This guide provides a comprehensive overview of the key concepts covered in LETRS Unit 3, Session 2, focusing on foundational reading skills. We'll delve into the core ideas, offering explanations and examples to solidify your understanding. This isn't a substitute for the actual session materials, but rather a helpful resource for review and reinforcement.
Understanding the Building Blocks of Reading: Phonemic Awareness and Phonics
LETRS Unit 3, Session 2 emphasizes the crucial interplay between phonemic awareness and phonics. These two foundational skills are intertwined and essential for successful reading development.
Phonemic Awareness: The Sounds of Language
Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. This isn't about the letters themselves, but about the sounds the letters represent. Key skills within phonemic awareness include:
- Rhyming: Identifying words that share the same ending sounds (e.g., cat, hat, bat).
- Alliteration: Recognizing words that begin with the same sound (e.g., Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers).
- Phoneme Isolation: Identifying the individual sounds in a word (e.g., identifying /c/ /a/ /t/ in "cat").
- Phoneme Blending: Combining individual sounds to form a word (e.g., blending /c/ /a/ /t/ to say "cat").
- Phoneme Segmentation: Breaking a word down into its individual sounds (e.g., breaking "cat" into /c/ /a/ /t/).
- Phoneme Deletion: Removing a sound from a word (e.g., removing the /t/ from "cat" to make "ca").
- Phoneme Substitution: Replacing a sound in a word with another sound (e.g., changing the /c/ in "cat" to /h/ to make "hat").
Phonics: Connecting Sounds and Letters
Phonics builds upon phonemic awareness by teaching children the relationship between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes). This involves understanding letter-sound correspondences and applying this knowledge to decode (read) and encode (spell) words. Effective phonics instruction covers:
- Consonant Sounds: Understanding the sounds represented by individual consonants and consonant blends (e.g., /b/, /t/, /bl/, /st/).
- Vowel Sounds: Recognizing the various sounds vowels can make (short and long vowel sounds, diphthongs, r-controlled vowels).
- Decoding Strategies: Using knowledge of letter-sound relationships to sound out unfamiliar words.
- Encoding Strategies: Applying knowledge of letter-sound relationships to spell words.
The Importance of Explicit and Systematic Instruction
LETRS strongly advocates for explicit and systematic phonics instruction. This means:
- Explicit Instruction: Directly teaching specific skills and strategies, rather than relying on implicit learning.
- Systematic Instruction: Teaching letter-sound relationships in a logical and sequential order, building upon previously learned concepts.
Assessment and Intervention Strategies
Regular assessment is vital to monitor student progress and identify areas needing additional support. LETRS provides frameworks for assessing phonemic awareness and phonics skills. Intervention strategies should be targeted and tailored to individual student needs.
Beyond the Basics: Connecting Phonics to Fluency and Comprehension
While phonemic awareness and phonics are foundational, they are stepping stones to reading fluency and comprehension. Strong phonics skills enable students to decode words accurately and efficiently, freeing up cognitive resources for comprehension. Fluency, in turn, facilitates comprehension by allowing students to read smoothly and automatically.
This overview serves as a starting point. For a thorough understanding, consult your LETRS Unit 3, Session 2 materials. Remember to actively engage with the provided activities and resources to solidify your knowledge of these crucial reading skills.
