesday, February 17th, 2021

I taught my first small group lesson today with the new phonemic awareness/blending group
we’ve formed. This is the group that I will be working with as I complete my Study of Student
Achievement. We had a very successful first lesson. Before we think about tackling blending
skills, I am going to use the first couple of lessons to review letter sounds, listening for first
sounds, listening for ending sounds, and then medial sounds. Amanda’s advice was that it would
be good to start from the very beginning of the phonics continuum. So, today we did a simple and
fun alphabet review. Tomorrow, we will look at first sound awareness.

This is a journal entry from the very beginning of my journey with working with my

current small group of students. This small group was formed in order to give a skills boost to a

group of students who scored well below the benchmark during their mid-year Acadience

Reading assessments. The Nonsense Word Fluency scores of these students indicated that they

were having trouble with decoding CVC words. Our suspicion was that segmenting and blending

would be the focus of this small group’s lessons, but my mentor teacher suggested starting from

the very beginning, with letter sound awareness, just so that we could be sure of the crux of the

issue.

I almost feel nostalgic looking back on the above journal entry, as the small group that I

conduct three times per week has become a highlight of my student teaching experience. Before

beginning the small group, I had only what felt like a basic knowledge of phonemic awareness

and phonics pedagogy. I was relying on advice from my mentor teacher and internet resources in

order to plan the first couple of lessons. Now, I feel as though phonemic awareness and phonics

pedagogy is something that I may want to focus on in the future. I am, of course, still in the very

beginning stages of diving into this broad and detailed aspect of instruction, but I still feel as

though I’ve come a very long way as compared to where I was at the beginning of this endeavor.

I have become practiced at building CVC word exercises that assess students’ abilities to

identify the individual sounds in words, to name correct letter sounds, and to segment and blend
words. I have developed a number of novel and interesting phonemic awareness exercises in an

effort to keep my students engaged as we cover essentially the same principles every day,

segmenting and blending. The study of word families has been something that I have become

very interested in, as I’ve seen how using word families to practice blending with my students

has facilitated a lot of lightbulb moments for them. It’s really exciting to watch as they realize,

through the study of a word family, that if they can read an ending like “-AT”, they can read so

many other words - “CAT”, “RAT”, “MAT”, “FAT”, “SAT”, the list goes on. I’ve found some

incredible resources to incorporate into our lessons to keep the atmosphere light, fun, and

exciting. These resources include a plethora of “Sesame Street” videos that deal with

segmenting, blending, and word families. “Between the Lions” is another great resource for

blending skits and songs.

In looking back at the journal entry that I included above, I can remember feeling sort of

out of my depth at the beginning of this endeavor with the small group. It’s the same feeling that

I consistently had at the beginning of my time as a student teacher, as I added more and more

new experiences to my plate. Thinking about how I felt back in January, I can’t believe how

comfortable I feel with everything now. I feel confident as a novice remediator, and as a lead

teacher in general. I am thankful for these opportunities to reflect, as the progress that I’ve made

has made me feel quite capable in this field.