Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Prompting - A Good Technique for Teaching Spelling


(video from Jann Phonics of FB)

One of the benefits of joining the course of Jann is to learn about this "prompting" thing. It is a process of prompting the child to spell out a word by listening to the phonics sound of the letters. It is quite simple but would take a few practices to master it. E.g. when prompting your child 'CAR', you'll purposely pronounce the sound "C-A-R", while hearing the phonics of each letter, your child should tell you C, A, R, you then tell them to say out the letters, and pronounce the word. It sound easy, but most of us forget the importance of it and always take a short cut by skipping some of the steps.
If a child knows the theory of this 'prompting', he or she should have no problem in the spelling test at all, like Jann mentioned in her course, she never had a problem with her children learning the words given for spelling test. I do have a colleague who has a 4 years + kid who always struggle with spelling and it has taken up most of her time at home.
In the video above, you'll see how Jann prompted her son with this tough word "extraordinarily", her son was only 4.5 years old then. It might looked a bit stressful on the kid, but I believe this is probably due to the video recording, her children are always learning on their own pace and through a fun way. In the above video, it was the first attempt his son spelled this word "extraordinarily", he didn't manage to get it in this attempt, Jann let it go this time. Jann always tell us not to force the kids to do something they don't want, or have lost interest, but to revisit the activities again after sometime. So Jann probably had tried prompting this word again few days later, and I'm sure her son had get it in the subsequent attempts.

My own attempt of prompting:

(I prompted Chloe to spell the word "leaf" in her Fun Class of "L for Leaf", do note that in this word, LEAF, E and A are vowels, when 2 vowels appear together, the first one make the long sound and the second one is silent, thus A should have no sound here, but as Chloe is not taught about this rule yet, I had sound the A when I prompted her)

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