Spelfabet

Closing the teacher education phonics black hole

Last week I played local host to the first Melbourne Sounds~Write four-day training, attended by 31 fabulous teachers and speech pathologists from Victoria, NSW and ACT.

I travelled to Perth for this course last year, and really liked it because of the strong emphasis on empowering teachers to teach really well, and the noticeable lack of sales pitches for glossy, expensive materials. I’m convinced that if a course like this were included in teacher undergraduate courses, and offered to current early years and specialist literacy teachers, many or perhaps most of children’s current literacy difficulties could be prevented, or speedily remediated, in a time and cost-efficient way.

The course builds teachers’ understanding of our sound and spelling system, and provides the skills and all the materials to teach it, with classes, small groups or individuals. Unlike many phonics programs, it works right through from little words to long multi-syllable ones containing complex and unusual spellings, and organises them all in a consistent and logical way.

Education graduates often tell me that they learnt next-to-nothing useful about sounds and spellings at university. In schools I see many, many teachers who are simply fabulous at nearly everything they do, except phonics. There is (as one course participant put it) a black hole in teachers’ phonics knowledge and skills, and it needs to be closed. (more…)

Choosing a book for your child

Today’s Australian edition of The Conversation contained an article that really made me see red, called “Ditch the home readers – real books are better for your child”. Its advice from a literacy academic frankly contradicts the scientific research on how best to teach literacy.

The author’s argument is that readers with simplified spellings are boring, and children should be free to choose and independently tackle whatever books interest them.

He says (and I can’t believe I am not making this up), “Don’t worry about the book being too hard – you can use a strategy to help your child access the text when reading together at home, or you can read it to them.”

Well, I agree wholeheartedly with the second suggestion. Of course adults should read all kinds of interesting books to beginning readers, to show them what a powerful, wonderful thing reading is, and to develop their oral language skills and knowledge about the world.

However, the idea that children should be encouraged to themselves tackle books that are too hard for them is simply outrageous. Would we encourage children to ride bikes that are too big for them? To cook a three-course meal before they can make toast? To play a symphony before they can play a simple tune? I know lots of children who were set up to fail at reading like this, and if it carries on, it makes them think they are stupid, give up and eventually hate school. (more…)

Teaching vowel spellings

I’ve made a short video of myself teaching a student how to spell some words containing the sound “ay” as in “name”, “rain” and “play”, using my Workbook 4.

Teaching strategies and ideas are highlighted in onscreen text, here it is on Youtube.

I hope this is useful to people using, or thinking of getting, the Spelfabet Workbook 4 or 5, and/or that it includes some ideas and strategies that are useful to parents, aides and others who are teaching vowel spellings using other materials. (more…)

Printable wordbuilding card games

Please note that as of July 2019, the games in this post have been superseded by the ones you can find in this blog post.

It’s been pouring for most of today here in Melbourne, so I’ve been feeling sorry for everyone stuck indoors during the summer holidays. On the plus side, this has motivated me to finally stop obsessively polishing my four new word-building card games, and make them available here.

These games are designed to help learners practice their blending and phoneme manipulation skills, and to learn how to use and combine a variety of graphemes (spelling patterns) representing individual phonemes (speech sounds) in English.

You can find fairly detailed descriptions of each game in each one’s entry in my website shop, so I’ll just put little videos about each one plus a summary in this blog post.

“Short” vowel wordbuilding game

Here learners build words using single-letter vowel spellings, and consonant spellings including “ck”, “ng”, “ff”, “ll”, “ss”, “zz”, “x”, “tch” and “dge”, “sh”, “ch” and “th”. This game also provides lots of opportunities to learn which consonant combinations (blends) are typical of English, such as “fl” and “str” but not “vm” at word beginnings, and “nch” and “mp” but not “jn” at word endings. (more…)

Let’s call “nonsense word decoding” “new word attack”

A key criticism leveled at the very sensible use of nonsense words to assess children’s awareness of sounds and spelling pattern knowledge is that they don’t mean anything.

But how true is that?

In the UK all Year 1 children’s reading word attack is now tested via a Phonics Screening Check, so I thought I’d ask Google for definitions of some of its example nonsense words:

(more…)

Speak like the Queen when spelling long words

Recently I told a tweenage student to “speak like the Queen” when spelling long words, and her mother said “I don’t think you’ve ever heard the Queen speak, have you?” (headshake). “We must listen to the Queen’s Christmas Message this year”.

The Queen’s Christmas Message was A Thing Australians listened to, before we had 27,000 TV channels and our own national anthem, and before Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of this Realm and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith became so elderly she stopped going on telly much.

Fortunately, not only is Her Majesty now on Twitter, but her Christmas messages are on Youtube, in case any kids you know want to listen to them, with a view to imitating her wonderfully rounded vowels and crisp and precise consonants while spelling. Here’s last year’s, skip to 0:45 on the video clock for where she starts talking:

https://youtu.be/b7F-HJRJ2Hc

I’m sure if we all enunciated words like “sculpture”, “reconciliation”, “sacrifice”, “captured”, “referendum” and “Ebola” like Her Majesty, we’d always spell them right. (more…)

Make them laugh and let them win

Parents often report difficulty getting their children to work on their reading and spelling at home. Sometimes it’s hard even to get them to play games.

Children with reading and spelling difficulties tend to associate these activities with failure and unhappiness, so of course at first they aren’t too keen on them.

We need them to associate reading and spelling with success and happiness, so they’ll work willingly and get through the amount of work they need to do to catch up. It’s vital to choose work that’s at the right level and give them lots of strong and specific praise.

Games are a great opportunity to really heap on the success and happiness. Here’s a short video of me teaching the great little boy who appeared in my last two videos how to pay memory, using cards from the Get Reading Right Picture This card game.

He didn’t read a lot of words during this game, but he had a great time, and learnt how to play the game. The next steps would be to speed up the game and add more cards so he is reading more, and then introduce different cards with additional sounds and letters, and/or longer words. There are six decks of cards in this card game, so it gives lots of opportunities for controlled reading practice.

As always, thanks so much to the boy in the video and his parents for letting me make and share this video.