Freeman and Freeman, Chapters 3 & 4

Reading all the examples given in chapter 3 made me think of so many funny little things that I have seen emergent writers do when encoding the sounds they make.  I already mentioned the "chruk" in the forums... I also have seen "sol" written for "saw" quite a bit.  The first time I saw a child write that, I asked her what she meant to say (I really didn't know).  She said, "You know, like I saaawl a movie with my mom yesterday."  She really did say it with an L!  And so do many other kids.  

In Spanish, some of my kids say "muncho" instead of "mucho" (many), and so of course the N shows up in their writing.  Some also write "jueron" (pronounced hweyrown), but it should really be "fueron" (fweyrown)... meaning "they went".  When I ask them for clarification, sure enough - they pronounce it just the way they write it!  It happens so often I sometimes forget how funny it can be.  In fact, we as teachers encourage "sound spelling" or "stretching words" to aid emergent writers.  The last thing I want is for kids to get stuck and not write their ideas because they want to spell everything perfectly.   They will naturally acquire spelling as they go, and we don't have time to try to build Rome in a day!

I was totally into the chapter on phonemic awareness.  It really helps me think about the choices I make in the classroom.  I was reminded of how important listening to reading really is.  I need to get more audio books!  (I only have about 14, and my kiddos listen to them over and over again... or just choose to not listen at all.)  It also makes me think I need to read them more poetry.  I don't use decontextualized phonemic awareness activities at all... I never have, actually... but until I read my first Freeman and Freeman book (not this one), I didn't really know why I didn't like them other than that they didn't make much sense to me.  The authors put a name to my teaching philosophy that I wasn't aware of (psychosociolinguistic).

One more dialect story about my husband and the short E sound: he was introduced to a guy named Bin.  He thought, "that's a weird name" but went along with it, and called him Bin just like everyone else.  He was totally embarrassed when he saw the guy's name written down - it was Ben, of course.  I thought it was really funny that he was embarrassed about pronouncing it with a Texan accent... it's not like anybody else thought he was saying it wrong!