I work at the two Bronx Charter Schools for Better Learning. I’m called a “Professional Development Specialist,” which means I get to train new teachers and teaching assistants in our school’s specialized pedagogy, which was created by an Egyptian mathematician, Dr. Caleb Gattegno. Dr. Gattegno developed unique materials and techniques for teaching math, reading, writing and second languages.
My job consists of helping new teachers and teaching assistants (pre-K through 5th Grade) become proficient at working with young children to read and write English. Almost all the kids are native speakers of English, and they live in low-income neighborhoods of the Bronx.
I often visit teachers in their classroom, where we might co-teach a reading or writing lesson to the whole class, or to just a small group in the corner while the rest of the class does independent work. At other times, a teacher will bring a handful of students to a pull-out room, and we work with the kids there.
The materials we use are complex, but almost all the kids catch on to them easily. However, the teachers, especially if they’re new, struggle with such a welter of details and with basic knowledge about English that they never learned themselves in college or grad school.
Case in point: we use a spelling chart (called the “Fidel”) which contains all the possible spellings for every sound in English, color-coded by the sound you say when you see this spelling in a word. For example, the vowel sound in the word “date” can be written thirteen ways:
- a (as in late or cake or taste…)
- ai (as in mail or pail)
- ay (day)
- ey (they)
- ei (vein)
- eigh (sleigh)
- ea (great)
- aigh (straight)
- et (ballet, buffet, crochet…)
- ae (israeli)
- au (gauge)
- e (suede)
- ee (fiancee)
There are 23 columns for all the vowel sounds in English, and 35 columns for all the consonants (including five different columns for how the letter “x” can sound (xylophone, box, exist, anxious, luxurious). Of course, the “x” in xylophone is part of a larger column that includes s (is), ss (scissors), se (hose), ‘s (pam’s), z (zoo), zz (dizzy), thes (clothes), sth (asthma), and more.
We expect teachers and teaching assistants to be fluent with this chart. As staff trainer, I teach workshops on it during the summer, hold once-a-week training sessions for groups of new teachers during the school year, and visit with the teachers one-on-one to help them use the Fidel with their kids.
Here’s a recent example of what happened when we had two new students enter our 1st Grade in the middle of the year. Their teacher brought them to a pull-out room and we worked together to get them acclimated to the Fidel. We focused on the “oh” column, which contains these possible spellings for the vowel sound you make when you say the word “go.”
- o, oe, ow, owe, oa, ou, ew, oh, ough, eau, oo, au, eo, ot
We showed them various pictures (e.g., a picture of a nose), they identified the word (“nose”), then they came to the spelling chart to tap out the correct consonants and the vowel. Then they wrote the word in an ever-growing list on a whiteboard. We showed pictures where the sound of “oh” had different spellings, for example nose, coat, doe (the female deer), dough, snow, bones, boat, sew, and so on.
Each time they wrote a new word on the whiteboard, we had them read back the entire list. As a final step, we asked them to come up with a sentence that contained three examples of words from the list, and write it. The result you can see at the top of this post (“I got hurt and broke seven bones in my nose”), and I’ll re-paste it here. I find it interesting how this 1st Grader “justified” the text so that each line started at the left margin and ended at the right, with the words rather evenly spread apart in the middle.
Another case:
A 2nd Grade teacher brought a small group of children to the pull-out room, and she used the Fidel to help them identify and spell long words that begin with the word “under.” She’d tap the columns for, say, “underneath.” The kids would say the word, discuss what it meant, then come to the Fidel to tap out the columns again and select the right spelling. (Note: the column for the “ea” in “underneath” has 13 choices in it, including e (he); ee (sheep); ea (eat), y (happy), ie (field); ei (conceit); i (ski); ey (key); and is (debris)).
After they identified the correct spelling for a word, one student would make up a sentence that contained that word, and all the students would write it in their notebooks.
Here are the five words the students studied, and the sentences they created and wrote for each one:
- I saw a toy under my bed.
- Underneath the chair I saw a rat on the floor.
- My cousin takes off her underpants in the bathroom.
- I smelled my underarm and it was disgusting.
- At home my Mom underpaid my siblings after they did their chores.
It’s refreshing to let the students create their own sentences. For one thing, they “own” the material more since it comes from them. For another, they don’t censor themselves or come up with something bland that the teacher might (probably?) do if she dictated sentences herself.
Another case:
In addition to the Fidel, we have twenty color-coded Word Charts. If they’re the large size Word Charts, they take up an entire classroom’s wall; however, there are smaller sizes, too. Each chart contains between 30 and 40 words (totaling about 700 words for all 20 charts), and every part of every word is colored the same way it is on the Fidel. For example, the word shoes appears in three colors: the sh is sky blue, the oe is leaf green, and the final s is lilac. The first Word Chart uses only a few colors and easy-to-decode words (pat, pet, pit, is, us, top, spot) but by the time you get to the higher-numbered charts you’re dealing with exceptional spellings like aisle, isle, Wednesday, spatial, pneumatic, amoeba, rhythm.
Want to see an example? Here’s the word conscientious, from Chart 19:
Notice how the sc and the t are both colored sky blue; the same color as the sh in shoes. If the children just look for words that they know that share the same colors they see in conscientious, they can decode the word independently.
One way of using the Word Charts is to ask the students to come to the chart wall and with a pointer tap the words they know they can read, and then tap some words they can’t read yet. Then as the teacher you decide exactly what to work on that day.
For example, one 1st Grade teacher brought a few kids to the pull-out room. She took my suggestion of having the students identify words that they knew on the charts, and planned to go from there, perhaps stringing together a bunch of known words to create a long sentence. However, one boy, after pointing to known words, touched diaphragm and said, “I don’t know this word.” So we worked with the group to decode it, then talked about the meaning. Among other things, we told the students to place their hands high on their stomachs and just below the ribcage, then after taking a few deep breaths, tell us what they noticed.
We asked the students to write their own sentences using the word. Here are two of them:
- I must use my diaphragm to breathe.
- I was in a car accident and hurt my diaphragm.
I doubt first grade students in any other school in New York are writing sentences like these. And because the twenty Word Charts are permanently on the classroom wall, if a week later a child wants to write about her diaphragm again but can’t quite remember the spelling, she merely has to look at the charts on the wall and find it.
When I later spoke with this lesson’s teacher, she said she was thrilled by how energized the kids were during the lesson. Furthermore, when this group returned to the regular classroom, they spontaneously took their friends to the chart with diaphragm on it, and explained to their friends how to decode it and what it meant.
Final case:
Teacher X in 1st Grade told me that she wanted to work with Chart 11, extending what she and her students had already done with it. Chart 11 has many words that you can use in questions (what, when, where, why, who, whose…) and typically a new teacher will have the students create simple utterances like What time do you eat lunch? Or, Where did you buy that hat?
However, before she got her kids, I told her that she could use these “question” words to force children to make sentences that are longer and more complex. All you need to do is point to a few different words that could begin a sentence, then stop on one of these “extension” words (e.g., when, where, who, since) and say, “How would you finish this sentence?”
I gave her some sample sentence starters, then she got some children and led the entire lesson while I watched. She did extremely well. She’d tap out the beginning of the sentence on the Word Charts, the children would watch silently, then, when the teacher lowered her pointer, they’d eagerly raise their hand, say the words the teacher had tapped and add their own endings.
They worked with four sentence starters:
- I have been reading since…
- I go to the garden where…
- I like the man who…
- I like to eat chicken when…
The students’ oral and written results were stunning. Furthermore, they were all excited by the work and keen to do more.
Here are some of their sentences:
- I have been reading since last year.
- I have been reading since I was a baby.
- I go to the garden where there are beautiful flowers.
- I like the man who has a golden tuxedo and gold pants.
- I like to eat chicken when it is grilled.
- I like to eat chicken when it is in the freezer.
- I like to eat chicken when it is still alive.
- I go to the garden where they have poison ivy.
This is a luxury, really, for everyone involved. The children are lucky to work with materials that call on their intelligence, independence and creativity. The teachers are lucky that they frequently have these private coaching sessions, not only with me (who helps them teach reading and writing), but with other trainers who work with them on mathematics or classroom management. And for me, it’s all a striking example of “Life Without Parkinson’s,” in that I marvel a lot at what the kids are capable of, what they produce, and how happy they usually are. The fact that I have Parkinson’s is a non-issue during these sessions; in fact, I forget that I’m a Parkie at all.
