Every day during my whole group phonics routine, we also do some phonemic awareness training. Not Heggerty (which I do here and there throughout the week when time permits), but a simple and easy routine that I’ve been doing for years now. The routine includes practice with the three most important phonemic awareness skills that budding readers and writers need: first sound fluency, blending sounds, and segmenting sounds.
To read, you need to know how to blend sounds. In order to write, you need to hear what the first sound in a word is and you also need to be able to separate (i.e., segment) all the sounds in a word and then try to write the graphemes that represent those sounds. These three skills are the three main subtests of kindergarten DIBELS, another indication of just how vital they are.
In the video, you’ll see my class practicing all three skills—hearing first sounds, blending, and segmenting—on the same day in about a five-minute routine. I start with the easiest skill and end with the most difficult skill. To get my students to this point, we started with practicing just first sound fluency for two-three weeks. It’s an easy thing to practice, but the students were also learning how to sit still, how to watch me, how to listen, and how to hear and feel sounds in their mouth. That is why we stuck with just this skill for nearly three weeks. Then, I added in blending. By this time, the students could listen to and hear the difference between three sounds and blend them together. All the work I’ve done at my table during centers helped them move into blending three sounds fairly quickly. After another week or two, I added in segmenting. What you see on the video is the first day I’m doing segmenting with my students. They do pretty well; we’ve done some segmenting during whole group writing time.
You’ll see me holding a picture alphabet card for letter Ee. On the back is a list of words that have short e in the initial position and a list of words with short e in the medial position. I just introduced this letter and that is why I’m using these words.
Here’s the good news. Really good news. What you see me doing here—these three skills—is what my whole group phonemic awareness training is going to look like for the next (approximately) five months. Whatever new letter/sound or digraph or diphthong I introduce and teach, I’ll be using that sound to continue practicing and refining these three skills. The students will not tire of this or “master” it until they can blend four, five, six sounds that I give them; use their fingers precisely for segmenting; hear those nasal sounds like /n/ and include them in the segmenting; and many more challenging variations on these skills.
And there’s more good news. You can start these skills with your students tomorrow. You don’t need picture alphabet cards that you can hold in your hand. You don’t need prepared word lists. You don’t have to focus on one sound. You can just look around your classroom and come up with words. Yours might sound like this:
“Copy me, ch-ch-chair.”
Students copy you.
“Copy me, t-t-table.”
Students copy you.
“Copy me, b-b-boy.”
Students copy you.
“I’ll say three sounds and you will blend them together on my signal, /h/ /a/ /t/.
On your hand signal, students say “hat.”
Repeat with two other random (or not so random) CVC words.
“I’ll give you a word and you will tell me all the sounds in the word. Your word is bug.
Count out the sounds by putting your fingers up as the students say, “/b/ /u/ /g/.”
If students get confused or don’t answer in unison, say the sounds with them until they learn how to answer together.
Repeat the segmenting practice with two more words.
It’s that easy. And trust me, it’s effective. It’s even more effective if you listen to students individually as they demonstrate blending and segmenting to determine which students need extra support. I do this at my teacher table during centers using Kilpatrick’s phonemic awareness training. Each student will need to master first sound fluency (“What’s the first sound you hear in ________?”), blending, and segmenting. They will have to get to the point where they can do all of these skills on their own without the help of the whole group (or even a small group) around them.
Note: You’ll see me throw in a bit of vocabulary instruction because I always, always want kids making meaning. It’s important to work on both factors of the simple view of reading: word recognition (decoding) x language comprehension = reading comprehension.
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It all starts on October 3, when my small group instruction starts including individualized phonemic awareness training, students progressing through 34 word lists organized by spelling patterns (yes, the word lists are free to you), word work and spelling and writing sentences, and the most amazing decodable fluency ladders and continuous texts that you’ve ever seen.
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Sincerely,
Randee
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