Word Families reading module

 Having to teach the year 1 students on reading English is one difficult task especially when your students are the Malay-speaking students

 Being provided by textbook and activity books is an advantage but at a certain point, it could be a restriction. In my honest opinion, the emphasized words introduced in the textbook are not really suitable in the sense that they are giving the students a hard time to understand the relation in terms of phonemes arrangements between the words

For examples, in the English Year 1 Textbook (2017),Unit 3, the words given under the /s/ phoneme are sun, snail, soup, soap, shine and etc.The students could identify the /s/ phoneme but to read those words will be difficult to them since the sounds of the letters that follow after the /s/ phoneme are different. Teaching a child to read through the vowel first, then add on the last sound can be counterproductive and lead to confusion. The students need to sound out every letter. This is slow and breaks up the flow of the words, making it hard to figure out the meaning

Based on some readings that I’ve made, I found out that the teaching of reading through WORD FAMILIES could help the students to apply decoding skills to unknown words. When learning families of words, children are able to read familiar patterns of letters quickly and fluently. Word family patterns help children’s spelling. They are able to recognize spelling patterns and apply these to other words of the same family

For instances, in the words “pat”, “mat” and rat, the students will learn to identify the “at” sound as chunk, instead of needing to sound out the letters individually

 

I realised that I need to do something for my students instead of solely depending my teaching on textbook. Therefore, I develop a very simple reading module which I think will be effective to my students based on the word families’ technique and I am sharing to all of you here in my blog. The words stated in my module wouldn’t be hundred percent from the textbook but they are selected based on what I feel suitable to my students

 word family reading module