Many children are first identified as struggling readers/spellers at around age seven or eight, because they are smart enough to get by using faulty strategies for the first couple of years of school, but by the third year it’s obvious that their classmates’ reading and writing is taking off, and theirs is not.
These children often haven’t been systematically and explicitly been taught how to sound words out, and often have very little idea how to pull a word apart into sounds in order to spell it. On tests of phonemic awareness and spelling pattern knowledge (e.g. non-word or low-frequency word reading and spelling tests) they perform poorly.
Many or perhaps most of these children can still catch up, but there’s no time to waste.
Key concepts and knowledge
Your child needs to be absolutely crystal clear about the fact that spoken words are made of sounds, and letters/spellings are how we write them. Written words are not memorised like pictures. Nobody has enough visual memory for that. Looking at the first letter and the picture and guessing is not reading. Each word’s sounds and letters have to be worked through, from beginning to end. English spelling is complicated but learnable, and it’s time to get cracking and systematically learn it.
Your child may first need to learn to sound out little words with very simple spellings. Shelve words with spellings of two or more letters (such as “ar” and “ee” and “sh” and “eigh”) for later by sticking to synthetic phonics teaching materials like the ones suggested below. These start just with tiny, simply-spelt words like “in”, “on”, “up”, “top”, “dig” and “hat”. Different schemes start with different groups of letters, but as seven and eight-year-old children have generally already had a fair bit of exposure to letters, it may not matter which group of letters you start with. They might recognise most or all the letters, but just not know what to do with them.
Say sounds not letter names when working with your child. Sounds are where the rubber hits the road when it comes to decoding and spelling words. Letter names can confuse some children, and lead to them spelling “left” as “lFt” and “self” as “sLf”.
When you say a word for your child to spell, stretch it out and help your child “hear” all the sounds. Make letters available for them to choose from and copy at first, rather than having to remember how to form them, and where (sticking up? Hanging down?) from memory. If necessary, give very specific instructions about how to form each letter e.g. “start here” (drawing a dot) or “circle first” or “line first” or “go this way” (drawing a little arrow), or “this letter is a hanging-down one”. You can find good information about handwriting here and here.
When reading, encourage your child to say a sound for each letter and then blend the sound to make the word. When writing, ask your child to say the sound for each letter/spelling as he/she writes it. Just keep saying “I can’t hear you!” till you can. In the early stages, writing/spelling shouldn’t be a silent activity, because relevant sensory information (seeing the shape of the letters, feeling them in the hand and feeling the sounds in the mouth, hearing the sounds) helps lock sounds and their spellings together.
Once your child knows one sound for each letter, it’s time to start introducing sounds that are spelt with more than one letter, like “sh”, “ch” and “ng”, and combining consonants e.g. “mp” in “jump”, “gr” in “grub”. It’s hard to discern the inside consonants in such words, so this probably needs practice.
Some programs introduce consonant blending before introducing sounds that are represented by two letters (digraphs). Some work the other way around. At this age, the sequence is probably less important than making sure your child learns only one new thing at a time, and gets enough practice to make each new bit of knowledge or skill fast and automatic.
Suggested materials
- Decodable books: Some 7-8 year-olds love the Pip and Tim books or apps, or the Pocket Rockets, but as they are designed for 5-6 year-olds, some older kids aren’t keen. Many 7-8 year-olds love the Magic Belt readers, which have simplified spellings but are full of adventure, wizards, goblins and explosions. The Totem and Alba readers then introduce more complex spellings. However, there are many other beginners’ decodable books available, including some free online ones.
- A moveable alphabet. That single-letter one on your fridge is fine for starters, but pretty soon you’ll need an alphabet with spellings like “sh” and “oo” and “ee” as single items, click here to find one. My own cheap-and-cheerful download-print-and-laminate version is intended to help you explain the complexity of our spelling system, and work on phonemic awareness skills without the extra motor demands of writing. With beginners I only use the single-letter vowel spellings (put all the other orange spellings aside). It comes with suggested word sequences to make e.g make “sit”, change it to “sip”, then “tip”, then “tap”…
- The Spelfabet workbook 1, Level 1 word-building games and free First Phonics Picture book. These are intended to be affordable and straightforward for parents and other non-experts to use, and to provide children with explicit information and plenty of practice at hearing sounds in words and learning how these are represented by spellings.
- Card games like Trugs box 1 or Milo’s Read and Grab games (yellow and light green at first, then pale pink and purple).
- The apps listed in this blog post (if you don’t have an iPad you can use Phonics Hero online.
- The home resources from Get Reading Right.
- Sound Check (book 1) breaks down the task of writing little words well.
- A whiteboard or magnadoodle board can be a fun way for children to experiment with writing little words. The app Oz Phonics 3 has Spelling Pen and Paper tasks which turn this into a quiz/self-test which children often enjoy. Start with the CVC words, and don’t move to the CVCC or CCVC words till your child is getting the CVC ones 90% right.
Children with speech or language delays
Children who are struggling with reading and spelling also often have difficulties with listening and/or speaking, so if you’re worried about these skills, it’s important to seek a language assessment by a Speech Pathologist without delay. Many schools have a Speech Pathologist who can provide this free, as well as providing some therapy at school, and suggestions/activities for you and your child’s teacher.
If your school doesn’t have a Speech Pathologist, you can find private Speech Pathologists in your area using the search function on the Speech Pathology Australia website. If you’re outside Australia, try this site. If you’re in Australia, you might like to ask your GP for a Medicare EPC/CDM referral, so that Medicare can help cover the cost of the first five sessions. Private health funds also provide some rebates for private Speech Pathology services.
5 responses to “3. 7-8 year-olds”
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The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
Hello,
My son is in Year 1 and struggling with his reading. We had him assessed and he was found to have poor auditory discrimination and auditory comprehension skills. The report reccomended we complete a phonics program with him and also look at Earobics, whch is designed to improve auditory skills. I also found Fast ForWord online – have you heard of that? And what are your thoughts?
Obviously we don't want to overload him, as he is only in Year 1. What do you think would be the best way to focus of efforts and time?
His writing is also very, very slow.
Thanks for your time.
Regards,
Mary
Hi Mary,
Since I don’t know your son I can’t give you proper professional advice so please take the following as suggestions/ideas only, and reality-check them with your local professionals if possible. Firstly, I’m surprised that speech therapy wasn’t recommended to help your child with his auditory comprehension, ideally provided via the school. Maybe you’re in a state where there are no therapists in schools? A phonics program also sounds essential to me, make sure it is a Synthetic Phonics one that works from sounds in words to spellings, and does a lot of writing/spelling, not just reading. There are lots listed on my Phonics Resources pages. I haven’t read any proper, recent research on Earobics or used it myself (I bought it and lent it to someone and it was never returned, sigh) but the theory behind it makes sense to me, though I’m not sure whether it offers benefits above and beyond just working on phonics. The research on Fast ForWord is equivocal, but I do sometimes recommend it specifically for students with poor listening skills, not just low literacy. I’ve seen many kids’ listening scores improve after doing it, and when I asked teenagers who have done it what they thought of it, they’ve typically said 1) it’s boring and 2) they can understand their teachers better now. Which works for me, and we buy it for a group of students at the same school, so the per-student cost is quite low. I wouldn’t suggest doing both Earobics and FFW as they target much the same thing. But the primary things I’d suggest you focus on are language therapy and synthetic phonics, with a solid component on segmenting and spelling.
Hope that helps, and please remember that this is not proper professional advice, which I can’t give without seeing your child.
All the best,
Alison
Thanks so much for you reply! That was really helpful.
There are just SO many options out there, so trying to work out the best one.
Kind Regards,
Amy
Hi Alison,
Thanks for sharing so much incredible information. I recently read Mark Seidenberg’s Language at the Speed of Sight and feel like it explained everything that is going on with my daughter, who is otherwise a bright and capable child, but is eight years old (Grade 2 in the US) and has not progressed meaningfully in her reading since beginning kindergarten.
Incidentally, she receives speech therapy (outside of school) 1x weekly and has worked extensively on the “th” and “r” sounds, and I suspect that her inability to pronounce these phonemes (especially r-controlled vowels) may be interfering with her ability to decode and encode. The school does not think that the speech issues and the reading issues are connected, but the school is also devoted to a Balanced Literacy approach and woefully out of step with the Science of Reading research.
As a former teacher, I am taking on teaching a synthetic phonics approach at home about 10-20 minutes per night, and we are slowly and systematically working through the sequence in the Explode the Code books, with some Tim Rasinsky word ladders thrown in for fun. My question for you is: should I (or the speech therapist) be doing something specific to the sounds that she struggles to articulate, and are there any other activities that you think would be especially important given her profile?
Thank you,
Shipley
Hi Shipley, Thanks for the lovely feedback. I definitely do think your daughter should have articulation therapy targeting the sounds she still can’t say correctly, and it sounds like your speech pathologist is onto this. /th/ is not very hard to establish but it’s quite hard to generalise to conversational speech, especially in kids who can’t read well so they can’t see how f/v and th look different in words, as well as sounding slightly different. /r/ is often a lot harder to establish correctly at age 8, I struggle to do it myself, and then generalising can be another struggle, but again I’m sure seeing the difference in the letters helps reinforce the sound difference. I’m sure your speech pathologist knows all the techniques to try, and is working through them.