My
cooperating teacher recently told me something that shook me to the core. The
program they use in kindergarten in the school in which I am observing, is
called Open Court. This gives the
students several weeks to work on one
letter and to learn the sounds that it
makes. Because of this approach, the program appears to limit the amount of
letters a student can learn over the course of a year. This week they should be
on the letter K. This is scary to me because there are only two months left of
school.
To make matters worse their reading
program does not align with this Open Court
program. Students began reading two months ago. Luckily, my teacher did not follow the Open Court
program totally and the students all
know every letter and the sounds that those letters make. If my teacher had followed the Open Court approach to beginning reading
there is no way that the students would be on track.
I will be teaching in less than a year
and it scares me that there can be two programs that I need to work with that
do not agree with each other. As a future teacher would you follow this Open Court
program or would you implement your own beginning reading program? What kind of reading programs and which teaching
strategies that you have observed that you feel will be helpful to you as you
begin to teach emergent readers? 
I think that I would use this program but maybe vary it a little bit. I like the idea but I think that I would teach all the letters and sounds they make first and then begin to implement the program. I'm also a tad confused on the program as well but I think that if we just do this program then you take the risk of not completing all the alphabet in time.
ReplyDeleteI would follow as much of this that was required of me. I would then see what it is missing and fill in the blanks with my own lessons. I would strengthen the children's reading by adding too, or incorporating my own lessons. I would hope that this program could at least be used as support.
ReplyDeleteIn the current school I am observing in they use Orton-Gillingham approach to reading. I think it is great, at times a bit unnecessary for second graders, but it does the job. They focus on sounds and syllables and give students a new way to spell. From what I have observed, this is a great program. I can only hope the job I get uses Orton Gillingham because I have become so familiar with this program.