"Train in the Rain"
Outside in the cold, cold rain,
I sit here waiting for the train.
I'm mad about this long, wet wait.
The train is fifteen minutes late!
Near the depot, the crowd huddles,
while one boy runs and jumps in puddles.
As the group begins to whine,
we see a headlight's bright white shine.
At the station, the train pulls in -
the conductor with a mile wide grin.
We say, "We waited as it rained and poured!"
He shrugs and says, "All Aboard!"
As we construct our training manual, we're more concerned with the richness of the content than the quality of the poetry, so please don't insult my literary skills. As I've mentioned previously, there are five key components of literacy development: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. This short poem provides at least one entry point for each of the key components.
Phonemic Awareness: Simply put, this is the understanding that words are made up of sounds. The rhyming pattern above makes it easy for kids to identify repeating phonemes (sounds). Additionally, we can use rhyming words to do some phonemic awareness exercises. What's the first sound you hear in train? It's the /t/ sound (That's phoneme isolation). What if you took that away? You get rain (That's phoneme deletion). The awareness created by exercises in phonemic isolation and deletion is an first step in strong literacy development.
Phonics: In phonics, we draw connections between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters). While phonemic awareness allows us to develop word families (words that share a characteristic - for example, the /ain/ sound), phonics allows students to learn that this sound can be shown in multiple ways (train, reign, sane, vein). In phonics, it's important to show that different letter combinations can produce the same sound. Rhyming poems provide a great opportunity for this to be demonstrated (In this poem, you see both wait/late and bright/white, while you also see rhyming words shown by the same letter combinations, like train/rain and whine/shine).
Fluency: Research shows us that fluency improves most significantly through partnered reading aloud. Students should hear something read aloud, then have the opportunity to read aloud themselves. Poetry is a natural literary realm for this practice. Additionally, rhyming provides an additional cue for getting the word right, as students can expect rhyming sounds.
Vocabulary: Often, it is best to teach necessary vocabulary before a student reads a passage. There are multiple opportunities for vocabulary instruction (for a 3rd grade student) in this poem: depot, huddles, and conductor, for example. Additionally, the poem provides contextual clues so the reader may be able to derive meaning.
Text Comprehension: When focusing on comprehension, we often focus on three strategies: summarizing, clarifying, and predicting. The above poem provides plenty of chances for a tutor to check comprehension using these strategies. For example, "Why is the writer mad?"
This (at least in our first draft) will be the first piece of content our tutors encounter. In just twelve lines, we provide all the content necessary for instruction in all five keys areas. This brevity is important as long texts are often intimidating for struggling readers. Through this first poem, we will be able to show how effectively they can provide literacy instruction in all the necessary areas.
I welcome your thoughts. What do you think of the content for Lesson #1?
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Mark
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