Mrs. Brocker's News
March/April
February/March Review
The past two months have been action packed, we enjoyed celebrating Valentines day, 100's Day, and Read Across America. We have several fun events planned during the last few months of Kindergarten!
Save the dates because parents are invited. There will be more Information to come:
*Final Kindergarten Outdoor Forest Field Trip on June 10th
*Kindergarten Concert/Art Hop on June 2nd!
Reading Workshop/Book Bags/Tracking with their reading finger
Is it necessary to have the child actually point with their finger as they read?
"Yes, it is! The importance of the physical movement (kinetic process) in tracking can not be emphasized enough. Have the child use their 'reading finger' in the learning stage. Not only does this motion help en-grain necessary left-to-right processing but pointing at sounds also helps the child focus on and correctly process individual sounds within the word. It improves attention to detail as well as proper left-to-right tracking. Require physical tracking motion when teaching beginners and when remediating struggling readers. In remediation, if an older student perceives finger motion to be ‘babyish’ they can use a toothpick, pencil or another pointer of their choice but still require physical motion. If the student is making tracking errors or missing details, continue physical tracking.
Eventually the child will ‘outgrow’ the need for physically pointing at the letters. When the child has engrained the essential left-to-right processing of all sounds physical tracking no longer needs to be directly taught. The child can then drop the finger motion. As students advance in skills from initial phonologic processing to fluency they tend to appropriately outgrow and drop finger movement on their own. If the student has established strong phonologic processing of print, and does not make tracking or attention to detail errors, they have mastered the necessary directional tracking skill and can drop finger pointing." by Miscese Gagen