Rationale
Demographics
I work as a preschool teacher in a suburban school district. As of October 2020, there were 233 students enrolled in my building. For the 2020-2021 school year, my school added three preschool classrooms, which added three preschool teachers a speech language pathologist and a resource teacher. In the preschool program we offer morning and afternoon classes for students with and without disabilities. In our preschool program, there are currently 75 students. Of those 75 students, there are 42 kids on an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). The rest of the students are either parent pay students, meaning they are typically developing students, or are considered at risk, meaning they may struggle with age-level academic skills and need more direct, individualized instruction. In my morning and afternoon class combined, I have a total of 11 students and 8 students have IEP's. This means the students receive individualized, direct instruction in one or more areas of development: cognitive, social skills, communication, etc. In my study, all four of the students are on IEP's. The students receive services from both a speech language pathologist and resource teacher in order to receive support in their area of need.
Need:
My capstone project was centered around 4 students in my morning preschool class. Both quantitative and qualitative data showed a need for letter naming and letter sounds. Throughout the months of August to January, my paraprofessionals expressed concerns about these students abilities to name letters. The paraprofessionals asked for strategies to help these students learn the letters in their name. Observations during letter work and morning work time showed me that students were not always able to name the letters in there name. They also were not consistent on naming the letter of the week, even after it being taught four times over the course of a week. Based on my students report card data in September, three of the four students knew 0 uppercase letters and 0 letter sounds. One of the students knew 10 uppercase letters. However, this student showed regression from the last year he was in preschool. Based on GOLD data taken in October, three students scored behind their color band meaning they were not where they should have been for kids their age in the areas of letter naming and letter sounds. A district common assessment was given in February for letter names and sounds. Two students in my study showed progress in their ability to name letters, however, they were inconsistent with the letters they knew in August. This showed me the students needed additional instruction to help them retain and gain better understanding of the alphabet. All the data collected indicated that these four students would benefit from more repeated, focused instruction in the areas of letter names and sounds.
Importance:
The information gained from this study is important because it allows me to know how to best teach letter names, sounds and written forms to help elicit memorization. This information will teach me effective ways to use multi-sensory teaching methods which will help me meet my students' diverse learning needs. Students need to have strong phonemic awareness at a young age so that they are able to recognize letters, especially those in their name. These phonemic awareness skills will also set them up for success in their later years as they head off to Kindergarten and begin to learn how to read and write. All individuals need phonemic awareness in order to be successful in life and starting the awareness at a young age will help make sure that they have a strong foundation so they are able to thrive and succeed in the rest of their schooling lives.
Literature Review
The years from birth to five are the single most important years for children's literacy development to emerge (Elliott & Olliff, 2008). Alphabetic knowledge is especially important to learn because it is seen as a strong predictor of later literacy achievement on reading and spelling (Jones et al., 2012). In order to help create strong literacy skills in students, teachers need to know how to teach the alphabet in a way for students to remember. “Multisensory instruction represents one approach used by teachers to target foundational literacy skills for young children with and without disabilities” (Lozy et al., 2020, p. 1337). This literature review will discuss what alphabet knowledge and multisensory learning is, the effectiveness and limitations of multisensory learning, how alphabet knowledge correlates with later academic achievement as well as how to utilize multisensory teaching in the classroom.