Making Sense of Phonics

1. Making Sense of Phonics Isabel Beck

2. Why are we teaching phonics? • Research has determined that successful readers rely primarily on the letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns in words, rather than on context or pictures to identify familiar and unfamiliar words. • Systematic phonics instruction makes a bigger contribution to children’s growth in reading than non-systematic alternative programs or no phonics.

3. Why Teach Phonics • Phonics helps all learners. • Good readers spell better with phonics instruction. • Many children, even good readers, read more effectively with explicit, systematic phonics instruction.

4. Systematic Phonics • Systematic, not random: • Preplanned skill sequence • Progresses from easier sounds to more difficult sounds • High-utility sounds and letters taught first • Letters with similar shapes and sounds are separated • Vowels separated in sequence of alphabetic instruction

5. Elements of a phonics lesson • Sound (Phonemic awareness) • Letter-sound association (often uses a card) • Blending/Word building • Reading decodable text • Application in other context

6. What do you teach? Kindergarten • Basic Phonological Awareness • Consonant Sounds • Consonant Blends (Introduce) • Long and Short Vowels (Introduce) • PWIM

7. What do you teach? 1st Grade • Long and Short Vowels • Consonant Digraphs (ch, th, sh, wh) • Consonant Blends • Vowel Digraphs (oi, oy, ew, etc.) • Silent e • R-Controlled Vowels • Irregular Vowel Teams

8. What do you teach? 2nd Grade • Irregular Vowel Teams • Inflectional endings • Prefixes and Suffixes

9. Principles of Good Phonics Instruction: 5 Components • Teacher explanations of the reading concept or strategy targeted for development and why it is useful • Teacher modeling and demonstrations of how the concept or strategy can be applied • Student opportunities for application and articulation of its use • Coaching through direct assistance to individual students and through the design of subsequent teacher • Explanations, models, and practice activities monitoring for application in real reading situations.

10. Questions from the book… Ahas! • Phonemic awareness may be taking on more of a life of its own than is useful. • Students need to receive more intense decoding rather than phonemic awareness instruction. • Compared to a matched control group, children in the Word Building group made significantly greater progress on standardized tests of decoding, comprehension, and phonological awareness. • Show student the difference between what she read and what should have been read… let child immediately compare her response to correct response. • Adding vocabulary to children’s repertoires and scaffolding their ability to follow a complicated text should not be held back until their word recognition becomes adequate.

11. Questions from the book… Next steps… • Create continuum of when to teach letter identification, word families, and blends. • Create progress monitoring to follow the word building activities. • Discuss successive blending and what that looks like. Demonstration… Reflection. • Create one-sheet script to follow for easy access.

12. Resources Beck, I. L. (2006) Making Sense of Phonics. New York, New York: The Guilford Press Murley, C. (2010) Des Moines Public Schools Retrieved March 18, 2011 http://www.paec.org/teacher2teacher/phonics_notetaking_guide.pdf