September 2023 – Reflect

Blending Practice

Once students learn letter sounds, they need lots of practice blending words together. There are a few different ways you can give this practice.

There are two main things that can make blending difficult for some children: auditory processing weakness and short-term memory weakness. You must ensure students are automatic with letter sounds as well. Often, times students are not automatic enough with some sounds, and it slows them down, and they are not hearing the blended word. You should not be discouraged from working with students on blending if they do not know all letters and sounds, however. It is our job to know the letters and sounds we have taught and that each student has internalized. Hold students accountable for what they know. Work with those sounds when practicing blending, while pushing them forward.

When working with readers on blending, you need to keep a few things in mind. Recognize that some sounds are continuous sounds while others are stop sounds. When students recognize this after modeling and discussion, it helps them fluently blend words.

When introducing CVC words to beginning readers, make sure to do so by modeling how to say the words without completely stopping between sounds. We have to make certain that our kids understand that the individual sounds in words blend together. This is also where Set For Variability comes into play. I discussed this in my last blog post.

One strategy that I have found helpful when a student is struggling with blending is teaching them to blend the first two sounds in a word together. This works with CVC words and words with blends and digraphs. The kids who have processing issues often mix up the last sound. Blending the first two sounds together helps alleviate some of the cognitive load. It also activates their word knowledge causing the brain to start making connections with possible words students have in their oral vocabulary and or reading and writing memories.

This can also make easier transitions when working with word chunks and words that rhyme. Our brain is always trying to make meaning and does so when learning to read by recognizing meaningful letter strings and chunks contained in words that can help us understand their meanings.

I have linked a blog post from Burkins & Yates discussing some other great things to keep in mind when teaching blending.

7 Ways to Use Our Decodable Word Lists and Sentences (Part 2)

Enjoy, they offer some great ideas!

Troy

Set For Variability

You may have been hearing the term set for variability being used lately. It is a term often talked about within the science of reading movement. Research discussing Set for variability has been out for a while.

Set for variability refers to the ability to take an approximation error of a word and fix it into the correct word. Some are now labeling it as a strategy to help solve irregular words. It is more of a process readers must be able to perform. For Set for variability to be successful, a child must have phonemic awareness, and letter-sound knowledge, be able to decode and blend, and have a representation of the target word in her oral vocabulary (see Elbro, de Jong, Houter, D., & Nielsen, 2012).

It also requires self-monitoring skills. Readers must be willing to do some self-teaching and take a leap, trying out the word in a slightly different way.

It involves the manipulation of sounds, adjusting the mispronunciation into a word they have heard that makes sense of the sentence. Notice how making meaning never goes away. Our brains naturally try to find meaning.

Be aware that too much phonics and exposure to 100% decodable books will not allow students to use the process of Set for variability. Readers have to be exposed to words they cannot sound out early on. Not just High-Frequency words either. They must learn to play around with sounds in words and change mispronunciations into meaningful words.

Here are a few helpful ideas to set your students up to learn this process.

As teachers, we have to coach kids into listening and switching the sound they say to something that gives the word meaning and sounds like a word they know and have heard

We can use phrases like “What else could it be” (Marnie Ginsberg)
Try it again

In their book Shifting the Balance, Burkins & Yates created a charge to help us teach kids to be flexible. I have provided a snapshot of it.

Help students use it with irregularly spelled High-Frequency words.

Words like: what, saw, was

I see 1st-grade readers try sounding out the word “what” all the time and then self-correcting after a brief pause, an example of students using Set for variability.

I recently worked with a struggling 3rd grader who got stuck on the word “tube.” First, he decoded it perfectly, but with a short u sound. I asked him to try again and pointed to the e. He perfectly sounded it out again with the u saying its name. The long u sound is tricky, however, and it often does not perfectly say its name. I had to help him work through this. He was frustrated because he was following the rules he had been taught, and it was not working. I helped him use meaning and structure to make a leap to the correctly pronounced word.

A short a sound is often tricky for kids first learning short vowels. Think about the words am, ran, etc. The short a sound is not always pure.

So, teach students to first read with their eyes and say all the sounds in the word. If incorrect and their decoding attempt was phonetically accurate, have them use the sense-making processes we are more familiar with. They can cross-check the approximation they said with known words and for meaning.

Troy

Knowledge Is Comprehension in Disguise

Think about content goals as well as literacy skills, goals, and objectives. You should have a content goal for students to engage them in the text. Also, have literacy skill goals and objectives you can pull from your district and state standards.

The content goals will help hook the students into reading. You must give them a reason to read.

For example, consider this content goal or reason to read for students in a well-known text like Chicken Little.

Content Goal: Read to find out a mistake Chicken Little makes. This mistake led her to mislead others into believing something that was not true. Let’s read to figure out what her mistake is. Maybe we can learn from her mistake to help us live better lives.

Then, you can also have a literacy goal or objective that ties into your district curriculum and state standards. But it would be best to keep the text at the center of comprehension work. Use the text to plan your lesson to develop the processes, skills, and knowledge necessary to work with texts and readers. It is not isolated skill work. Consider how the literacy skill, strategy, or objective can support the student in bringing their knowledge to the forefront.

Susan Neuman once said knowledge is comprehension in disguise. We must help students build knowledge, not just skills, to comprehend texts. Oral language that students hear, speak, and interpret becomes the words of the texts they are asked to read. Oral language comprehension must be happening for it to be translated into print. Comprehension depends on what kids bring to the text and how we continue to develop our language competencies.

Kids must use multiple language and cognitive processes to comprehend what they read. They must:

Process the language of the text
Have word recognition and utilize decoding skills
Understand the meaning of the words, working out the syntactic sense of the sentences(sentence comprehension)
Understand the vocabulary and learn new language as they read
Integrate the meaning of multiple sentences as they read. (which requires some inferring).
Incorporate background knowledge and apply it in specific ways
Understand what is not specifically stated, along with literal knowledge

We have to help students integrate and elaborate on what they are reading with the lives they lead within and outside of school.

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