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3 Reasons why there’s so much disagreement around the science of reading

TRT Podcast#45: SOR Bootcamp #1 – 3 Reasons why there’s so much disagreement around the science of reading

We’re starting a science of reading bootcamp! Share this 6-week podcast series with friends who want to learn more. In today’s episode we define “science of reading” and explore why there’s so much disagreement around this topic. Also check out our online course, Teaching Every Reader! It opens for enrollment on October 4, 2021. Get the details here.

 

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Hello and welcome to Triple R Teaching, Episode 45. I am so glad to be back! I started this podcast back in the spring of 2020, and both summers I was sure I would keep it going all summer long, but real life hits me every time. Having all six kids home, they're ages five to fourteen, gets a little crazy. Especially with four of them being rather loud boys, and it's really hard for me to get quiet thinking and recording time. But I'm back and I'm excited! They're all back at school now, even my baby who just started half-day kindergarten. I'm thrilled to connect with you again here in Triple R Teaching!

Today is going to start a six week series, "The Science of Reading Bootcamp". This series is for you to share with your colleagues who are interested in the science of reading. If they want to know what it's all about, what the key points are, and perhaps most importantly, how implementing the science of reading is going to look in their classrooms.

So, today, in episode one of this series, we're going to define the science of reading and answer the question, why is there so much disagreement around the science of reading?

Let's start with the definition. This is from whatisthescienceofreading.org. "The science of reading is a vast interdisciplinary body of scientifically based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing." I also like a very simple definition: the science of reading is the body of research that explains how we learn to read.

So, as I've stated before, the science of reading is not a curriculum. It's not a fad, the research has been around at least 40 years. It's not a pendulum swing. It's not phonics first and only. It's a body of research. Once you pin that down, it doesn't feel like the science of reading should be so divisive. But if you start a conversation with someone about the science of reading in a Facebook community, maybe even the teacher's lounge, you'll quickly find it deteriorate as people on both sides get rather heated.

Why is that? Today, we're going to give three reasons why there's so much disagreement around the science of reading.

Number one, the cultures of science and education are very different. I told you before that I was a balanced literacy advocate for 20 years, and I have to say that I was very leery of science when it came to what I should be doing day to day in my classroom. I was told over and over in the professional reading that I did and at the conferences I attended that I knew my students best. I didn't need a scientist who'd never met my students and perhaps, never spent a day in a classroom to tell me how to teach my students to read! I had my own experience and intuition on my side.

I felt that a scientific approach would kill the love of reading and make reading a joyless experience. In his book, "Language at the Speed of Sight", Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, addresses this very thing. This is what he writes. "The scientific perspective is seen as sterile and reductive, incapable of capturing the inevitable character of the learning moment or the chemistry of a successful classroom." He hit the nail on the head with that! This was it exactly. The science didn't talk at all about the joy of learning to read, the excitement of sharing a new book with my students. I was sure that the science of reading was all about rules and scripted lessons and I wanted none of it!

I felt that my experience and observation carried much more weight than something a scientist had to say. Indeed, many teachers feel like this. In Seidenberg's book, he writes, "Education as a discipline has placed much higher value on observation and hands-on experience."

I wish, as a teacher, that I'd understood that the process of learning to read is far more complex than it appears on its surface. I'd been a good reader for as long as I could remember, and I, honestly, didn't really know much about how I did it because most of what goes on into reading is subconscious. To me, learning to read felt natural. That's what it seemed like for me, and that's certainly what my professional books were telling me.

I embraced the balanced literacy approach because I felt that my approach with as-needed phonics instruction, leveled books with predictable texts, and three-cueing to support my students as they read was the way to go. I was passionate about teaching my students to learn to read and love it. I read a lot! I went to a lot of conferences.

What I didn't understand was that my approach would not work for every student, and that I couldn't understand reading by reading. In his book, Seidenberg says, "That's why there is a science of reading, to understand this complex skill at levels that intuition can not easily penetrate."

I'm going to conclude this point with one more quote from Mark Seidenberg. "The methods commonly used to teach children are inconsistent with basic facts about human cognition and development, and so, make learning to read more difficult than it should be."

So, to wrap up this point, science and education are different cultures. In education, many of us feel that our observation and intuition and experience carries more weight than what we're learning from scientific studies. What we don't often realize is that some of the methods we're using are inconsistent with basic facts from research that have been known for a long time. And if we address those, we'll make learning to read actually easier and we'll meet more of our students' needs.

Let's move on to number two, the second reason why there's so much disagreement around the science of reading. Phonics, which is at the core of structured literacy, is a divisive topic! Now phonics is simply connecting sounds to letters and spellings, so you would wonder why that would be controversial. There's a lot of reasons.

Number one is that many people think that phonics is inherently boring. And I think that's fair that some people think that because in some classrooms and some programs, phonics has been, or is being taught in a boring way. Perhaps these teachers were taught phonics in a boring way. Perhaps they were good readers as children, but they hated reading class because of all the worksheets and the workbooks and the things they already knew. Perhaps as teachers, they had to use a phonics program that bored them to tears all over again. You may not agree that phonics is inherently boring. I no longer agree with that, but I think we can understand why some people may feel like it is.

Another reason phonics is controversial is that some people believe English is too crazy of a language and too inconsistent to bother spending time with phonics and phonics rules because they just aren't consistent. I think the answer to this is more education. I used to feel like this as well, but even just a few spelling rules from Denise Eide's book, "Uncovering the Logic of English", helped clear some things up for me. As an aside, I think we need to be careful about overdoing the phonics rules, there's something to be said for too much. But I think everyone should read "Uncovering the Logic of English" by Denise Eide, to learn how consistent English actually is.

Another reason that phonics is a controversial topic is that some people think they learned to read without phonics. But I think what they really mean is that they learned to read without explicit systematic phonics instruction. We actually know that can be true of some kids. If you've never seen Nancy Young's Ladder of Reading, you should check that out. I will link to it in the show notes. You'll see that she breaks down the percentages of children who learn to read through different approaches. In her ladder, she explains that all students benefit from a structured literacy approach. However, for about 5% of kids, learning to read seems effortless, and another 35% will learn to read no matter what approach we use.

So to these students, it may feel like they learn to read without phonics, but if you are a good reader, you can read unfamiliar words in isolation, like maybe a phonetic scientific word that you've never seen before. If you can do that, you're not using context and you're not relying on memorization because you've never seen the word before, you're using phonics! So somehow you learned it! We all DO use phonics.

Another reason, and I think this is a big one, why the idea of phonics instruction is divisive is because children learning to read using phonics, and not three-cueing (as in using context and meaning and everything else to figure out words), sound like they're making slower progress. I've told you before that I taught my oldest five kids to read using phonics and a balanced literacy approach. I used leveled books and predictable text.

As I studied the science of reading, I made a switch for my youngest and taught him only with a structured approach using decodable books. When I first started teaching him to read and listening to him read those decodable books, I'm not going to lie, it was painful! My husband who has seen me teach all the other kids to read said something to me. He said, "It makes me feel kind of sad to hear him reading like that" because it was just sooooo slow. "S-A-D, sad" - that's what it sounded like! And this was not what I was used to with my older kids. When they were reading their leveled predictable books, it felt like they were reading smoothly and cleanly and they weren't suffering through all of these words.

This is a common concern. When I read in the science of reading Facebook groups that I'm in, I hear people ask this question. They say, "I'm concerned because when I used balanced literacy, my students seemed to be making faster progress. Now I'm using decodable books and they're reading so slowly."

Many people will chime in and say, "This is normal, don't worry, they'll get there."

This was a concern for Margaret Goldberg. I've mentioned her before. She was a former balanced literacy teacher and now she writes at the Right to Read Project. She had the same concern when she had switched to more of a structured approach. A friend of hers, Dr. John Shelfbine told her this, "The kindest thing you can do for beginning and struggling readers is to give them the time and encouragement they need to grunt and groan their way through sounding out words. You're rewiring their brains and it's hard work."

Sure enough, my son got past it too, and I promise you, it did nothing to kill his love for reading. He just started kindergarten. He's reading very well already, and he loves books. But I'll admit, it was scary for me at first.

Next, teaching phonics systematically and sequentially takes a lot of time. If teachers aren't sold on systematic sequential phonics instruction for early readers, these phonics lessons they have to teach may feel like wasted time. They may start to resent them because it crowds out time that they want to spend reading aloud to their students, letting students explore books on their own, meeting with students in small groups, and so on.

If this is a concern you have, don't worry. There are definite compromises we can make, and we can still include all these things in our reading block. We'll address this later in the series.

Finally, as to why phonics is such a controversial issue, there is misunderstanding on both sides. I've seen all the charts comparing balanced and structured literacy. I have a chart on my website, I'll link to it in the show notes so you can see that. In mine I tried to be a little more fair than I've seen in some of the charts. Some of the charts seem to claim that in a balanced literacy classroom, there is no phonics instruction, and frankly, that's just not true for most balanced literacy classrooms. The problem comes with it being systematic and sequential, but to claim that a balanced literacy teacher doesn't teach phonics is not true and not fair and it leads to feelings of defensiveness!

On the other hand, many balanced literacy teachers may think that phonics proponents don't teach fluency, comprehension, or vocabulary because they have this long involved phonics lesson and there's no time for anything else. That's really not fair either, because certainly people who understand the science of reading know that it's more than phonics, it's also about comprehension and they make room for both in their reading instruction.

Let's move on to our final reason why there's so much disagreement around the science of reading. It's that discussions about the science of reading lead to feelings of defensiveness, anger, and fear. When you've got all those emotions coming together, there's going to be disagreements.

I've got to say that as a balanced literacy teacher learning about the science of reading, I felt attacked! I'm sorry to say that instead of leading me to be introspective, it made me feel defensive. The articles said I wasn't teaching phonics. I was! The articles said I was teaching guessing by using three-cueing, but I felt that I was teaching my students to be strategic! The articles said I should be doing more explicit instruction. Well I felt that my mini lessons served that purpose just as well as a thirty-minute whole class phonics lesson that wouldn't meet the needs of all my kids. The articles criticized my lack of a structured curriculum, but I felt that I knew my students and what they needed way better than a scripted curriculum! The articles said balanced literacy didn't work, but I had plenty of anecdotal evidence that it did!

When one person is feeling defensive, that's not a great starting point for a conversation. It's also true that I had a LOT of fear. What if they were right? What if three-cueing wasn't good for kids? What if it actually taught them bad habits? What if I wasn't reaching the needs of all my students? What if my whole philosophy about teaching reading was flawed? What would I have to admit about the way I taught in the past?

I was afraid of confronting the mistakes I made. I was afraid of thinking back to those students who struggled, knowing I could have done something different to help them. I was also afraid that this structured approach would take the joy out of teaching and learning.

On the other side, there's a lot of anger. There's anger by science of reading advocates who have known the research a lot longer than people who are just discovering it. They're angry because they've seen many children fail to learn to read since they did not receive structured explicit instruction. They shout in Facebook groups in all caps. Instead of rejoicing that someone new is here to learn, they shame people who are new to the game, to people who arrived there later than they did.

The best we can do is gently and kindly share resources with fellow educators. My commitment to you in this science of reading bootcamp is to be clear, concise, and judgment-free.

Today, I gave you three reasons why I believe there's so much disagreement around the science of reading. Number one, the cultures of science and education are very different. Number two, phonics is a very divisive topic. And number three, discussions about the science of reading often lead to feelings of defensiveness, anger, and fear.

Not to worry though, in this series, I don't want you to feel defensive or angry or afraid. I want to encourage you and help you see all the joy and excitement there is in teaching reading using a structured approach. So come back next week, we'll see you for our second episode in the science of reading bootcamp.

You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/45. If you're listening to this in real time, August of 2021, mark your calendars because on October 4th, we are opening the doors to our online course, "Teaching Every Reader".

Several hundred teachers joined us this past spring when we reopened the course and one of our students, her name is Alyssa, had this to say,

"Although I've been teaching vulnerable learners for many years, I found the course to be very informative, as it provided current research and teaching reading effectively. It was more rigorous and comprehensive than I anticipated, but was presented in a really organized and systematic manner. I especially appreciated the guided notes that outlined the videos and made it very easy to follow along and take notes. This will be really useful for revisiting some of the content in the future. Thank you so much for the opportunity for professional development and best practices in reading instruction!"

Go ahead and head to teachingeveryreader.com and get on the waitlist so you're sure to be notified when we open the doors again. See you next week!

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References What is the Science of Reading? website Uncovering the Logic of English , by Denise Eide Language at the Speed of Sight , by Mark SeidenbergNancy Young’s Ladder of Reading The Drudgery (and Beauty) of Decodable Texts on The Right to Read Project What’s the difference between balanced and structured literacy? blog post

 

 

The post 3 Reasons why there’s so much disagreement around the science of reading appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Do’s and don’ts for teaching vocabulary

Vocabulary is the knowledge of words and their meanings.

For many decades, researchers have noted that there is a strong correlation between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension.

And yet …

Researchers tell us that, traditionally, vocabulary instruction has not been strong … in far too many classrooms.

Believe me, I get it.

As I planned my daily classroom schedule each school year, I thought about everything I had to fit into my day. As I thought about phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary instruction … vocabulary felt the least important.

I’m not saying that I neglected vocabulary instruction entirely.

I taught a few new words when reading a new selection or when teaching a social studies or science unit … but I often neglected to teach these words in depth.

With my days so full already, I hoped this incidental vocabulary learning would be enough.

As tempting as it may be to leave vocabulary instruction in the background, it’s important to remember that it has a huge impact on students’ comprehension … which is the goal of reading, after all.

According to Beck, McKeown, and Kucan, in their book, Creating Robust Vocabulary:

In 1999 and 2002, researchers discovered that kindergarten vocabulary knowledge could predict reading comprehension of students two years later in second grade.
A 1997 study showed that vocabulary knowledge in first grade predicted students’ reading comprehension in their junior year of high school!

Vocabulary building is just too important to leave to chance.

It would be so nice to have a list of the exact vocabulary words that children need to learn by grade.

What a handy reference that would be!

But no such list exists.

Instead, I recommend following Isabel Beck and Margaret McKeown’s system for selecting the words in a text best suited for direct vocabulary instruction.

In their system, each word is classfiied according to its level of utility.

It’s called the Three-Tier System

Earlier in this series we talked about the power of interactive read-alouds. These are an ideal time of day to teach new vocabulary.

While reading aloud, you’ll have both unplanned and intentional moments for teaching vocabulary.

Examples of unplanned vocabulary teaching through read alouds

By unplanned, I mean that you teach the meaning of a word because it’s clear that your learners need it defined – and not because you planned the instruction ahead of time. When you’re reading and it’s clear your students need a word defined, you can do one of the following:

STRATEGY 1: Provide a quick, kid-friendly definition and keep reading.

Example:

“One night, in a phosphorescent sea, he marveled at the sight of some whales spouting luminous water.” (Amos & Boris, by William Steig)

“Phosphorescent”  and  “luminous”  both have to do with light. When Amos looked at the night ocean, it looked like it was glowing. Even though the ocean doesn’t make its own light, the light from the moon and stars made the ocean glow.

STRATEGY 2: Give a quick synonym for the word.

For example:

“… Gazing at the immense, starry sky ….” (Amos & Boris, by William Steig)

“Immense”  means really big.

STRATEGY 3: Point to the picture to help your learners understand what the word means.

For example:

“Boris the whale was flung ashore by a tidal wave and stranded on the very shore where Amos happened to make his home.” (Amos & Boris, by William Steig)

Let’s take a look at this picture. Do you see how the whale is on the beach and can’t get off? He is  stranded . To be stranded means that you are stuck somewhere and you can’t leave. Boris is stranded on the beach.

STRATEGY 4: Act out or demonstrate the meaning of the word.

For example:

“He stood with his mouth agape.”

“Agape” means to have your mouth wide open like this (demonstrate). Can you show me what it looks like to have your mouth agape?

Those are all quick examples. We provide the definition, and we move on. We don’t want the reading interrupted for a long period of them.

Even when we do intentional vocabulary teaching through read alouds, our goal is to get in and out quickly. That is, we don’t want our vocabulary teaching to interfere with our learners’ enjoyment of the story.

How to do planned vocabulary teaching through read aloudsBefore reading, choose 4-5 tier 2 words to focus on. Decide how you’re going to teach the words. Will you provide a definition, give a synonym, use the picture, or act them out?Have a kid-friendly definition ready. I like to use  Miriam Webster’s online dictionary for kids  as a reference.Mark the pages with a small  sticky note flag  so you don’t forget to call attention to the featured words.

As you can see, it doesn’t have to be difficult or complicated to teach vocabulary in the context of read-alouds. Many times, it makes sense to give a quick definition and move on.

And yet …

It’s also helpful to go deep with our vocabulary instruction. To help our learners really make new words their own, we’ll need to do more than share a definition during read-alouds. 

We’ve talked about how to choose the Tier 2 words you’re going to teach your students. We’ve talked about how to briefly introduce them before reading, or perhaps during reading.

Now it’s time to talk about how to tackle these words after reading. How do we teach these words in depth?

The authors of Bringing Words to Life recommend the following.

First, review the story context for the word by rereading the sentence in which the word appears.Explain the meaning in a child-friendly way.Have your students repeat the word back to you.Use the word in other context, different from the one used in the story.Ask your students to provide their own examples of ways to use the word.Have them repeat the word once more.

Anita Archer is the go-to expert for explicit instruction. Check out this quick video to see how she expertly introduces new vocabulary words to a group of second graders.

Teaching words in detail like before or after hearing them in a read aloud is an important beginning. but for the words to really stick and become part of our students’ vocabulary, we must revisit these words throughout the week.

The following infographic provides a few ways to do that.

Let’s sum up!DON’T leave vocabulary building to chance. In order for reading comprehension to take place, students need strong vocabulary knowledge.DON’T look for the perfect list of vocabulary words for the grade you teach. Instead, learn to choose Tier Two words for instruction.DO teach new vocabulary words within read alouds.DO teach new words in depth.

Thank you so much for joining us for this in-depth series about the Big Five!

CLICK HERE FOR A PRINTABLE VERSION OF THIS BLOG POST

If you’re ready to learn more, you’re invited to check out our online course, Teaching Every Reader.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR ONLINE COURSE

The doors will open for one week on October 4, 2021. Please feel free to send your questions to hello(at)themeasuredmom(dot)com.

Check out the rest of this series!

The post Do’s and don’ts for teaching vocabulary appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Do’s and don’ts for teaching comprehension

It’s week four of our deep dive into “The Big Five!” So far we’ve explored phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. Today we’ll take a look at do’s and don’ts for teaching comprehension.

Have you ever heard people say that in the primary grades, children “learn to read” and in the later stages they “read to learn”? There’s some truth to that. At the very early stages, students cannot comprehend what they’re reading because they’re not reading fast enough.

They have to develop some automaticity with word recognition and fluency of rhythm to be able to free up more of their brains for comprehension.

However, the act of teaching comprehension isn’t something we should push off to a later date.

In their recent article in The Reading Teacher, The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction, Duke, Ward & Pearson have this to say:

Given the absolute necessity of foundational word-reading skills, it is tempting to think that instruction should begin with a focus on developing those and later turning to comprehension.

However, research has supported a simultaneous, rather than sequential model of reading instruction.

Along with development of phonological awareness, print concepts, and alphabet knowledge, young learners in preschool and early elementary school benefit from efforts to develop oral language comprehension …

As young learners being to read texts themselves, comprehension instruction, alongside phonics and other foundational skills instruction, has an important place.

Nell K, Duke, Alessandra E. Ward & P. David Pearson

We might ask … how do we teach comprehension when students aren’t doing much reading? Or when the reading they do is slow and tedious because they’re still learning phonic decoding?

The answer lies in reading aloud to your students.

An interactive read aloud is not when you grab a book off the shelf to fill five minutes. While that’s certainly a good thing to do, an interactive read aloud is something you plan for.

You choose a book before you meet with your students, determine teaching points (such as skills and vocabulary), and (if you’d like) jot them down on sticky notes. Put those notes at the places in the book where you plan to stop and talk. Then read and enjoy!

In an interactive read aloud you might …

Do these things before you read

talk about the author and illustratortake a sneak peek at the book before you read (read the back or inside summary)examine the table of contentsinvite students to discuss what they already know about the topicmake predictions about what will be in the text

Do these things as you read

stop to examine new vocabulary wordsthink aloud as you readinvite students to make connections to the textencourage students to interact with the book by having them talk to a partner, act out a sentence or short part of the book, make a quick sketch or note, or participate in a class discussion

Do these things after you read

ask students to retell the storyhave students name things they learnedcheck predictions

When you ask thought-provoking and open-ended questions, your students will engage in high-level thinking. With your help, they will have thoughtful discussions with you and their classmates.

The products of reading comprehension are demonstrations of what the reader knows and understands AFTER reading.

Examples of reading comprehension products include:

Answering text-based questionsWriting a summaryCompleting a worksheet about a bookRetelling a storyCompleting a graphic organizer about a text

In contrast, a reading comprehension process is a skill or process that students have which enables them to create the product.

Examples of reading comprehension processes include:

Making inferencesMonitoring comprehensionMaking predictionsAsking questions while reading

What’s the point, you ask?

The point is that, too often, we have our students complete products and think that we’re teaching comprehension.

We’re not.

When you assign a worksheet with questions after students read a story, you’re not teaching comprehension. You’re assessing comprehension.

Teaching and assessing both have their place, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we’re teaching when we’re just checking understanding.

We must make time to explicitly teach reading comprehension processes.

It troubles me when I hear some people in the science of reading community claim that once students are proficient with decoding and reading fluently, comprehension will “just happen.”

We can’t (and shouldn’t!) count on that. Comprehension is just like everything else in a structured literacy classroom. We must explicitly teach it.

In recent years, reading comprehension strategy instruction has come under attack. This may be for good reason; some teachers (I’m raising my hand here!) have focused so much on the process that they almost forget about the product.

For example, a reading lesson becomes more about learning the skill of activating prior knowledge than about actually learning the life cycle of a frog.

Here’s a key thing to remember:

Reading comprehension strategies should be taught as TOOLS to help students comprehend text. They are not an end in themselves.

All that said, researchers tells us that even primary students benefit from reading strategy instruction (and – you guessed it – a lot of this instruction will happen through explicit modeling during interactive read alouds).

Here’s an infographic with the strategies to emphasize in the early grades.

As you’re planning your interactive read aloud, whole group lessons in which students read grade-level text, or small group lessons, take some time working through a template like this one.

This template is based on the Berger Framework:

Summary of understandings: What themes or concepts do you want your students to learn from this text?
Text challenges to address: What challenging sentence structure, inferences, etc. will students need help with?
Before reading: What will you do to prepare students to read? You might activate/build prior knowledge, introduce vocabulary, and/or set a purpose for reading.
During reading: Where will you stop to analyze text structure, ask a question, make an inference, etc.?
After reading: What questions will you ask, how will you teach vocabulary, and what independent work (if any) will students do in response to the text?

If you’re looking for texts for students to read when using the above framework, I’ve got great news! I have a variety of reading comprehension passages in my shop. Get a FREE sample at the end of this post.

Let’s sum up!DON’T wait to teach reading comprehension. Researchers tell us that students can learn comprehension alongside other early reading skills.DO spend time preparing powerful interactive read alouds … the ideal time to teach comprehension to our youngest readers.DON’T confuse reading comprehension processes and products. Giving worksheets isn’t teaching students how to comprehend; it’s assessing them.DO teach reading comprehension strategies.DO consider using a lesson plan template when planning reading comprehension lessons. Download the free reading passage at the end of the post and give it a try!



Free reading passages
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

The post Do’s and don’ts for teaching comprehension appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Do’s and don’ts for teaching reading fluency

 

Have you been following along with our series about the Big 5? So far we’ve tackled phonemic awareness and phonics. Now it’s time to discuss the do’s and dont’s for teaching reading fluency.

 

As I look back on my years as a balanced literacy teacher, I realize that I misunderstood fluency and its place in the big picture.

I was opposed to decodable books because I thought that leveled books, with their predictable language, helped students become fluent readers.

Since my students could “read” those predictable sentences quickly and easily, I thought this was building their fluency.

In contrast, I was troubled when I heard students slooowwlly sound out words in decodable books. I felt that it negatively impacted fluency and comprehension. I felt the same concern that Margaret Goldberg wrote about in her blog post, The Drudgery (and Beauty) of Decodable texts.

“Sounding out each word took so long that by the time they got to the end of a sentence, students didn’t know what they had read. I worried that I was creating ‘word callers’ (and they weren’t even calling the words very well!)”

As Goldberg studied the science of reading, she learned the same thing that I did: students have to do the hard work of sounding out words to become proficient readers.

Fluency will not happen right away.

While they can learn comprehension through whole class read alouds, comprehension of the texts they read themselves will not happen right away.

 

 

I can best explain the proper place of fluency through a video excerpt from the Fluency Module of my online course, Teaching Every Reader.

Key takeaways from the video:

Fluency is the automatic application of decoding and language skills.Fluency is the bridge to comprehension.

It’s easy to go overboard with fluency assessments, or to feel so overwhelmed that you’re not sure where to start.

Good news! Assessing oral reading fluency can be quick and simple.

What gets confusing is all the acronyms and abbreviations. Let’s get those straight first.

ORF: Oral reading fluency; it’s a combination of reading rate and accuracy.CBM: Curriculum based measurement; it’s the assessment tool that is most commonly used for measuring ORF.WCPM: Words correct per minute; it’s how we measure ORF.

To conduct an ORF CBM assessment, listen to a student read aloud from an unpracticed, grade level passage for one minute. Follow along with a copy of the passage and mark any errors.

At the end of the one minute, determine the student’s ORF score by subtracting the number of errors from the total number of words word. The score is expressed as WCPM.

How often should you assess students’ oral reading fluency? Here’s a good plan:

Assess first graders’ fluency in the winter and spring.For second grade and up, assess oral reading fluency in the fall, winter and spring.

After assessing, be sure to compare student scores to the fluency norms as compiled by Jan Hasbrouck and Gerald Tindal.

If a child’s fluency is not within ten WCPM of the 50th percentile on the table, you should assess more often and keep track of the child’s progress on a chart.

 

With all that talk about assessing oral reading fluency, it’s important to remember that we do this to assess only one aspect of fluency.

As Jan Hasbrouck and Deborah Glaser write in their handbook, Reading Fluency, “ORF assessments yield results that can be interpreted and used for making decisions, yet provide only ‘one piece of the puzzle’ when determining overall wellness.”

In fact, there are four key aspects of teaching reading fluency, which I’ve described in the following infographic:

 

Did you catch the bullets under AUTOMATICITY? Fluency isn’t just about reading words. We need students to be able to quickly identify letters, letter sounds, syllables, and more.

If you’re a student of my course, Teaching Every Reader, you can get a file of fluency drills for all levels in this lesson.

Prosody is all about to do with reading the way we speak – it’s about reading with phrasing, emotion, and emphasis, and rhythm (even inside our heads).

Teaching students to read with prosody is SUCH an important part of teaching reading fluency.

According to the authors Pamela E. Hook and Sandra D. Jones, in their chapter of the book Expert Perpsectives on Interventions in Reading, children must learn to read with expression in order to improve comprehension.

These experts tell us that students must transition from decoding text to constructing meaning by reading with prosody. “Making this connection allows a reader to self-monitor and self-correct, which in turn facilitates the comprehension of text.”

I can speak to this from my own experience. Of our six kids, one stands out as not being particularly interested in reading. (He’d rather shoot baskets, throw a football, or ride his bike any day!) He often reads aloud in a monotone voice, hardly stopping for punctuation.

When I ask him about what he just read, it’s no surprise that he has no idea! In contrast, when he and I read aloud together and I force him to stop and read with expression, his comprehension improves.

Use reader’s theater to build reading fluency

Reader’s theater is an authentic way to get students to reread a text with expression – which builds fluency and improves comprehension.

Reader’s theater combines reading and performing. It requires no costumes or scenery.

You need a copy of the script for each group of students. As the teacher, you’ll assign roles and guide students as they practice reading their scripts. After several days of practice, students can perform their scripts for the class.

I especially love reader’s theater scripts in the form of partner plays!

Partner plays include only two parts, making them ideal for buddy reading and use at centers.

Here’s an audio recording of a partner play I read with my youngest (he just started kindergarten; I taught him to read at home before starting school using a structured literacy approach).

When you get to the end of this blog post, you’re invited to download all three levels of this partner play for FREE!

Fluency is important, but it’s often forgotten in the daily challenge of “fitting it all in.”

As tough as it sounds, I recommend incorporating fluency practice every day in grades 1-3.

If this sounds tedious, don’t worry. There are countless ways to build fluency!

Do whole class or small group echo reading, in which you model how to read a text, and students “echo” you, matching your phrasing as much as possible as they reread the text. This is not a recitation activity; it is reading. Make sure that you gradually increase the amount of text that students echo to prevent them from relying on their memory.

Do whole group or small group choral reading. You and your students will read the text simultaneously; it will give them practice developing automaticity and expression.

For students who need a fluency intervention, use timed repeated reading. This is when a student reads for one minute and tries to beat their rate and accuracy with successive one-minute readings of the same text. But don’t use this with everyone. According to the authors of the Core Reading Sourcebook, timed repeated reading is best used “as an intervention strategy that is most appropriate for slow but accurate readers who need intense practice to increase their automaticity in reading connected text.”

Provide fluency drills at centers to give students practice naming letters and letter sounds. More advanced readers should practice reading syllables and single words. If you’re a member of my online course, Teaching Every Reader, you can head to this lesson to grab a big file of fluency drills.

Have students play word reading games in pairs or small groups. (My collection of editable reading games is perfect for this.)

Spend a week doing partner plays or reader’s theater (zip to the end of this post to download a free script in three levels!).

Give students daily time to read text at their independent or instructional level. Phonics lessons are great, but students must practice what they’re learning by reading connected text. I recommend making sure that each student has a bag of decodable texts that s/he can read every day. For students who are ready for leveled books, those should be in the bag as well. Note that I did not say that kids should grab any old book off the shelf and read for fluency practice. Work with your students to choose their books, and hold them accountable. Listen to them read whenever possible.Let’s sum up!DO understand the role of fluency in the big picture of learning to read. Fluency is the bridge to comprehension.DO assess oral reading fluency at different points of the year for first grade and up.DON’T focus only on reading rate. Fluency includes accuracy, rate, expression, and automaticity.DO provide authentic experiences for students to practice reading with expression. Partner plays are my favorite tool for this! Scroll down to get a FREE script.DON’T forget to make time for daily fluency building.
CLICK HERE FOR A PRINTABLE VERSION OF THIS BLOG POST




Free partner play in 3 levels
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

 

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Do’s and dont’s for teaching reading fluency

 

Have you been following along with our series about the Big 5? So far we’ve tackled phonemic awareness and phonics. Now it’s time to discuss the do’s and dont’s for teaching reading fluency.

 

As I look back on my years as a balanced literacy teacher, I realize that I misunderstood fluency and its place in the big picture.

I was opposed to decodable books because I thought that leveled books, with their predictable language, helped students become fluent readers.

Since my students could “read” those predictable sentences quickly and easily, I thought this was building their fluency.

In contrast, I was troubled when I heard students slooowwlly sound out words in decodable books. I felt that it negatively impacted fluency and comprehension. I felt the same concern that Margaret Goldberg wrote about in her blog post, The Drudgery (and Beauty) of Decodable texts.

“Sounding out each word took so long that by the time they got to the end of a sentence, students didn’t know what they had read. I worried that I was creating ‘word callers’ (and they weren’t even calling the words very well!)”

As Goldberg studied the science of reading, she learned the same thing that I did: students have to do the hard work of sounding out words to become proficient readers.

Fluency will not happen right away.

While they can learn comprehension through whole class read alouds, comprehension of the texts they read themselves will not happen right away.

 

 

I can best explain the proper place of fluency through a video excerpt from the Fluency Module of my online course, Teaching Every Reader.

Key takeaways from the video:

Fluency is the automatic application of decoding and language skills.Fluency is the bridge to comprehension.

It’s easy to go overboard with fluency assessments, or to feel so overwhelmed that you’re not sure where to start.

Good news! Assessing oral reading fluency can be quick and simple.

What gets confusing is all the acronyms and abbreviations. Let’s get those straight first.

ORF: Oral reading fluency; it’s a combination of reading rate and accuracy.CBM: Curriculum based measurement; it’s the assessment tool that is most commonly used for measuring ORF.WCPM: Words correct per minute; it’s how we measure ORF.

To conduct an ORF CBM assessment, listen to a student read aloud from an unpracticed, grade level passage for one minute. Follow along with a copy of the passage and mark any errors.

At the end of the one minute, determine the student’s ORF score by subtracting the number of errors from the total number of words word. The score is expressed as WCPM.

How often should you assess students’ oral reading fluency? Here’s a good plan:

Assess first graders’ fluency in the winter and spring.For second grade and up, assess oral reading fluency in the fall, winter and spring.

After assessing, be sure to compare student scores to the fluency norms as compiled by Jan Hasbrouck and Gerald Tindal.

If a child’s fluency is not within ten WCPM of the 50th percentile on the table, you should assess more often and keep track of the child’s progress on a chart.

 

With all that talk about assessing oral reading fluency, it’s important to remember that we do this to assess only one aspect of fluency.

As Jan Hasbrouck and Deborah Glaser write in their handbook, Reading Fluency, “ORF assessments yield results that can be interpreted and used for making decisions, yet provide only ‘one piece of the puzzle’ when determining overall wellness.”

In fact, there are four key aspects of teaching reading fluency, which I’ve described in the following infographic:

 

Did you catch the bullets under AUTOMATICITY? Fluency isn’t just about reading words. We need students to be able to quickly identify letters, letter sounds, syllables, and more.

If you’re a student of my course, Teaching Every Reader, you can get a file of fluency drills for all levels in this lesson.

Prosody is all about to do with reading the way we speak – it’s about reading with phrasing, emotion, and emphasis, and rhythm (even inside our heads).

Teaching students to read with prosody is SUCH an important part of teaching reading fluency.

According to the authors Pamela E. Hook and Sandra D. Jones, in their chapter of the book Expert Perpsectives on Interventions in Reading, children must learn to read with expression in order to improve comprehension.

These experts tell us that students must transition from decoding text to constructing meaning by reading with prosody. “Making this connection allows a reader to self-monitor and self-correct, which in turn facilitates the comprehension of text.”

I can speak to this from my own experience. Of our six kids, one stands out as not being particularly interested in reading. (He’d rather shoot baskets, throw a football, or ride his bike any day!) He often reads aloud in a monotone voice, hardly stopping for punctuation.

When I ask him about what he just read, it’s no surprise that he has no idea! In contrast, when he and I read aloud together and I force him to stop and read with expression, his comprehension improves.

Use reader’s theater to build reading fluency

Reader’s theater is an authentic way to get students to reread a text with expression – which builds fluency and improves comprehension.

Reader’s theater combines reading and performing. It requires no costumes or scenery.

You need a copy of the script for each group of students. As the teacher, you’ll assign roles and guide students as they practice reading their scripts. After several days of practice, students can perform their scripts for the class.

I especially love reader’s theater scripts in the form of partner plays!

Partner plays include only two parts, making them ideal for buddy reading and use at centers.

Here’s an audio recording of a partner play I read with my youngest (he just started kindergarten; I taught him to read at home before starting school using a structured literacy approach).

When you get to the end of this blog post, you’re invited to download all three levels of this partner play for FREE!

Fluency is important, but it’s often forgotten in the daily challenge of “fitting it all in.”

As tough as it sounds, I recommend incorporating fluency practice every day in grades 1-3.

If this sounds tedious, don’t worry. There are countless ways to build fluency!

Do whole class or small group echo reading, in which you model how to read a text, and students “echo” you, matching your phrasing as much as possible as they reread the text. This is not a recitation activity; it is reading. Make sure that you gradually increase the amount of text that students echo to prevent them from relying on their memory.

Do whole group or small group choral reading. You and your students will read the text simultaneously; it will give them practice developing automaticity and expression.

For students who need a fluency intervention, use timed repeated reading. This is when a student reads for one minute and tries to beat their rate and accuracy with successive one-minute readings of the same text. But don’t use this with everyone. According to the authors of the Core Reading Sourcebook, timed repeated reading is best used “as an intervention strategy that is most appropriate for slow but accurate readers who need intense practice to increase their automaticity in reading connected text.”

Provide fluency drills at centers to give students practice naming letters and letter sounds. More advanced readers should practice reading syllables and single words. If you’re a member of my online course, Teaching Every Reader, you can head to this lesson to grab a big file of fluency drills.

Have students play word reading games in pairs or small groups. (My collection of editable reading games is perfect for this.)

Spend a week doing partner plays or reader’s theater (zip to the end of this post to download a free script in three levels!).

Give students daily time to read text at their independent or instructional level. Phonics lessons are great, but students must practice what they’re learning by reading connected text. I recommend making sure that each student has a bag of decodable texts that s/he can read every day. For students who are ready for leveled books, those should be in the bag as well. Note that I did not say that kids should grab any old book off the shelf and read for fluency practice. Work with your students to choose their books, and hold them accountable. Listen to them read whenever possible.Let’s sum up!DO understand the role of fluency in the big picture of learning to read. Fluency is the bridge to comprehension.DO assess oral reading fluency at different points of the year for first grade and up.DON’T focus only on reading rate. Fluency includes accuracy, rate, expression, and automaticity.DO provide authentic experiences for students to practice reading with expression. Partner plays are my favorite tool for this! Scroll down to get a FREE script.DON’T forget to make time for daily fluency building.



Free partner play in 3 levels
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

 

The post Do’s and dont’s for teaching reading fluency appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Do’s and don’ts for phonics instruction

In today’s post, the second in our 5-part series, we’ll dive into do’s and don’ts for teaching phonics.

Another name for this post could be “Mistakes I’ve Made When Teaching Phonics …” because I’ve made a lot.

Let’s start with a little backstory.

When I first started teaching first grade, I had to use a very rigid phonics program that I detested.

I was a balanced literacy teacher all the way, and I didn’t think that such a structured approach was necessary. (Also, to be fair, the program was very, very boring and took an insane amount of time.)

The following year, I chose (with the principal and school board’s blessing) to take a different approach to phonics instruction. I taught phonics on as “as you need it” basis and taught my students to read using leveled texts and the three cueing system.

When students were stuck on a word, I did as I’d been taught in graduate school and tried really hard not to say, “sound it out.” Instead, I told my students to use clues from the picture or sentence to help them “solve” (note that I didn’t say read) the challenging word. I asked them to connect what they saw in the picture with the first letter of the mystery word.

I wasn’t anti-phonics by any means; I felt I was teaching as much of it as my students needed. But I put a greater emphasis on three-cueing; I thought that using three cueing was teaching them to problem solve.

Now, after studying the science of reading, I understand that students need to learn phonics in a structured way so they can become proficient at orthographic mapping and, thus, learn to read words by sight.

Learning to read words by sight is not about memorizing lists of “sight words”; rather, it’s about connecting phonemes to graphemes (sounds to letters) until it becomes automatic.

Orthographic mapping involves the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory. It explains how children learn to read words by sight, to spell words from memory, and to acquire vocabulary words from print.

Linnea Ehri

Now that you know a bit of my history, let’s dive into the do’s and don’ts for phonics instruction.

As a first and second grade teacher, I had a general idea about the order in which to teach phonics skills, but I didn’t think it was all that important.

I never had a printed scope and sequence that I could refer to.

Now I understand that a solid scope and sequence is KEY.

According to Wiley Blevins, in his fabulous book A Fresh Look at Phonics, a superior scope and sequence will:

Build from the simplest to the most complex skillsAllow many words to be formed as early as possibleTeach high-utility skills before less useful sound spellingsSeparate easily confused sounds and letters

A solid scope and sequence is a road map, and it’s essential for anyone looking to teach phonics in a structured, systematic way.

If you’re looking for the perfect scope and sequence, I’m sorry – there isn’t one. But following the above guidelines will help.

As I take into account my experience, study, and Orton-Gillingham training, I now recommend the following sequence for phonics instruction:

Consonants, short vowels, and basic digraphs (ch, sh, th, wh) … with CVC wordsBeginning and ending blendsCVCE wordsLong vowel teamsR-controlled vowelsDiphthongs and complex vowelsLess common sound spellings

Of course, there’s a lot more that needs to go into that sequence, such as syllable types and spelling rules.

You can grab my full scope and sequence for phonics instruction for FREE at the end of this post.

I fought decodable texts for a long time. That’s probably because the ones I had to use were just awful. They were stilted and nonsensical. I just couldn’t stomach them.

Instead, I used leveled texts. I thought that students were building fluency because they could “read” these books quickly, but they weren’t truly reading. They were using context and perhaps the first letter or two to guess the words. Occasionally they were sounding out words in their leveled readers. And as their haphazard phonics knowledge grew, some students naturally used phonics more and more. Eventually, they were truly reading.

But not all of them.

Some of them were still guessing. And I didn’t realize that because I didn’t see them when they graduated from my room into third grade. I didn’t see them struggling through harder texts – texts with fewer pictures and longer words – when three-cueing no longer served them.

Students must practice what they’re learning in their phonics lessons by reading connected text. This text may be decodable passages or decodable sentences, but I think using actual decodable books is a good goal.

Here’s why:

It’s exciting to read an actual book. It’s fun.Books tell stories (or at least they should). Stories are fun.Books have pictures (or at least they should). Pictures are fun.

No, learning to read isn’t all about fun.

But I feel I need to add the “fun” bit because sometimes it gets lost in the structured literacy approach. I get discouraged when I hear people say that early reading material shouldn’t have any pictures.

As long as our phonics material is structurally sound, there’s nothing wrong with making it appealing. Learning to read is hard work, but stories and pictures add joy.

As for where to find these quality decodable books, you’re in luck.

I spent six months purchasing and studying decodable texts. You can find my top recommendations in this post.

This morning I remembered how important routines are.

That’s because today was the first day all six of my kids went to school – from my oldest in high school all the way down to my baby, on his first day of kindergarten.

In order to get all the kids out the door at 7 AM, pick up two neighbor girls, and get to both schools on time, a routine was absolutely essential.

And we were out the door with five minutes to spare!

As a mom, I’ve learned how important routines are.

For some reason, though, I fought routines as a classroom teacher. I felt that routines made things boring.

As a parent I see that routines give kids security. They know what to expect. They get better and better at doing the things because they’ve done them so many times.

A routine helps you do the easy stuff automatically; it frees up your brain for the challenging work.

All that said, here’s a good routine for your phonics lessons.

These phonics lessons don’t have to be for the whole class.

I find it interesting (and frankly, disheartening) that some structured literacy teachers are adamantly against small group lessons. They maintain that the best (and only) way to teach phonics is through a whole class approach.

This way everyone gets access to grade level material.

But how does a 30-minute phonics lesson on “grade level” material help the student who is miles behind? And what does it do for the advanced readers who knew this content last year?

This is where small group teaching comes in, and it brings us to our first DON’T.

I know that one reason I had such a negative feeling about structured phonics lessons was because the whole class lessons I taught that one year served very few of my students.

It was a class of about 20 first graders, and several of them entered the room reading fourth grade chapter books.

I also had a student who had spent two years in kindergarten and still struggled to remember letter sounds.

The rest of the kids were spread across the middle.

A single phonics lesson was supposed to meet ALL of their needs?

I wish I had thought of giving a phonics assessment and then grouping my students by phonics skill.

Instead, I grouped by “reading level” and had my students read leveled books.

When some students got stuck at a lower level, I didn’t realize it was probably because they needed more explicit phonics instruction … not more practice with three-cueing.

In an ideal world, you’d have other teachers in your building who would work with you so that each of you could teach a small group phonics lesson at the same time. Students would visit a different classroom if needed, and each would get instruction tailored to his/her needs. In just 20-30 minutes, every student would be done with his/her phonics lesson.

In an ideal world.

I have never lived in that world, and you may not, either.

Here’s my recommendation:

Give a phonics assessment (if you’re a member of my course, Teaching Every Reader, you can use the one in this lesson ).Group your students by what they’re ready to learn next. Have no more than 4 groups, even if it means (and it probably will) that some students will need to start by practicing things they already know.Train your students to do meaningful literacy activities while you’re meeting with small groups. Yes, this will take some time. Yes, it will be worth it. If possible, meet with all of your phonics groups each day. If it’s not possible, make sure you meet with your lowest groups daily. Within your groups, follow the structure of an effective phonics lesson, as noted in the above infographic. Your lower groups will likely need longer lessons than your highest group.

A common criticism of structured literacy/the science of reading is that it’s all about phonics.

I feels like that.

It feels like that because other approaches often lack an appropriate focus on phonics, so the structured approach may feel like it’s going a little overboard to correct it.

The fact is, phonics instruction is HUGE for beginning readers. Decoding is the bulk of their reading work.

As they become more proficient at decoding, they will become more fluent, and they will be able to devote more attention to reading comprehension.

But they need to become proficient with phonic decoding first.

AND YET …

Beginning readers can (and should) build background knowledge.

They can (and should) build vocabulary.

They can (and should) think critically.

They can (and should) learn about language structures, genres, and more.

If you’re a student of the science of reading, you’re likely familiar with Scarborough’s reading rope, which you can see here.

Dr. Hollis Scarborough published it in 2001 as a visual to illustrate the complexities of learning to read.

As you notice, there are two strands. The top strand involves language comprehension.

The bottom strand is where phonics comes in.

What we need to remember is that those early decodable books aren’t going to do a whole lot to improve language comprehension.

The bulk of that work comes through interactive read-alouds.

I recommend doing one or two interactive read-alouds every day. You can learn more about them in this blog post.

Let’s sum up!

This was a hefty blog post about teaching phonics! Let’s review.

DO follow a strong scope and sequence when teaching phonics. As a reminder, you can get my scope and sequence for FREE at the end of this post.

DO use decodable texts. It’s true; many decodable books have given them a bad name. But they’re not all boring and stilted; in fact, better books and series are being published all the time. Check out my ultimate guide to decodable books to find the best of the best.

DO follow a consistent routine in your phonics lessons. When kids have a routine for the easy stuff (knowing what comes next, getting out their letter tiles, etc.) they free up their brains for the more challenging work. A routine also keeps the teacher on task and makes planning easier!

DON’T limit your phonics instruction to whole class teaching. If all of your students have the same level of phonics knowledge, go ahead and stick to whole class teaching. But I’m willing to bet that they’re all over the map. Focused small group lessons will accelerate student growth.

DON’T forget the rest of the Reading Rope. Phonic decoding is extremely important for beginning readers, but we can address other strands through interactive read alouds.

Free phonics scope and sequence



Free Phonics Scope & Sequence
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

The post Do’s and don’ts for phonics instruction appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Do’s and don’ts for teaching phonemic awareness

Looking for tips for teaching phonemic awareness?

In this post I’ll share do’s and don’ts for teaching phonemic awareness … sharing mistakes I’ve made in the past and new insights I’ve gained through my study of the science of reading.

As we consider do’s and don’ts for teaching phonemic awareness skills, let’s start with the basics.

I admit it … I didn’t understand the difference between phonological and phonemic awareness for a long time.

I knew they weren’t the same as phonics. I knew that phonics has to do with print, and phonological/phonemic awareness has to do with sounds.

But the rest was fuzzy.

A visual helps.

The above graphic is from my online course, Teaching Every Reader. As you can see, there are many components of phonological awareness: rhyming, alliteration, syllables, concept of word, onset- rime, AND phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is just one piece of phonological awareness.

Many researchers would argue that it’s the most important piece.

There are several mental skills associated with word reading. Phoneme awareness appears to be one of the most important of these skills. Phoneme awareness refers to the ability to notice that spoken words can be broken down into smaller parts called phonemes.

David Kilpatrick, Equipped for Reading Success

Did you catch that?

While the other components of phonological awareness have to do with the larger parts of words (syllables, onset/rime, etc.), a phoneme is the smallest part of a word. It’s an individual sound.

Test yourself.

How many phonemes does each of these words have?

hatfishswimboxsquish

Ready for the answer key? Note … when you see letters between those slash marks (fancy word = virgules), we are referring to the sounds, not the letter names.

Hat has three phonemes: /h/ /a/ /t/Fish has three phonemes: /f/ /i/ /sh/Swim has four phonemes: /s/ /w/ /i/ /m/Fox has four phonemes: /b/ /o/ /k/ /s/Squish has five phonemes: /s/ /k/ /w/ /i/ /sh/

How’d you do?

If you’re new to counting phonemes, don’t worry! It takes a little practice.

Before we move on, let’s remember that there are four levels of phonemic awareness.

The following infographic breaks down the four types and gives a sample phonemic awareness task for each one.

If you’re asking, “Who cares?” then I say “Great question.”

Knowing what phonemic awareness is does us no good if we don’t understand why it matters.

That brings us to our second “do …”

Let’s start with the end goal: reading comprehension.

How do we get there?

Check out this quote from David Kilpatrick.

Reading comprehension is our goal, and the most direct route to good reading comprehension is to make the word recognition process automatic so a student can focus all of his or her mental energy on the meaning.

David Kilpatrick, Equipped for Reading Success

The next logical question is: HOW do we make the word recognition process automatic? How do we get students to the place where they recognize words immediately without needing to sound them out?

Hint: It’s not through memorizing long lists of words!

We use a process called orthographic mapping to be able to instantly recognize words.

Orthographic mapping is a process by which we map phonemes to graphemes.

Say what?!

This threw me for a loop for while, but it’s not as complex as it sounds.

Phonemes = sounds

Graphemes = printed letters which represent sounds

Therefore, orthographic mapping is a mental process by which we match the sounds of a word to the letters in a word (the spellings). By second grade, typical readers need just 2-4 exposures to a word to have it “orthographically mapped.”

We cannot become good at orthographic mapping unless we have both letter sound knowledge AND PHONEMIC AWARENESS.

(That was a very quick look at orthographic mapping, and if you don’t quite get it yet, that’s normal. Here’s an 11-minute video from Ms. Jane’s Tutoring & Dyslexia Services that explains it in an easy-to-understand way.

Once we understand WHAT phonemic awareness is, and WHY we need to teach it, we’re ready to get started.

But before you start, make sure you know how to pronounce phonemes properly.

What’s the sound of the letter l?

Did you say “luh”? Many people make that mistake.

Instead, we say that the sound of letter l is /llllll/.

Otherwise, if students are sounding out the word let, they might read it as luh-et.

Pronouncing phonemes getseven trickier with letters like p and b. It’s hard to clip the sounds quickly so we don’t add an “uh” to the end.

Check out this quick video to make sure you’re pronouncing all 44 phonemes correctly (the sounds will be different, of course, if you are not speaking American English.)

I have to hang my head in shame here because, for years, I didn’t give a lot of thought to phonemic awareness.

By “years” I mean all the years I was a classroom teacher. UGH.

I thought that the playful games we played with words and songs would be enough.

And it was … for some students.

I didn’t get that phonemic awareness is often the missing key for struggling readers. (And truthfully, all my students would have benefited from explicit instruction in phonemic awareness.)

Had I known its importance, I would have made it a point to teach phonemic awareness every day. (Every kindergarten and first grade teaches should fit it into their daily schedule.)

The good news is that phonemic awareness instruction doesn’t have to take long, and it requires few materials.

Many teachers love the Heggerty phonemic awareness curriculum. The program includes hand motions and daily lessons that take just 10-15 minutes.

I think Heggerty is a pretty solid program, but if your budget is tight, you can get a free printable phonemic awareness program at Reading Done Right.

Not ready to purchase a full curriculum? My phonemic awareness bundle has 12 weeks of oral phonemic awareness activities, plus printable games kids love.

Are you familiar with sound walls? They’re all the rage these days – a substitute for the more traditional word walls.

In the past, we used word walls as a way to help kids find spellings of high frequency words.

But the problem with a word wall is that while we have 44 phonemes in the English language, a word wall only has 26 letters.

It makes more sense to teach children sounds (phonemes) and then gradually add words to the sound wall as they learn phonics patterns that spell those sounds.

Here’s a sound wall that I helped a teacher put up this very morning. (This is my own creation and will be added to my shop in the next few months.)

I won’t get into all the specifics here, but you can see that the sounds are arranged based on how they’re made in the mouth.

We also put up this sound wall for vowel phonemes. You can see that the vowels are arranged based on how your mouth is formed when you make the sounds. The bottom-most sound is the short o, when your mouth is opened the widest.

Many teachers have little mirrors that they give their students so they can see how their mouth looks when they articulate particular phonemes.

Here’s a very important sound wall tip …

Do not put up all the sounds and word cards on the first day!

The above examples are complete sound walls that you might not even see until third grade.

You should only display the words below each sound when you’ve taught that phonics pattern.

For example, the above sound wall includes “ei” for veil. You would likely not teach that pattern in first grade, so a first grade teacher would never use that card.

(If the idea of sound walls is fuzzy, stay tuned, because my upcoming product will explain exactly how to use it!)

We often hear that phonemic awareness activities can be done in the dark (without print), and that’s true, but it’s also important to teach phonemic awareness and phonics together.

One of my favorite ways to do that is with phoneme grapheme mapping. Check out this video I did with my preschool-aged son and our neighbor. (They are little; please excuse the incorrect letter formation. )

In this activity they practiced:

Phoneme segmentingPhoneme blending

We could have added phoneme isolation by asking, “What’s the first/middle/last sound?”

We could have added phoneme manipulation by asking, “If you took the /s/ off of sun and replaced it with /f/, what would the new word be?”

Another way to integrate phonemic awareness with phonics is to have a phonemic awareness warm-up related to the phonics skill you’re about to teach.

For example: If you’re teaching the ai spelling pattern, tell your students to listen for the vowel sound in each word. They should give a thumbs up if they hear the long a sound.

bat (thumbs down)
rain (thumbs up)
say (thumbs up)
snack (thumbs down)
weigh (thumbs up)

Then continue on to your phonics lesson in which you tell them that ai is one way to represent the long a sound.

Let’s sum up!

This was a hefty blog post about teaching phonemic awareness! Let’s review.

DO understand the difference between phonological and phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness has to do with the individual sounds in words. There are four kids of phonemic awareness tasks:

phoneme isolationphoneme blendingphoneme segmentingphoneme manipulation

DO understand the importance of phonemic awareness. The short explanation is that students must be proficient in phonemic awareness to be able to do the mental process of orthographic mapping – which is how we recognize words automatically instead of having to sound them out.

DON’T leave phonemic awareness to chance. Kindergarten and first grade teachers should reserve 5-10 minutes for phonemic awareness instruction every day.

DO use a sound wall as you teach each phoneme. Remember not to add a word card until you’ve taught the phonics pattern associated with that word.

Finally, DO integrate phonemic awareness with phonics instruction. You can do that with activities like phoneme grapheme mapping or by doing a related phonemic awareness task before you teach a new phonics skill.

As a reward for making it to the end of this post, you’re invited to download this FREE set of phonemic awareness games, a sample from my full set.

Free phonemic awareness games
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD


The rest of this series is coming this Fall!

 Part 1  Part 2 – Coming August 30  Part 3 – Coming September 6  Part 4 – Coming September 13  Part 5 – Coming September 20

 

The post Do’s and don’ts for teaching phonemic awareness appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Do’s and dont’s for teaching phonemic awareness

Looking for tips for teaching phonemic awareness?

In this post I’ll share do’s and don’ts for teaching phonemic awareness … sharing mistakes I’ve made in the past and new insights I’ve gained through my study of the science of reading.

As we consider do’s and don’ts for teaching phonemic awareness skills, let’s start with the basics.

I admit it … I didn’t understand the difference between phonological and phonemic awareness for a long time.

I knew they weren’t the same as phonics. I knew that phonics has to do with print, and phonological/phonemic awareness has to do with sounds.

But the rest was fuzzy.

A visual helps.

The above graphic is from my online course, Teaching Every Reader. As you can see, there are many components of phonological awareness: rhyming, alliteration, syllables, concept of word, onset- rime, AND phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is just one piece of phonological awareness.

Many researchers would argue that it’s the most important piece.

There are several mental skills associated with word reading. Phoneme awareness appears to be one of the most important of these skills. Phoneme awareness refers to the ability to notice that spoken words can be broken down into smaller parts called phonemes.

David Kilpatrick, Equipped for Reading Success

Did you catch that?

While the other components of phonological awareness have to do with the larger parts of words (syllables, onset/rime, etc.), a phoneme is the smallest part of a word. It’s an individual sound.

Test yourself.

How many phonemes does each of these words have?

hatfishswimboxsquish

Ready for the answer key? Note … when you see letters between those slash marks (fancy word = virgules), we are referring to the sounds, not the letter names.

Hat has three phonemes: /h/ /a/ /t/Fish has three phonemes: /f/ /i/ /sh/Swim has four phonemes: /s/ /w/ /i/ /m/Fox has four phonemes: /b/ /o/ /k/ /s/Squish has five phonemes: /s/ /k/ /w/ /i/ /sh/

How’d you do?

If you’re new to counting phonemes, don’t worry! It takes a little practice.

Before we move on, let’s remember that there are four levels of phonemic awareness.

The following infographic breaks down the four types and gives a sample phonemic awareness task for each one.

If you’re asking, “Who cares?” then I say “Great question.”

Knowing what phonemic awareness is does us no good if we don’t understand why it matters.

That brings us to our second “do …”

Let’s start with the end goal: reading comprehension.

How do we get there?

Check out this quote from David Kilpatrick.

Reading comprehension is our goal, and the most direct route to good reading comprehension is to make the word recognition process automatic so a student can focus all of his or her mental energy on the meaning.

David Kilpatrick, Equipped for Reading Success

The next logical question is: HOW do we make the word recognition process automatic? How do we get students to the place where they recognize words immediately without needing to sound them out?

Hint: It’s not through memorizing long lists of words!

We use a process called orthographic mapping to be able to instantly recognize words.

Orthographic mapping is a process by which we map phonemes to graphemes.

Say what?!

This threw me for a loop for while, but it’s not as complex as it sounds.

Phonemes = sounds

Graphemes = printed letters which represent sounds

Therefore, orthographic mapping is a mental process by which we match the sounds of a word to the letters in a word (the spellings). By second grade, typical readers need just 2-4 exposures to a word to have it “orthographically mapped.”

We cannot become good at orthographic mapping unless we have both letter sound knowledge AND PHONEMIC AWARENESS.

(That was a very quick look at orthographic mapping, and if you don’t quite get it yet, that’s normal. Here’s an 11-minute video from Ms. Jane’s Tutoring & Dyslexia Services that explains it in an easy-to-understand way.

Once we understand WHAT phonemic awareness is, and WHY we need to teach it, we’re ready to get started.

But before you start, make sure you know how to pronounce phonemes properly.

What’s the sound of the letter l?

Did you say “luh”? Many people make that mistake.

Instead, we say that the sound of letter l is /llllll/.

Otherwise, if students are sounding out the word let, they might read it as luh-et.

Pronouncing phonemes getseven trickier with letters like p and b. It’s hard to clip the sounds quickly so we don’t add an “uh” to the end.

Check out this quick video to make sure you’re pronouncing all 44 phonemes correctly (the sounds will be different, of course, if you are not speaking American English.)

I have to hang my head in shame here because, for years, I didn’t give a lot of thought to phonemic awareness.

By “years” I mean all the years I was a classroom teacher. UGH.

I thought that the playful games we played with words and songs would be enough.

And it was … for some students.

I didn’t get that phonemic awareness is often the missing key for struggling readers. (And truthfully, all my students would have benefited from explicit instruction in phonemic awareness.)

Had I known its importance, I would have made it a point to teach phonemic awareness every day. (Every kindergarten and first grade teaches should fit it into their daily schedule.)

The good news is that phonemic awareness instruction doesn’t have to take long, and it requires few materials.

Many teachers love the Heggerty phonemic awareness curriculum. The program includes hand motions and daily lessons that take just 10-15 minutes.

I think Heggerty is a pretty solid program, but if your budget is tight, you can get a free printable phonemic awareness program at Reading Done Right.

Not ready to purchase a full curriculum? My phonemic awareness bundle has 12 weeks of oral phonemic awareness activities, plus printable games kids love.

Are you familiar with sound walls? They’re all the rage these days – a substitute for the more traditional word walls.

In the past, we used word walls as a way to help kids find spellings of high frequency words.

But the problem with a word wall is that while we have 44 phonemes in the English language, a word wall only has 26 letters.

It makes more sense to teach children sounds (phonemes) and then gradually add words to the sound wall as they learn phonics patterns that spell those sounds.

Here’s a sound wall that I helped a teacher put up this very morning. (This is my own creation and will be added to my shop in the next few months.)

I won’t get into all the specifics here, but you can see that the sounds are arranged based on how they’re made in the mouth.

We falso put up this sound wall for vowel phonemes. You can see that the vowels are arranged based on how your mouth is formed when you make the sounds. The bottom-most sound is the short o, when your mouth is opened the widest.

Many teachers have little mirrors that they give their students so they can see how their mouth looks when they articulate particular phonemes.

Here’s a very important sound wall tip …

Do not put up all the sounds and word cards on the first day!

The above examples are complete sound walls that you might not even see until third grade.

You should only display the words below each sound when you’ve taught that phonics pattern.

For example, the above sound wall includes “ei” for veil. You would likely not teach that pattern in first grade, so a first grade teacher would never use that card.

(If the idea of sound walls is fuzzy, stay tuned, because my upcoming product will explain exactly how to use it!)

We often hear that phonemic awareness activities can be done in the dark (without print), and that’s true, but it’s also important to teach phonemic awareness and phonics together.

One of my favorite ways to do that is with phoneme grapheme mapping. Check out this video I did with my preschool-aged son and our neighbor. (They are little; please excuse the incorrect letter formation. )

In this activity they practiced:

Phoneme segmentingPhoneme blending

We could have added phoneme isolation by asking, “What’s the first/middle/last sound?”

We could have added phoneme manipulation by asking, “If you took the /s/ off of sun and replaced it with /f/, what would the new word be?”

Another way to integrate phonemic awareness with phonics is to have a phonemic awareness warm-up related to the phonics skill you’re about to teach.

For example: If you’re teaching the ai spelling pattern, tell your students to listen for the vowel sound in each word. They should give a thumbs up if they hear the long a sound.

bat (thumbs down)
rain (thumbs up)
say (thumbs up)
snack (thumbs down)
weigh (thumbs up)

Then continue on to your phonics lesson in which you tell them that ai is one way to represent the long a sound.

Let’s sum up!

This was a hefty blog post about teaching phonemic awareness! Let’s review.

DO understand the difference between phonological and phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness has to do with the individual sounds in words. There are four kids of phonemic awareness tasks:

phoneme isolationphoneme blendingphoneme segmentingphoneme manipulation

DO understand the importance of phonemic awareness. The short explanation is that students must be proficient in phonemic awareness to be able to do the mental process of orthographic mapping – which is how we recognize words automatically instead of having to sound them out.

DON’T leave phonemic awareness to chance. Kindergarten and first grade teachers should reserve 5-10 minutes for phonemic awareness instruction every day.

DO use a sound wall as you teach each phoneme. Remember not to add a word card until you’ve taught the phonics pattern associated with that word.

Finally, DO integrate phonemic awareness with phonics instruction. You can do that with activities like phoneme grapheme mapping or by doing a related phonemic awareness task before you teach a new phonics skill.

As a reward for making it to the end of this post, you’re invited to download this FREE set of phonemic awareness games, a sample from my full set.

Free phonemic awareness games
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD


The rest of this series is coming this Fall!

 Part 1  Part 2 – Coming August 30  Part 3 – Coming September 6  Part 4 – Coming September 13  Part 5 – Coming September 20

 

The post Do’s and dont’s for teaching phonemic awareness appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Books to read on your science of reading journey

TRT Podcast#44: Books to read on your science of reading journey

This concludes our official science of reading series, but there’s a lot more to learn! Check out my top recommendations for books that will help you understand the science AND apply it to your classroom. Also check out our online course, Teaching Every Reader!��It’s open for enrollment through May 10, 2021.��Get the details here.

Listen to the episode here

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Hello friends. Before we get into this episode, I wanted to add two books I forgot to mention - really essential books for your science of reading journey. One is "Equipped for Reading Success" by David Kilpatrick. He's all about explaining orthographic mapping and helping you understand how to build phonemic awareness with your students. And also Denise Eide's book, "Uncovering the Logic of English," which will teach you about some spelling rules and generalizations you may not have known before, and will help you teach your students reading and writing.

If you're with me on Facebook, you are watching a live recording of the Triple R Teaching Podcast Episode 44: Books to Read on Your Science of Reading Journey. If you've been with me on the podcast for the last couple of months, you know that I've shared quite a lot of episodes all about understanding the science of reading and how to apply that knowledge into the teaching that you're doing in your classroom.

Today I want to take a look at some books that I recommend for those of you that want to learn more. I'm going to start with books that I feel are very simple and an easy way to get into it, then we'll progress to some more challenging books, and we'll finish with very practical books.

The first one I like, and the first one I actually got the whole way through, was "Know Better, Do Better" by David and Meredith Liben. I love this book because it's written in a story format. They talk about how they started a charter school - a public school in Harlem - with a whole language approach. They were really excited about it, they got all the right materials, great teachers, and they were all into it. They thought they were doing a great job... and then their students ranked the bottom of the area's test scores.

So they realized that what they thought was working wasn't working, the students weren't really learning to read very well. So they kept what was good about the whole language approach, but then they moved to a more structured literacy approach. This was way back in the nineties, I believe. And it worked! The students became great readers!

I like this book because it is not judgmental. It's written to people like me who come from a balanced literacy background, or for some of you maybe even whole language, and they tackle some of the things that might scare you a little bit and help you understand how it worked for them. So you might be scared of switching to decodable books, but they talk about their experience with it and how it actually was very positive. It's quite short and super interesting and helpful, so I would start with "Know Better, Do Better" by David Liben and Meredith Liben.

Another book is a new one that was just recently published, called "Shifting the Balance" by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates. I'm going to go ahead and read to you the summary on the back: "These days, it seems that everyone has a strong opinion about how to teach young children to read. Some may brush off the current tension as nothing more than one more round of ���The Reading Wars.��� Others may avoid the clash altogether due to the uncivilized discourse that sometimes results. Certainly, sorting the signal from the noise is no easy task. In this leading-edge book, authors Jan Burkins and Kari Yates address this tension as a critical opportunity to look closely at the research, re-evaluate current practices, and embrace new possibilities."

I like this book because, again, if you are in a balanced literacy classroom, this shows you how to start to understand the science of reading and make some changes. It's not judgmental, but is a good way to start integrating the science into more of what you're doing.

Those are the ones I recommend starting with. As you're ready to learn a little bit more, I recommend "Speech to Print" by Louisa Moats. This one helps you understand the structure of the English language, which can then help you teach it. I think you might be surprised at how much you didn't know, that's how I feel about it. I haven't completed this book yet, but I refer to it often. It's got a lot of helpful charts, talks about things like teaching syllable types, talks about phonemes and morphologies, and is really helpful.

Now anytime you ask someone, "What book should I read about the science of reading?" they'll usually recommend one of these books, if not all three. These are Mark Seidenberg's "Language at the Speed of Sight," "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Wolf, and "Reading in the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. I'm going to be honest with you, these books are hard. I have definitely not gotten through all of them, in fact, I've only read a portion of each one of these books.

I prefer Stanislas Dehaene's YouTube video. There's a presentation that he gave about how the brain learns to read, and I find that much easier to get through than this book. I watched it many times until it made sense to me. I will link to that in the show notes for this episode.

Here's this one, "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Wolf. She is a professor of child development, and she's excellent. You can find her doing a lot of interviews all over the place. I found this book hard to get through, but maybe eventually I'll be able to do it.

Of all three, I find Mark Seidenberg's book the most easy to read. He talks about understanding the science of reading and why it's important for our students. He's a cognitive neuroscientist. This book is long and the font is small, but a lot of it's told in, again, sort of a story fashion, so it's easier to get through.

Another book, which I can't wait to finish, is this one, "Overcoming Dyslexia." You might think at first glance, "I don't need to read that. I'm not interested in learning about teaching students with dyslexia because that's not what I do." Or you might think, "What I learn in there can't also apply to the rest of my class." But this is really good because she talks about the science of how the brain learns to read and how the way that we teach students can really help. You may actually read it and find out that some of your students possibly could have dyslexia based on the things that she writes, and that will help you think about how to change what you're doing in the classroom. It has lots of stories, and she has a very nice writing style, I highly recommend it.

Now let's talk about getting some practical books. These would be books that not only teach you about the science, but also give you things to do with it. I'll give you a few of my recommendations here.

I like "A Fresh Look at Phonics." This book is older, from 2017, so about four years old. I really like Wiley Blevins a lot. I like him because he is not the type of person that's going to tell you it has to be one way. He's honest about what the research really says and what people try to make it say. He also shows you how you can be a good phonics teacher, even within maybe a less than ideal setup. Maybe you're in a balanced literacy classroom and you have to be, so you can't quite transition to a structured literacy classroom. He'll still show you how to be a strong phonics teacher. This is extremely easy to read, and has lots of helpful resources. You might also want to check out his book, "Phonics A to Z," which I think is on its third edition.

Here's another book that is actually one of my favorites. I love that Rollanda E. O'Connor in her book, "Teaching Word Recognition," talks about the research. She's constantly backing up what she's saying with research, but it's also extremely practical and I found it very interesting. I read this book in the car while we were on vacation and I just marked it up all over the place. I read it from start to finish. She talks about things like oral language, phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle, decoding, developing sight words, reading multi-syllabic words. It's just got everything. It's really, really good and is a short read, so you can get a lot out of it in a short time.

I'll share two more books. One is "How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction" by Sharon Walpole and Michael McKenna. This is the book you want if you're trying to figure out how to do needs-based small groups during your reading block; if you're interested in finding out specifically what skills each of your students has and then you're grouping them to help them move forward. This is not going to be teaching you how to group students by reading level, it's going to help you group them by their need. So maybe you could think of it as grouping them by their deficits, like where are they in terms of their phonics knowledge? Where do they need to go next? This book will help you get them there. I love it because, as any of you know, when you have a class of 25 kids they're going to be all over the place, right? They're not all going to be moving at the same pace your phonics curriculum does. And so this is really good for differentiation, and I think you'll love that over half the book is the activities so it's really, really practical. This is a very popular one. If you find it's expensive on Amazon, you should get it from the publisher's website, the Guilford Press.

Here's the last one. This one is on the pricey side, but wow is it an incredible book with lots of resources! I love that each chapter talks about the science and it gives you really practical ideas. This is called "Teaching Reading Sourcebook," from Core. It might be about $80, but look how fat it is, and it's very readable with big font, really nice charts, word lists, as well as specific activities to do with students. I highly recommended it. They also have an assessment spiral-bound book that you can buy, which is also very good.

So let's really quickly review the books we talked about today. The books that I started with, as in books that are going to slowly get you into the science of reading, particularly if you're coming from a balanced literacy background are: "Know Better, Do Better" by David and Meredith Liben and "Shifting the Balance" by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates.

Then if you want to go really deep and read some of those harder books, some of your choices are: Mark Seidenberg's "Language at the Speed of Sight," which is my favorite of these, "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Wolf, and "Reading in the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene.

You also might want to check out "Overcoming Dyslexia" by Sally Shaywitz. This book is not just for teachers of students with dyslexia, it will help you understand how the brain learns to read and how you can apply that to how you teach all of your students.

Finally, I talked about some books that are really practical. Those were: "A Fresh Look at Phonics" by Wiley Blevins (I recommend anything by Wiley Blevins), as well as "Teaching Word Recognition," which talks a lot about the research, but also talks about specific activities. That's by Rollanda E. O'Connor. "How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction" by Sharon Walpole, which I think is a must-own. And then finally, from Core, "Teaching Reading Sourcebook," which is jam-packed with summaries of the research and specific activities that you can do.

I hope this was helpful. I've really enjoyed doing the science of reading series with you. This concludes our official science of reading podcast series, but we're not going to stop talking about these things next week. We're going to start a series about teaching phonics.

I should also let you know that if you're listening to this in real time, when I publish it on the podcast, it will be Monday, May 3rd, and that is the day that Becky Spence and I are opening the door to our online course, "Teaching Every Reader." We're very excited to open it up; we only open it up a couple of times a year. In fact, on Monday and Tuesday, we're going to be giving a live workshop that is going to teach you four simple ways to bring the science of reading into a K-2 classroom. In that workshop, we'll be giving specific details about the course and how, if you join by Thursday of next week, you can get special early bird pricing. So if you haven't signed up for one of the workshops, you can do that by heading to themeasuredmom.com/liveworkshop.

If you want to learn more about the course, you can go to teachingeveryreader.com. There's an information page there now, and it will switch over with an option to join us on Monday. I'm also always happy to answer questions; you can email my team at hello@themeasuredmom.com. Thanks so much for joining me, and I'll talk to you again next week.

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Related episodes What are the reading wars? My reaction to Emily Hanford���s article, ���At a Loss for Words��� How the brain learns to read What the science of reading is based on What���s wrong with three-cueing? Should you use leveled or decodable books with beginning readers? Do���s and don���ts for using decodable texts with beginning readers The difference between balanced and structured literacy 3 science of reading myths debunked Recommended books Equipped for Reading Success , by David Kilpatrick Uncovering the Logic of English , by Denise Eide Know Better, Do Better , by David & Meredith Liben Shifting the Balance , by Jan Burkins & Kari Yates Speech to Print , by Louisa Moats Reading in the Brain , by Stanislas Dehaene (check out the related YouTube video here) Proust and the Squid , by Maryanne Wolf Language at the Speed of Sight , by Mark Seidenberg Overcoming Dyslexia , by Sally Shaywitz A Fresh Look at Phonics , by Wiley Blevins Teaching Word Recognition , by Rollanda E. O’Connor How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction , by Sharon Walpole & Michael McKenna CORE’s Teaching Reading Sourcebook , by Bill Honig, et. al.Join our online course … open for a short time only! Register here!

 

The post Books to read on your science of reading journey appeared first on The Measured Mom.

Syntax and semantics in structured literacy

Have you been following along in our series about structured literacy? Becky Spence (This Reading Mama) are doing this collaborative blog series as we revise our online course, Teaching Every Reader, to align with the science of reading.

In week 1, I named the elements of structured literacy. In week 2, we examined the key differences between balanced and structured literacy. I was honest about why it took me quite some time to make the shift from balanced to structured literacy.In week 3, Becky defined phonology and helped us see how we can teach phonological and phonemic awareness in a structured way.In week 4, I discussed the why, what when, and how of teaching sound-symbol association (i,e, phonics) within a structured literacy setting.In week 5, Becky broke down syllable instruction . I highly recommend her free chart for teaching about syllables in a systematic way – it’s super helpful and can be found right in the blog post. In week 6, Becky took the mystery out of morphology . She explained that it’s important because it helps learners read with meaning and spell words correctly.

And now we’re on week 7! It’s the final week of our structured literacy series, and I’m going to tackle syntax and semantics.

I’ll be honest … these elements of structured literacy are not as easy to explain.

The definitions are rather straightforward, but it can be difficult to describe systematic and sequential way to teach these aspects of structured literacy.

But it’s crucial that we take the time to teach syntax and semantics; after all, structured literacy isn’t just about phonics!

What is syntax within structured literacy?

Syntax is the set of principles that dictate the sequence and function of words in a sentence in order to convey meaning. This includes grammar, sentence variation, and the mechanics of language.

The International Dyslexia Association on readingrockets.org

You likely have a grammar curriculum that you follow.

But syntax isn’t just about identifying whether a word is a noun, verb, adjective, or other part of speech.

Understanding sentence structure is what’s really key.

According to Joan Sedita of Keys to Literacy, “the ability to understand at the sentence level is in many ways the foundation for being able to comprehend text.”

Here are two of the activities that Sedita recommends for teaching sentence structure:

Sentence scramble: Write each word of a sentence on a card. Give the cards (out of order) to your students. They must arrange the words into a complete, grammatically correct sentence.Sentence elaboration: Start with a simple subject (The cat). Then ask the W questions as readers gradually add more information.

EXAMPLE:

“Who?” the cat.
“What about the cat?” The cat ate.
“What did she eat?” The cat ate a cicada.
“Where did she eat it?” The cat ate a cicada in the front yard.
“Why did she eat it?” The cat ate a cicada in the front yard because she was hungry.
“When did she eat it?” This morning, the cat ate a cicada in the front yard because she was hungry.

I learned about another activity for building sentence structure from Deb Glaser of The Reading Teacher’s Top Ten Tools.

Sentence combining: After reading a fiction or nonfiction text to your students, share two related sentences. Discuss how the sentences relate to each other and choose a connector to combine the sentences.

EXAMPLE: After reading aloud The Three Little Pigs, you could post these sentences:

The Third Little Pig was smart.
The Third Little Pig built a house of bricks.

Talk about how the sentences relate. Do they have contrasting ideas? Does the second sentence give more information? Does one sentence provide an explanation? Do the sentences show events in a sequence?

In this example, the first sentence explains why the pig built a house of breaks: he was smart.

Here are two ways to combine the sentences:

The third little pig was smart, so he built a house of bricks.

The third little pig was smart; therefore, he built a house of bricks.

What is semantics within structured literacy?

Semantics is that aspect of language concerned with meaning. The curriculum (from the beginning) must include instruction in the comprehension of written language.

The International Dyslexia Association on readingrockets.org

The truth is that it’s going to take a little time before beginning readers can make sense of what they read. After all, when they’re sounding out word by word, it’s slow going. They can’t remember what they read fast enough to make much sense out of the text.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t concern ourselves with meaning-making.

Far from it!

Students can build language comprehension when we read to them.

As we read aloud to students, we should …

Call attention to new vocabulary words and teach them in context.Stop to examine challenging sentences and and provide support to help students make sense of them.Plan both low and high level questions in advance, and ask them in an interactive way.Teach narrative structure and informational text structure. (For more about this, check out a 5-part series on This Reading Mama’s website.)Call attention to text features.Teach our students to use comprehension strategies such as visualizing, making connections, and monitoring comprehension.

Let’s not leave the development of syntax and semantics to chance!

Check out the rest of the series

 Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4  Part 5  Part 6  Part 7

 

The post Syntax and semantics in structured literacy appeared first on The Measured Mom.