Tompkins Ch. 5

The part of this chapter on developing fluent readers and writers that I enjoyed the most was the part on word recognition. I really enjoyed what the author had to say on this, because I feel that word recognition is something I see a lot in the field. Tompkins wrote about how children are more likely to recognize the word whale than the word what,"because whale conjures up the image of an aquatic mammal, whereas what is abstract. However, what is used much more frequently, and children need to learn to recognize it" (p. 158). Words like what, could, to, etc. are called sight words because they aren't pronounced phonetically, so children can't easily decode them, therefore they are words that children learn by sight and by forming a relationship of how that word is said.

My CT has a word wall in the classroom, but after reading the list of high-frequency words in the book, I think my CT could add a lot more than what she already has. Her word wall is divided alphabetically and each letter has a few words under it, but since I'm in a first/second split class, I think more sight words would be beneficial to them. I've noticed that my students are getting really good at sounding out words and focus on on sound-letter relationships, but when they try to do that with a sight word they get stuck. I haven't seen my CT add any new words to the word wall since I first saw it at the beginning of the year, and Tompkins mentions in the chapter that word walls should be added to as new vocab is introduced and new elements of literacy are introduced. I think the students in my class would really benefit by seeing new sight words get added to the word wall, because they are so observant that they would always be looking for new words and this would really help with their fluency.