If you have participated in our Intro to Science of Reading, particularly sessions 5 & 6, this is an extension of what we practiced in the structured literacy lessons. We will go deeper into instructional routines we touched on in those sessions.
Participation in the previous sessions is not required, though. If you teach literacy with small groups, especially K - 2nd, this session could be helpful for you. It's a grab bag of valuable instructional routines which are most commonly skipped for various reasons, most often time constraints.
In this session, we will examine and practice:
- Letter formation
- Writing letters by hand is an integral part of learning letter/sound correspondences. It is also the best way to avoid ongoing confusion of identically shaped letters such as b/d.
- Using a verbal pathway and kinesthetic input to learn and practice letter formation supports all learners.
- Phoneme (sound) blending
- This is crucial to students' reading success. We'll examine basic classroom instruction in phoneme blending and also techniques to use when we need to provide students more support with this skill.
- Irregular words
- Most English spellings follow common spelling patterns. And even those with unexpected spellings are still mostly phonetic. We'll look at the "heart method" for teaching irregularly spelled words.