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There’s so much more to phonics than simply letters and sounds. Help your students to engage in active word play, learn about the alphabetic principle, master morphology, and develop strong phonemic awareness. Check out these tips and resources all about phonics and word study!
Have you ever noticed students having difficulty not only with visually similar letters such as b and d, but also having difficulty with letter sounds that seem more surprising such as /b/ & /p/ or /k/ & /g/? For mature language learners, it is sometimes challenging trying to find out what is causing the difficulty….
What is the alphabetic principle? To start, let’s come to a common understanding of what we mean by the alphabetic principle. This is not just singing or saying the ABC’s. It is a term used to describe a very important part of the reading process. We are really talking about 2 interconnected skills.
You may think of phonemic and phonological awareness as something for the primary grades, for early readers, or for non-readers. If you teach older struggling readers or language arts classes for upper elementary or middle school, you may not find phonemic awareness tasks among the materials at your disposal. However, for a lot of readers…
Phonemic awareness might be one of the most important, most talked about, and most misunderstood aspects of literacy. Some of that confusion stems from the similarities and differences between phonological and phonemic Awareness. They are very much related, but not interchangeable. If Phonological Awareness is an umbrella that covers skills, those skills include hearing words…
In Part 1 of How To Teach Schwa Vowels, we talked about strategies for learning schwa a. Schwa a is a great place to introduce the schwa vowel because it is predictable in its location and spelling. In addition, this post offers a lot of suggestions about teaching children about accent and stress which is…
Schwa vowels can be puzzling to children and adults at first. Breaking down schwa sounds by groups can be helpful. Starting with schwa a sounds is one of the common unstressed syllables in the English language. With this “How to Teach Schwa Tutorial”, your students will be able to pick this unstressed syllable up rather…
One question that comes up in discussion among OG colleagues more than just about anything else is about students who are having difficulty distinguishing vowel sounds. Sometimes they struggle with two similar short vowel sounds. Sometimes they have difficulty distinguishing between short and long vowel sounds. We are always looking to add to our bag…
As teachers of structured literacy, we soon discover that English is more logical than it appears at first, but that isn’t always the popular opinion out there. This article details several resources to prove WHY English isn’t crazy. Have you ever heard… These are the types of comments I hear from my students during Orton-Gillingham…
Have you ever had a student decide a word didn’t look right so they added an e to the end? When in doubt, they throw an e on the end. Many students learn one of the reasons for silent e as part of the standard curriculum. Most of the other uses remain a mystery. Silent…