Phonics

Phonics is the skill that involves seeing a printed word and associating it with a sound. This means understanding the sounds that letters make and the word patterns that make up language and applying them to written words. Phonics can be taught through synthetic phonics or analytical phonics. The most effective strategies involve both methods.

Synthetic Phonics

This approach to teaching phonics involves teaching the connection between sounds and letters. Students blend the letter sounds into words when using this approach.

Analytical Phonics

This approach does not use sounds in isolation and instead looks at the letter sound relationship after memorizing sight words.

7 Syllable Types

Understanding the different types of syllables can help with recognizing word patterns and decoding. Syllables can be broken into 7 types.

Closed Syllable: This is used to describe a short vowel sound that is followed by one or more consonants. When this syllable comes before another syllable there would be a double consonant in the word. Examples: Pup-py or Kit-ten

Vowel-Consonant-e Syllable: This is the syllable that creates the "silent e" sound. The vowel makes a long vowel sound when followed by e. Examples: Rule, Care, Toe

Open Syllable: When a syllable ends with a vowel rather than with a consonant, it becomes an "open syllable" This results in a long vowel sound. Examples: To-tal, Ri-val, Bi-ble

Vowel Team Syllable: This syllable usually is a double vowel but sometimes is made with a consonant. These syllables have 2-4 letters making the vowel sound. Examples: Train-er, Spoil-age

Vowel-r Syllable: This is used to describe syllables in which the letter r comes after the vowel. Examples: Bird, Dirt, Wart

Consonant-le Syllable: When a syllable consists of a consonant followed by le it is at the end of the word. Examples: Bea-gle, Ici-cle

Schwa Syllable: This is used to describe any other syllables that don't follow a rule. These are unaccented. Examples: Dam-age, Na-tion

Onset and Rime

Words can be broken down into onset and rime. Onset is the initial sound and rime is everything that follows. Teaching students how to break words down into these parts can help students learn the patterns and recognize words that are similar. Words with the same rime are often called a word family.

Strategies

When introducing phonics, the instruction should be delivered systematically and explicitly especially for students that have SLD in the areas of reading. This means that direct instruction connecting letters to sounds following a sequence from easy to difficult should be used.

Sound Hunt

This activity uses picture cards. The picture cards are hidden throughout the room and students have to find the picture cards that match the letter. This could also be done with real objects instead of pictures. Each student is given a letter to find the associated object for.

Word Family Flower

Using a common ending, students will place rhyming words as pedals around the center of the flower. This creates a word family flower demonstrating patterns in words and that words that look similar also sound similar.

Onset and Rime Slide

Using the onset and rime slide, students use different onsets with the rime that was introduced during instruction. Students look at the word that was created and determine if it is real or nonsense and put it into the appropriate column.

Jumping Syllables

Students move syllables from words around to make nonsense words. This helps practice syllable manipulation and understanding word patterns and structure.

Building words

Using a word that is already familiar, students write down every word that they can find within that word.

Interventions

Wilson Reading System

Tier 3

Grades: 2-12

Small Group or Individual

This program is designed to be taught in 30-minute sessions twice a week. This is a more intensive program focusing on multisensory literacy. The goal of this program is for students to become fluent in both decoding and encoding skills.

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Project Read

Tiers: 1, 2, and 3

Grades: K-12

Small Groups

An intervention that can be implemented for all tiers, this multisensory program focuses on connecting sounds to letters to sound out words. There are also spelling exercises included. There are 3 levels of the program. There is a kindergarten level, a 1st-3rd grade level, and a 3rd grade - Adult level. A main difference between the 3rd-adult level is the pacing of the program is faster.

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Benchmark Phonics

Tier 3

Grades: K-5

Small Group or Individual

This intensive intervention is meant to be delivered daily for about 20-30 minutes. The structure stays consistent and starts with a review of the previous lesson before introducing new vocabulary and a new decodable text. The student then writes about the text. This ensures both decoding and encoding practice.

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Wonder Works

Tier 2

Grades: K-6

Small Groups or Individual

This intervention involves scaffolded readings and word work. Students learn from explicit instruction but have independent work each session. There are formative assessments built into the lessons making progress monitoring easy. Each lesson has a clearly stated goal for students to look at in order to self assess progress too.

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Saxon Phonics & Spelling

Tiers 1,2,3

Grades: K-2

Small Group or Individual

This intervention can be used for all tiers. This is a multimodal program focusing on high frequency words, phonics, phonemic awareness, and spelling.

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Formal Assessments

Woodcock Reading Mastery Test 3rd Edition

Author: Richard W. Woodcock

Age: 4yrs 6 months- 79 yrs 11 months

Time: 15-45 minutes

Cost: $350

This test is often used in conjunction with the Kaufman Test but can be independent too. This test has 9 subtests but each subtest can be taken independently. Using the readiness cluster of subtests with the basic reading cluster of subtests, this test can measure phonics skills.

Readiness Cluster:

Letter Identification -recognizing printed letters
Phonological Awareness- Awareness of phonemes and syllables
Rapid Automatic Naming- Object/Color naming and letter/number naming

Basic reading Cluster:

Word Identification- Reading words of increasing difficulty
Word Attack- Nonsense words of increasing difficulty

WRMT-3

Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement 3rd Edition

Authors: Alan S. Kaufman, PhD & Nadeen L. Kaufman, PhD

Age: 4yrs 0 months- 25 yrs 11 months

Time: 15-85 minutes

Cost: $500

This test is oftentimes used in conjunction with Woodcock Johnson but the two can be independent of each other too. The test itself is an academic battery test. Using just the Sound-Symbol Composite and the Decoding Composite, might be good measures for phonics. The nonsense word decoding is part of both and would only need to be taken once.

Sound-Symbol Composite:

Phonological Processing
Nonsense Word Decoding

Decoding Composite:

Letter and Word Recognition
Nonsense Word Decoding

The letter naming facility subtest might also be useful.

KTEA-3

Informal Assessments

Letter-Sound match

A teacher will make a letter sound and the student will point to the letter that makes that sound using an alphabet strip.

Onset and Rime Slide

Using the onset and rime slides from class activities in a one on one check in can help teachers better understand a student's progress in blending words. This is a good way to assess since students would already be familiar with the format from the class activity.

Apps

Hairy Phonics

This app is available for purchase through google and apple. This app has games that focus on letter-sound associations and blending to make words.

Read With Phonics

This app involves traveling to other planets to develop phonics skills using synthetic phonics methods. This will teach the sounds of letters and how to sound out words when reading. This app is free with in-app purchases.

Khan Academy Kids

This free app without in app purchases works on all content areas. It does have phonics activities in there as well as the others. There are games and songs woven into the lessons to keep young students engaged.

Homer

This app requires a monthly subscription but incorporates learning skills in multiple areas. For the reading activities, there are engaging activities to learn about letter sound relationships tailored to individual student interests.

Splash Learn

Splash Learn is a website that has a variety of games to teach basic reading skills. This is a free resource to reinforce phonics skills in an engaging way that tracks progress. The app is also available on google and apple in addition to being on the web.

References

Beers, K (2003). When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do: A Guide for Teachers 6-12. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Language Circle Enterprises. (2021, September 29). Project read. Project Read. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://www.projectread.com/

McGraw Hill. (n.d.). Reading intervention program: WonderWorks. McGraw Hill. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://www.mheducation.com/prek-12/program/microsites/MKTSP-BGA10M0/wonderworks.html

Meet the word families. Reading Rockets. (2018, September 7). Retrieved April 23, 2022, from https://www.readingrockets.org/article/meet-word-families

Morgan, M., & Moni, K. B. (2005). Use Phonics Activities to Motivate Learners With Difficulties. Intervention in School & Clinic, 41(1), 42–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/10534512050410011101

Onset/rime games: Classroom strategy. Reading Rockets. (2022, March 2). Retrieved April 23, 2022, from https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/onset_rime

Saxon Phonics & Spelling Program: K-2 reading curriculum: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Saxon Phonics & Spelling Program | K-2 Reading Curriculum | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (n.d.). Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://www.hmhco.com/programs/saxon-phonics-and-spelling#overview

Six syllable types. Reading Rockets. (2020, November 13). Retrieved April 22, 2022, from https://www.readingrockets.org/article/six-syllable-types

Wilson Reading System. Wilson Language Training Wilson Reading System Comments. (n.d.). Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://www.wilsonlanguage.com/programs/wilson-reading-system/

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