Educators engage in professional learning.
The community of parents and educators at the school I did my 490 practicum at is rich with knowledge, skill, and teaching experience. I am so grateful to be learning from Shawna Audet, a parent and certified teacher who put together a series of weekly literacy workshops about teaching phonemic awareness, called “Road to the Code.”
I appreciate that teaching students how to read is a huge responsibility and as I teacher, I want to ensure I am improving my own understanding and skill set so that I may inspire my future students to be confident readers and writers. I am consistently working to build my tool-kit of research-based strategies for teaching literacy by taking workshops like Shawna’s.
After my first workshop with Shawna, I learned about the research-based order to best introduce phonemes, how to make phonemic awareness more kinaesthetic, how to use puppets for segmentation, substitution, deletion, and detection, how to use coloured tiles to practice phonemic awareness drills, and how to do a quick assessment (core phonics survey) to individualize teaching.
I am excited to continue learning through Shawna’s workshops!
