Phonics is a method of teaching how spoken words are composed of sounds called phonemes, and how the letters of words correspond to those phonemes. The process of reading involves 'decoding' words into their phonemes, so that meaning can be extracted from the speech made up of these phonemes. The process of spelling requires the writer to identify all the phonemes in a word and then use their knowledge of the phonemic code to scribe the word.
What is meant by the term 'synthetic' in 'synthetic phonics'?
This has nothing to do with being artificial, or being made of plastic! It is to do with putting things together. You synthesise when you blend together the component phonemes of a word to produce the sound of the word as a whole. Thus putting the sounds /d/, /o/ and /g/ together produces the sound of the word 'dog'. It is a ‘WOW’ experience for children, when they find they can do this by themselves for a new word - to find out what it means by how it sounds. It opens the whole world of books to them.
[ 本帖最后由 readingtree 于 2011-9-25 17:17 编辑 ]. 作者: readingtree 时间: 2011-11-20 12:50 标题: 9岁孩子的生活感悟——Never Give Up
Never Give Up
By Andrew Chang
One evening I was walking in our big, colorful garden. I looked up at our only fruit tree and wondered how to get the fruit from the tree. The fruit was an orange-yellow color, packed like cherries. But the fruit was on the top of the tree, and the tree was about 4 to 8 meters tall.
I mumbled,“I wish I can reach it. ”
Then, the bamboo grove at a corner of the garden caught my sight. I started walking toward the grove. I targeted a large, tall , and thick bamboo stalk at the front. I had used a shovel to cut marks in it years ago. I thought to myself: what if I could chop down the bamboo stalk and use it to poke the fruit from the tree in my yard?
I ran to our garage and got the shovel I had used to cut the marks.
Then, I ran back to the garden with the shovel.
I started hacking at the part with the marks, and every five minutes I would stop and rest, and continue.
After my third rest, my ayi came and asked what I was doing.
I said,“I’m chopping down the bamboo.”
She said,“Stop it , you won’t finish it , you’ll just make it worse.”
But I kept on hacking. My ayi wanted me to stop, but I ignored her.
After five minutes I realized I had cut through. The outer green skin had peeled off and the white-yellow inner skin now showed. I stopped immediatedly. The bamboo creaked. The stem cracked. The bamboo leaned forward and crashed to the ground. My ayi screamed and ran to the corner of the garden. Afterwards she recovered and helped me to break the stem and the branches off. I ran towards the fruit tree, holding the bamboo like a gigantic lance.
I used the bamboo stalk to poke the fruit off the tree, and soon tons of fruit rained on us, bouncing off my head. BONK!BINK! my ayi ran and got a bucket, and soon we had filled on fourth of the bucket with fruit. I hid the bamboo in a corner of the house to prevent one of the compound gardeners from taking it , because they might think it is trash. After that we put the bucket in the garage, and we were just about to go back inside when Kevin, my little brother came rushing out of the house.
The moment he found out I was picking fruit, he ran into the garden at “light’s speed” and grabbed the bamboo, and I decided two things: First, Never tell your little brother what you’ve been doing. Second, Always bring an umbrella when you hit fruit down from a tree.
After my ayi shooed him away, we started picking up the fruit again. Soon we had filled in half of the bucket with fruit and there were still more. My ayi had to go check on her food. I was starting to wonder if cutting down the bamboo was a good choice. Finally I finished picking up the fruit, which now stood five out of eight percent of the bucket. I carried the 50KG bucket first to the garage, and then decided to take it to the kitchen for roasting.
This narrative taught me the lesson to never give up, or you can never get what you need or want..
