Now that school is back in full force, our students are quickly learning a variety of different lessons, old and new. As an elementary education major myself, here is what I learned this week in my class called Teach Literacy in Grades K-2!
In this class, we were talking about phonics. Many aspects of this lesson made sense to me. We talked about phonemes and graphemes. I hadn't learned about letter blends, but that part of the lesson made sense. These blends were the L blend, R blend, and S blend. In all consonant blends, all of the sounds are heard. For example, 'str' in strong would be an example of an s blend. All three letters are heard.
Later, we discussed digraphs, and this is where I learned something that was nearly mind-breaking. There are two different types of digraphs, the consonant and vowel digraphs. The consonant digraphs made sense to me. Digraphs consist of two letter combinations that make one sound. For example, in the word, shine, 'sh' is a consonant digraph. Other examples include 'wh', 'ph', 'ch', and 'th'. Now, not all consonant digraphs contain an 'h'.
Upon further investigation in class, 'ng' is also a digraph despite both letters being heard. The reason for this is due to the ng phoneme where it is classified as one sound. That wasn't the near mind-breaking part of the lesson though. That was when we talked about vowel digraphs. During this part, our professor made the statement that 'w' is sometimes a vowel. None of us had heard this before. We had heard that 'y' is sometimes a vowel, but we'd never heard that 'w' was sometimes a vowel. The reason 'w' is sometimes a vowel is due to these vowel digraphs. 'W' is a vowel when the letters 'ow' form the long 'o' sound as in "grow". The isn't to be confused with the 'ow' in the word vowel, which is considered a diphthong, something we haven't covered yet in class.
In conclusion, literacy is invaluable in education. Learning literacy helps students in all disciplines. It helps us learn history, english, science, and even mathematics. Though this lesson seems simple, it is invaluable as we learn line upon line, gathering information and knowledge gradually over time. Literacy is the first step people take towards gaining a long lasting education and we can continue to learn more even later in life as I have.
If teaching literacy interests you, check out more information here to learn more about Elementary Education!
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