Phonological Awareness!

It has been proven that reading requires phonological and phonemic awareness. This is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in a language. Some students do this naturally, a lot of them need direct instruction and practice. You can learn more about phonological and phonemic awareness here:

Phonics

There is also no doubt that explicit instruction in phonics (representing sounds with letters) is needed. There was a movement to move away from phonics instruction, but it is back!

Many students will not be able to decode or spell unknown words without explicit instruction in phonics. You can find out more here:

We do not want to teach kids any strategy that takes their attention away from the letters and sounds when learning to read and spell. We do not want them guessing based on the first letter or looking at the picture for clues. That’s not real reading! 

Real reading is looking at the syllables and sounding out the letters or phonemes and blending those sounds to read words.

When we teach students a new phonics pattern, we want them to have lots of practice reading and spelling that pattern. We use skill-based or decodable texts. These texts will only have the patterns that the students have learned. We no longer want predictable readers or texts where kids have to guess complicated words that they haven’t learned.  We are controlling what they are reading so they are practicing real reading.

High-frequency words should not be taught through memorization. These words can be learned using sound–symbol relationships. High-frequency words may have irregular or temporarily irregular parts.

Integrating high-frequency words into phonics lessons allows students to make sense of spelling patterns for these words. Restructuring the way high-frequency words are taught makes reading and spelling the words more accessible to all students. 

Based on current research and the science of reading, we are changing how spelling will be taught. Random words assigned on a list Monday and tested on Friday are a thing of the past! 

Asking students to memorize individual words each week is not effective. 

Instead, we want them to learn a pattern that can be generalized and used to spell lots of words.   

The spelling of English words is more regular and patterned-based than people think. English is not that crazy! We just need to teach it in a systematic, direct way.