My sweet fifteen-year-old student kept looking at me with a patient, wondrous smile.
As usual our tutoring session began with us playing the caterpillar and train phonemic awareness games. We proceeded to her word cards from the Fry List -- the 700 most frequently used words for reading and writing. Then we were ready to begin the Partner Practice page that she was on in Part 4: the suffix -es added to words ending with the consonant digraphs “sh” and “ch”.
When I asked her to take out her worksheet, ‘Carrie’ said, “We didn’t have time to copy the worksheets, so I just put them on my Apple I-Pad.”
“Oh,” I said with a concerned voice. How was she going to mark the digraphs, root words, suffixes and vowels with our colors and our diacritical markings? So, I continued, “Maybe you could write the words on a piece of paper, so you can do all of our colors and markings.”
“I don’t need to do that,” Carrie patiently explained. “I can do all the colors and markings on my I-Pad.”
”How can you do that?” I worriedly questioned.
“I just use my Apple pen,” she replied.
“You mean it will write in colors and make different shapes and lines?”
“Yes.”
Carrie’s eyebrows raised higher and higher with each of my questions. I could see in her eyes and smile that she was delighted at my lack of knowledge of I-Pad’s and Apple pen’s capabilities. She was also proud to be teaching me!
“This is amazing!” I exclaimed. “My other students’ parents would not have to copy the Partner Practice pages if they didn’t want to or if they didn’t have a printer. This is awesome!”
Carrie’s bright, happy smile charmed me! Giggles!
I told her that I would have to share my new knowledge with everyone I knew that was teaching or learning reading, writing and spelling with Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”™.
I can imagine many of you are thinking, “Really, Linda didn’t know the capabilities of an Apple I-Pad or an Apple pen?”
Yes, it’s true – I didn’t know! Giggles!
But now that I know, I wanted to share with you that your child may enjoy doing some or all their Partner Practice pages on an I-Pad.
Now, you may be wondering, “Why doesn’t Linda put all “Silent Elephant “e”™ on a computer program with learning games?”
The answer is simple. For children to truly learn to read, write and spell while retaining and applying what they’ve learned for years to come, they need to be able to interact with the concept, to be engaged with their teacher/parent educator and if possible other children. They need to both mentally and verbally process and share what they’ve learned with someone. They need to hear and respond to questions like these:
Why are you using an orange wiggly line under those two letters?
I know that ‘trip’ can mean going on a vacation. Can you think of another meaning of trip?
How many sounds can you hear in the nonsense word “fash”? Are any of the sounds a blend? A digraph? Why did you think that?
What do you think about when adding a suffix that begins with a vowel to a word ending with Silent Elephant “e”? How is your thinking different when adding a vowel suffix to a CVC word?
Children need to be able to share their learning and listen to a teacher/parent educator and if possible, another child share their thoughts.
Children need to be totally immersed in their learning and engaged with another human being using active listening to totally integrate their new concepts into what they’ve already learned.
They need to be actively involved in their learning.
Carrie easily used her I-Pad and Apple Pen to mark all her words and she easily shared her work with me during our Zoom tutoring session, at the same time, she was reading to me, answering questions, asking questions, explaining why she marked the words as she did, and sharing how she knew what a word meant and much more.
She was using her technology to support her active engagement in her learning process.
I was so excited to learn from Carrie that an Apple I-pad and an Apple pen can be used to engage in active learning with their Partner Practice pages. What fun!
Maybe you would like to have your kiddos try it!
Contact me here :).