Teachers adapt literary instruction to meet students needs
FORT BRAGG, CA » On March 14, masks became optional for students and staff throughout Fort Bragg Unified School District. While mask-wearing reduced the transmission of COVID-19, it also got in the way of some aspects of learning. With the new shift in health guidelines, local Kindergarten teachers reflect on how they have met the additional challenges surrounding literacy development for the past two years.
A significant portion of the K-2 curriculum centers on phonemic awareness, and teachers were previously able to model mouth shapes to accompany varying sounds. “Phonemic awareness is an essential first step in learning to read; it teaches the students to hear and manipulate sounds to make words,” Angie Daniels, a Kindergarten teacher at Redwood Elementary, said. Since masks have an obvious hindrance to seeing a person’s face, teachers have had to adapt to keep children on track, such as utilizing online videos on Heggerty, one of the district-wide educational programs. “This is both positive and negative,” Daniels said. “Students can hear the speaker clearly and see her mouth, but a live teacher can adjust pacing moment-to-moment and provide corrective feedback.” Redwood’s Transitional Kindergarten teacher, Maureen Smith, echoed the success of utilizing the Heggerty program and reflected on a few other strategies. “We use a Brio wooden bridge and car to illustrate the beginning, middle, and end sounds of a word. The children respond really well to that visual.”
Current challenges are not limited to academics. Teachers are noticing that more students are struggling socially and emotionally. The district now requires a
is more important than ever to learn how to communicate feelings, a skill already difficult for fiveyear-olds without a mask obscuring facial cues. We now instruct students to focus on eyes and body language to empathize with one another’s feelings.” Ksenia Kruglyanskya, another Kindergarten teacher at Redwood, added that funds had been allocated to help support students academically and emotionally by providing leveled libraries for each classroom. “We (teachers) have also personally invested and fundraised to diversify our libraries,” Kruglyanskya said. “I personally was just granted a donation through Donors
Choose! These combined efforts have really increased student interest.”
According to the Kindergarten team, a silver lining of the pandemic is that it has strengthened everyone’s focus. “We are more aligned as a team than ever, thereby increasing the equity of instruction,” Daniels said. She explained that even more emphasis had been placed on classroom routines to help ground the students and provide them with as much consistency as possible during such an unpredictable time. Despite the adversity teachers are facing, Daniels reiterated the commitment of the kindergarten team as a whole. “Everyone has stepped up during this difficult time,” Daniels said. “These are the hardest years of my career, but my dedication to the students is greater than ever before.”