Every week I read the readings assigned for E339 and I find myself learning so much information. Before when I attended another university, I took a reading class where it was no where near as beneficial as E339 so I am truly amazed as how much I learn and feel better about teaching reading. This week we read two readings one about teaching phonemic awareness and the other about phonics.

In the first reading, it was really interested that it's focus was so strongly on phonemic awareness because in a previous reading from Catching Readers Before They Fall, one of the chapter's stated that phonemic awareness should only be taught five hours throughout the year while this chapter said it should be taught twenty. The chapter from Catching Readers Before They Fall made the point that you do not want to overdo phonemic awareness so I think that you have to take how many hours are recommended with a grain of salt. It really depends on your students and what you think they will benefit from.

Additionally, the beginning of the chapter talks about using songs and rhyming poems which I have noticed done in my field work. I'm in kindergarten so I see a lot of this type of stuff. Every week the students have an assigned nursery rhyme for the whole week where they read it every day a couple times a day. I think that this is great. Not only for phonemic awareness but it helps students who do not know how to read yet memorize the words and then make connections.

Something else that I had never heard of was the YOPP Test. I thought that this was a great assessment and very quick too. I liked that the chapter had an example of what it looked like in the chapter. Also, I found it super beneficial all of the books that chapter listed! I enjoyed the different things the YOPP listed to do for extra help. One other thing that really stuck out to me was the brief piece about invented spelling, page 11, where it talked about how this actually can benefit students because it helps them with sounds!

The second reading was "From Phonics to Fluency." The chapter is essentially just definitions that teachers should know that relate to reading. I actually really liked this chapter because it wasn't too many definitions but enough. Some I knew but there was some I did not know. For example when I was school, we learned "y" was sometimes a vowel but the reading said sometimes "w." I certainly never knew that at all!