Stage 4: Students develop sound-letter strategies.Understanding the sound-letter relationships helps students analyze/decode words and spell. Sometimes sound-letter relationships need to be explicitly taught; sometimes they are learned without instruction. Practice in graphophonic analysis should be combined with context analysis more often than it is conducted in isolation.Whether a graphophonic pattern is introduced or discussed in a writing experience, a reading experience, a direct lesson, or a phonogram chart, students need to apply immediately what they are learning as they read. Good readers use combined knowledge of pragmatic, textual, syntactic, semantic, and graphophonic cues to draw meaning from print. See pages 254-255 for problem-solving strategies using all of the cueing systems. Phonics Instruction Effective phonics instruction focuses students' attention on noticing the letter-sound patterns in initial consonants and consonant clusters, and in rimes. Some useful strategies include: Whole, to Part, to Whole: Whenever possible, teach phonics within the context of a story using a whole, to part, to whole approach. For example:
Analytic (Specific Sound) Mini-lesson: Provide students with strategies for decoding unknown words based on their knowledge of phonic elements in familiar words. The teacher selects the targeted sound(s) and develops a list of easy words that contain the target sound(s) (May, 1994). The teacher writes a sentence for each word and weaves the sentences together to make a short story, and then reads the sentences aloud to the students. The students echo-read each sentence. The teacher says each underlined target word and has the students repeat each word. The teacher says all the target words again and has the students look to see what letter or letters are the same in each word. The teacher says the words again and has the students listen to determine what sound, or sounds, are the same in each word. The students share other words that have the same sound(s). Synthetic (Sound Blends) Mini-lesson: Teach decoding skills by providing instruction in specific letter sounds and how to blend them together to decode unknown words. The teacher writes the target sounds/symbols on the board and tells the students what sounds they make. As the teacher points to the letters, the students make the sounds. The teacher models and reminds students how to blend sounds. The students blend the phonemes into a word. The teacher writes the word produced and has the students say it slowly and then quickly. The procedure is repeated for other words and then the words are written into meaningful sentences (May, 1994). Analogic (Word Family) Mini-lesson: Teach students to notice patterns in words and to use the words they know to figure out other words (Cunningham in Gambrell, Morrow, Neuman, & Pressley, 1999). Rather than teaching students phonics rules or expecting students to verbalize them, students learn to decode and spell based on analogy (Moustafa, 1997). "For short words, the patterns are beginning letters - all the letters up to the vowel (sometimes called onsets and spelling patterns) and then the vowel and what follows (sometimes called rimes, phonograms, or word families)" (Cunningham, 1999, p. 86). The study of high-frequency rimes generates many words and gives students an opportunity to develop an understanding of letter-sound relationships and English spelling. May (1994, p. 195), for example, urges teachers to focus on rimes rather than on vowels to help students see the vowel letter in a pattern along with the particular letters that follow and control its sound. The teacher presents two words with the same rime (a vowel and any consonants that follow it in a syllable - e.g., bash and cash) and asks the students for more words that end with the same three letters. To make the experience more visual, the teacher writes the words with a vertical line separating the rime from the other letters, or underlines it with different-coloured chalk (e.g., dash, trash, slash, thrash). Syllabication: Coincide or follow instruction on word families (grades 1, 2, and 3), vowel patterns, and suffixes with syllabication instruction (usually grade 3) - decoding words by chunking larger words into smaller bits so they are easier to decode (May, 1994, p. 210). The number of vowel sounds heard indicates the number of syllables in a word. The purpose of teaching syllabication strategies is to help students apply graphophonic analysis to syllable units in long words. Syllabication lessons should grow out of words found in stories and be applied back to those stories. Temporary Spelling: Encourage students to apply what they know about phonics through temporary spelling. Phonics knowledge is developed by encouraging and helping emergent writers to spell by writing appropriate letters for the sounds they hear in words. High-utility Generalizations: Be sure students can actually use a phonics generalization. Do not assume because they can verbalize it that they can use it. In addition, be cautious of confusing students with generalizations that are frequently broken (e.g., "the 'e' at the end of a word makes the vowel long" rule is broken by words most frequently seen by beginning readers including come, done, some). Word recognition must become something students can do on their own as they read because they will be expected to read words they have never seen before in print. There are many word identification and word analysis strategies that students can use when they encounter new or difficult words. These decoding strategies require explicit teaching in meaningful contexts, as well as many opportunities for students to read and reread words in other contexts.
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Aural/Oral Discrimination
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Visual Discrimination | |||||||
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K
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Pre-K
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Focus on Environmental Sounds Example: Sound Walks Sound/Listening Games for Enjoyment and Exploration Example: What's My Pattern? |
Focus on Shapes and Patterns in Environment Visual Discrimination Activities Examples: Name recognition activities, concept of letter/word activities Games Examples: Memory, Lotto (versions for young students) |
1
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Phonemic Awareness Language Play Activities Rhyming Alliteration Songs, chants, etc. Segmenting and Blending Activities Count the words Clap the syllables Blend and segment compound words Blend and segment syllables Blend and segment phonemes |
Letter Recognition Letter Discrimination/Forming Activities Examples: Guess my Letter ABC Centre Alphabet (letter names and order) |
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2 |
Initial and Final Consonant Deletion Examples: Say jeep. Say it again without the j. Say jeep. Say it again without the p. Graphophonic Analysis 1. Initial consonants related to one sound (b, f, h, j, k, d, l, m, p, r, t, n, v, w, y, z)* 2. Initial Consonants related to multiple sounds (s, c, g, q, x) 3. Y as a vowel 4. Final consonants 5. Word families (onsets and rimes)
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Structural Analysis -s ending -es, -ing, -er, -ed, -est endings Compound words Possessives ('s) Contractions Short-vowel families (phonograms): a = at, an, ap, and, ack, ash e = et, est, ell i = it, in, ip, ick, ing, ink, ill o = ot, op, ock u = ug, uck, ump, unk Long-vowel families (phonograms): a = ate, ake, ame, ale, ay, ain, ail e = eat i = ide, ice, ine, ight o = oke, ore Alternate-vowel sounds: all, aw, ir, or |
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5
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4
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3
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6. Additional Word Families Short-vowel families (phonograms): a = ad, am e = ed, en i = id o = ob u = ut, unch Long-vowel families (phonograms): a = ane, aid, ade, ait e = eet, eal, eel, ead, eed i = ite o = ote, oan, one u = ute, oot Consonant blends with s, r, I Consonant digraphs (sh, th, ch, wh) Medial consonants (the t sound in kitten) r-controlled vowels (ar, er, or, ur) (r and w-controlled) Vowel digraphs (oo, ew, au, oi, oy, ou, ow) Other vowel patterns (ough, augh) Review any of the above for students who need it. |
Inflected Forms: -s, -es, -ed, -ing, and -er, -est Possessives Compounds Contractions Derived forms: -y, -ly, -er with known roots (e.g., rainy, softly, former). Derived forms of more complexity. Prefixes and suffixes combined with known root words (e.g., subdivide, pre-arrange, laughable, guidance). Prefixes and suffixes combined with Latin and Greek roots (e.g., subterranean, prefer, predict, portable). |
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