Successful reading and spelling programmes for learners should be structured, multisensory, cumulative, based on phonics and contain opportunities for overlearning to enable all children (including individuals with difficulties such as dyslexia) to develop automaticity and improve their recall. Grapheme cards are recommended with the letter being taught printed on one side and a picture which contains the letter on the other side to help the child recall the phoneme easier using the multisensory learning.
Many phonics programmes in the UK are based on Letters and Sounds which is separated into 6 phases. A copy of the Letters and Sounds pdf book can be found at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/190599/Letters_and_Sounds_-_DFES-00281-2007.pdf. Letters and Sounds is not a complete programme on its own, but is the base of several programmes that have been validated by the government. It details different strategies for the first stages of reading and spelling and gives ideas for many games to play to practise the new learning. Synthetic, systematic phonics programmes teach the graphemes in a different order, you need to check with your child’s school which programme they are using and the order these graphemes are taught. The goal is the same for all these programmes, which is to help children understand and retain the grapheme/phoneme correspondence and use this information to learn to read and write.
Most synthetic, systematic phonics programmes will have different phases. The phases of some programmes include: Phase 1 where the child starts to develop listening and phonological awareness skills including phonemic awareness. This phase is usually started in nursery/preschool but these skills are continuously practised throughout the phases and built on throughout learning. Phases 2 and 3 will introduce single graphemes, digraphs and some trigraphs. Phase 4 involves consolidation of the learned graphemes/phonemes and learning to read and spell words containing adjacent consonants and polysyllabic words. Phase 5 introduces some alternative graphemes for phonemes already learned and finally Phase 6 teaches some of the rarer grapheme phoneme correspondence and new spelling rules.
It is beneficial if discovery learning is used to teach phonics, as a learner will make more connections and remember the learning if they make discoveries themselves. Therefore for each letter, objects can be shown, which contain the sound being taught, for the child to discover themselves the common sound before being shown the letter that represents the sound.
Grapheme cards should be used to teach the learner and these should have a picture on one side which begins with the target letter. This picture is shown to the learner for them to identify and say the word e.g. for them to say s-s-snake. On the reverse of the card should be just the printed letter for the learner to say the short, pure sound of /s/. Using all the senses in learning will strengthen the neural pathways to the brain, making more connections to aid learning and memory. It is important that the pure sounds are used throughout the teaching of phonics as modelled in the video below: https: //youtu.be/UCI2mu7URBc
BLENDING TO READ WORDS
Blending sounds will probably already have been taught in phase 1 when learners developed their phonological awareness skills. These phonemic awareness skills are a really important part of reading and spelling. Now they need to recognise the graphemes they see, say the corresponding phonemes in the correct order from left to right and blend them together to say the word. This will need a lot of modelling and practise. It is a good idea to start attempting to read CVC words which begin with a long continous sound such as s,f,l,m,n,r or v if a child is having difficulty blending, as these sounds will blend easier into the vowel e.g. try reading sun, run or fun instead of bun as long as the child has already learned these graphemes. If they struggle to read CVC words, start with VC words and progress to the CVC words.
Use sound buttons for each sound for the learner to say the sounds first and then blend the word. A digraph would have one sound button underneath it as it is one sound.
For extra practise throughout the day, graphemes can be written into squares on the playground, so that the learner has to jump across them, saying the phonemes as they jump and then blending them to say the word in a blank square at the end. This game can be extended once the learner can write graphemes by asking the child to write the whole word in the blank square.
Children who are having difficulties blending benefit from other multisensory techniques such as using their arm to blend the phonemes (sounds) once they have identified them, as demonstrated in the following you tube video below:
Using magnetic letters, make a cvc word for the child and read it together with them. Then move the letters, say the word and can they hear the phonemes to rebuild the word themselves and then read it again?
SEGMENTING TO SPELL WORDS
A learner can use their fingers to segment words, using one finger for each phoneme they hear.
As practised in Phase one, by just orally segmenting words into individual phonemes, now learners can try to segment words to spell. Starting by using counters to identify the number of phonemes, the child should be able to progress to substituting the counters to letters to represent the phonemes. This is shown in the video below.
I love to use duplo building blocks for learners to help develop their spelling skills if they are finding spelling difficult. First the learner says the word, segments it and counts the phonemes. They then pick up the large duplo brick of either 2, 3, 4 or 5 studs depending on how many phonemes were in the word. Then using single duplo bricks, they write each grapheme relating to the phoneme they are saying on each single brick, place it on top of the large brick until they have the whole word. Finally, they write the whole word underneath. The children love this multisensory learning and it really helps them to segment the phonemes.
To help build reading and spelling skills and to develop more phonological skills, it is recommended that the child often experiences manipulating letters of a word. For example, ask the child to make the word ‘cat’ with magnetic or wooden letters. Then ask what letter do they need to change to make the word ‘rat’, can they hear that it is the first phoneme they need to change and replace it with the correct letter? Can they change ‘rat’ to ‘rot’, then change ‘rot’ to ‘rob’ etc. This is a game that should be continued as they learn new graphemes, digraphs and longer words. Phonological awareness skills need building on all the time from previous learning. A list of words with one letter changed is available below to assist in lessons.
A child needs to be able to articulate words correctly in order to be able to spell them. Ensure that if a child is making pronunciation or grammar errors, that the word/sentence is repeated back to them, showing that the adult has understood them, but enabling them to hear what it should sound like. A child could use a mirror to see how they are making the sounds and mimic the adult’s facial movements. They could record their speech to check that they are saying it correctly. Recording the child’s voice for them to replay to practise spellings is also a good strategy, as well as practising reading sentences, recording them and then writing the sentence.
See DFE Letters and Sounds book for more ways to introduce and practise the grapheme/phoneme correspondence at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/190599/Letters_and_Sounds_-_DFES-00281-2007.pdf .
Our school is following the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonics scheme, see more details and a parents page on https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/
Help your child learn to read, write and spell 