Melissa's Melting Pot

In our English seminar we learnt about how we teach children to read using phonetics schemes such as 'letters and sounds' and 'jolly phonics'. There is an awful lot about phonics that i don't know and it seems to have changed since I was at school - a statement that makes me sound so old! We began with looking at definitions of words which are related/used in these schemes, some of these are: Grapheme - which is how the sound is recorded [written down] Phoneme - the smallest unit of sound in a word [the sound which a letter makes] GPC - Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence Segmenting - splitting up a word into its sounds or phonemes Blending - putting the sounds or phonemes back together  Digraphs  - a two letter sound Trigraphs - a three letter sound Sound button - a dot or line you place under the sound/phoneme to split up the sounds, then when you press the button the children say the sounds getting faster until they blend the phonemes ...

For Homework in English we got set to go away and learn a story and a poem off by heart. Now this sounds like a simple enough task but when you actually try it becomes trickier, you worry you will  forget the order of the story or the words and end up looking silly in front of your peers, plus however much you practice your story there is always that one section which catches you out! Me, Abi and Amy decided that as a group we would learn the story ' We're going on a Bear Hunt ' and after listening to our English seminar lecturer talking about Pie Corbett and how he told stories we decided we were going to not only tell the story but tell it with actions, this helps make it more engaging and interactive for the children plus they can join in with your actions! After researching the book 'We're going on a Bear Hunt' we discovered an amazing video of the author actually telling the story, with actions! You can look at the video here:  h...