A Phoneme is the smallest unit of sound (no visual here, only oral) can be used in rhyming words, segment words into individual sounds, and invent silly words by playing around with sound.
A Grapheme is the written representation of a phoneme using one or more letters, singing the ABC song, spelling their names.
The graphophonemic relationship happens when students match letters and letter combinations to sounds, blend sounds to form words, and decode and spell vowel patterns.
Phonemic Awareness takes place when students learn to manipulate the sounds of oral language. They are phonemically aware when they understand spoken words are made up of sounds, and they can segment and blend sounds into spoken words.
Phonics is when children learn to convert letters into sounds and blend them to recognize (visually see words) them.
Phonemic Awareness Strategies: Children learn to manipulate spoken language in these ways:
- Identifying sounds in words: such as doll ends with /l/ and starts with /d/.
- Categorizing sounds in words: ring, rabbit, sun. (sun doesn’t fit in)
- Substituting sounds to make new words: bar to car, gate to game.
- Blending sounds to form words: /b/ /i/ /g/ is big
- Segmenting a word into sounds: feet is /f/ /e/ /t/
Teaching Phonemic Awareness: This is done through songs, chant rhymes, read aloud wordplay books, and play games, children have many opportunities to orally match, isolate, blend, and substitute sounds and to segment words into sounds.
- Sound-matching activities:
- Sound-isolation activities: what sounds starts these words (chick, chin, cheek)
- Sound-blending activities:
- Sound-addition and subtraction activities
- Sound-segmentation activities: p-p-p-popsicle
- Elkonin Boxes: used to teach students to segment words. The teacher shows an object or a picture of an object and draws a row of boxes, with one box for each phoneme in the name of the object or picture. Then the teacher or a child moves a marker into each box as the sound is pronounced. These can also be used to teach spelling.
Phonics is the relationships between phonology, the sounds in speech, and orthography, the spelling patterns of written language. The emphasis is on spelling patterns, not individual letters, because there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in English. Phonemes are spelled in different ways. Such as bit-bite. Etymology, or language origin, of words also influences their pronunciation. For example, the /ch/ in chain, /sh/ in chauffeur, and /k/ in chaos.
A digraph is the combination of two letters representing one sound. Consonant digraphs are letter combinations representing single sounds that aren’t represented by either letter; the four most common are /ch/ in chair and each, /sh/ in shell and wish, /th/ in father and both, and /wh/ in whale. Vowel Digraphs are a combination of two vowels to make a single sound such as nail, or snow.
When the two vowels represent a glide from one sound to another, the combination is a diphthong. The vowel combinations that are consistently diphthongs are oi, oy, ou in house but not in through, and ow as in now, but not in snow.
When one or more vowels in a word are followed by an r, it’s called an r-controlled vowel because the r influences the pronunciation of the vowel sound. For example, (say these aloud), start, award, nerve, squirt, horse, word… and so on.
Phonograms: One-syllable words and syllables in longer words can be divided into two parts, the onset and the rime: The onset is the consonant sound, if any, that precedes the vowel, and the rime is the vowel and any consonant sounds that follow it. For example, in show, /sh/ is the onset, and /ow/ is the rime.
The best way to teach phonics is through a combination of explicit instruction and authentic application activities. (see page 161-2, for sequence of phonics instruction chart and phonics rules) Children use different techniques to identify unfamiliar words, 1. sounding out words, 2. decoding by analogy, and 3. applying phonics rules. CVC – consonant vowel consonant.
- Explicit instruction: teachers present minilessons, explicitly presenting information about a phonics strategy or skill, demonstrating how to use it, and presenting words for students to use in guided practice.
- Application activities: children apply the phonics concepts they’re learning as they read and write and participate in teacher-directed activities. In interactive writing, children segment words into sounds and take turns writing letters and sometimes whole words on a chart. They also make words, and work on correcting errors and review consonant vowel sounds and patterns.
Stages of Spelling Development occur as young children begin to write based on their knowledge of phonology. There are five stages of spelling development:
- (3-5 year-olds) Emergent Spelling: here children string together scribbles, letters, and letterlike forms, but they don’t associate the marks they make with any specific phonemes. During this stage they learn: The distinction between drawing and writing, how to make letters, the direction of writing on a page, and some letter-sound matches.
- (5-7 year-olds) Letter Name-Alphabetic Spelling: Children learn to represent phonemes in words with letters. They develop an understanding of the alphabetic principle, that a link exists between letters and sounds. During this stage they learn: The alphabetic principle, consonant sounds, short vowel sounds, consonant blends and digraphs.
- (7-9 year-olds) Within-Word Pattern Spelling: Students begin with the within-word pattern stage when they can spell most one-syllable short-vowel words, and during this stage, they learn to spell long-vowel patterns and r-controlled vowels. They learn: long-vowel spelling patterns, r-controlled vowels, more complex consonant patterns, diphthongs and other less common vowel patterns, homophones.
- (9-11 year-olds) Syllables and Affixes Spelling: Students focus on syllables in this stage and apply what they’ve learned about one-syllable words to longer, multisyllabic words. They learn: inflectional endings (-s, -es, -ed, -ing), rules for adding inflectional endings, syllabication, compound words, contractions.
- (11-14 year-olds) Derivational Relations Spelling: Students explore the relationship between spelling and meaning during this stage. And they learn words with related meaning are often related in spelling despite changes in vowel and consonant sounds. (wise-wisdom, sign-signal, nation-national) Students learn: Consonant alternations (e.g. soft-soften, magic-magician), vowel alternations (e.g. please-pleasant, define-definition), greek and latin affixes and root words, etymologies.
Teaching spelling is best done by conducting weekly spelling tests along with a complete spelling program. This includes teaching spelling strategies, matching instruction to students’ stage of spelling development, providing daily reading and writing opportunities and teaching students to spell high-frequency words. Students learn spelling strategies like: segmenting the word and spelling each sound, often called “sounding it out”, spelling unknown words by analogy to familiar words, applying affixes to root words, proofreading to locate spelling errors in a rough draft, and locating the spelling of unfamiliar words in a dictionary.
Some teachers use Word walls, for familiar commonly used words, or it can also have “important” words on it. Making words activities are fun. Teachers put together letter cards to assist students in making words. Word Sorts are used to explore, compare, and contrast word features in a pack of word cards. Interactive writing is used to teach spelling concepts as well as other concepts about written language. Proofreading is used so that students can local misspelled words and other mechanical errors in rough drafts. Dictionary use helps students locate the spelling of unfamiliar words. Spelling options are used for many sounds because so many words borrowed from other languages retain their native spellings.
Studying Spelling Words:
- Say the word.
- Read the letters.
- Spell the word.
- Write the word.
- Write the word again.
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