Vicarious Thoughts

Learning Aloud
Just as we use our mouths to repeat a phone number over and over to retain it in short term memory, other things can be learned in the same way. One key point here to remember is that the cycle of repetition must be short and quick and no less than three times.

Another point is that if students cannot pronounce a word, there is no way they can remember it. When reviewing flash cards orally, for example, students need to do it quickly, pausing only a second or two for recall.

If it doesn’t come, then they need to look at the answer and repeat it aloud, then go on. If done quickly, by the third or fourth iteration, most students can have 100 percent accuracy. The danger is when a student gets stuck on one card for too long, all of the other information in short term memory is lost, making the study ineffective.

One way to help students learn how to do this is to do the flash cards with them, modeling the speed and what happens if the student can’t remember: let them look at the answer, but making sure that that student gets a chance to respond correctly again. If the students are in a line (or even better, several lines), the first student answers a card, and then goes back to the end of the line while the rest of the students in the line give their responses to the cards one by one.

I’m keen to see how I can adapt this advice into the phonics part of the day, which right at the moment I’m experiencing some reluctance to even try – the alternative I see if all else fails is to back off for the moment, which I’m hesitant to do as I know how absolutely overjoyed she’ll be when she’s at the stage where she can read independently.

I should also mention that the comments on the original blogpost have quite a bit of content in them themselves.