Top Ways to Use an Alphabet Arc for Fluency, Punctuation, and Alphabetizing Skills

Today's blog is part 2 of a 3 part series on alphabet tasks you can incorporate into your lessons to build fluency, punctuation work, and alphabetizing skills. 

Hi friends. In part 1 of the series, we spoke about moving beyond the ABC song to help students recognize letters in print using the alphabet arc. Today, we will explore using the alphabet arc to build fluency knowledge, punctuation, and alphabetizing skills. If you missed part 1 of the series, click HERE to learn about sequencing tasks with the alphabet arc. 

🤔 So, What is Fluency?

Fluency is NOT the skill of reading fast! When we read fluently, we read words accurately and at a rate that allows proper expression, phrasing, and intonation. This ability to read well, or automatically, aids in deeper comprehension. 

When students struggle to read fluently, reading comprehension can be affected. This happens because the reader exerts a great deal of cognitive energy and focus on decoding the words, resulting in limited or lost meaning. 

Many struggling readers will get to the end of a paragraph, or page, with little knowledge of what was actually read. Decoding with automaticity frees up our cognitive ability to focus on the passage and task. 

There are many steps to building fluent reading, moving from letter recognition to sound-symbol correspondence to sight word decoding to phrases and sentences. 🗣-->📖

How Does this Connect to the Alphabet?

When we work with the alphabet letters, we begin laying the building blocks for recognizing those orthographic patterns within our printed language. Letter recognition is part of the reading process and lays the foundation for learning the alphabetic principle. Letter knowledge provides students with names and the knowledge that letters represent sounds in our spoken language. 

While letter knowledge alone is not sufficient for good word reading, students who know letter names have an advantage for understanding the alphabetic principle, the understanding that letter and letter patterns represent the spoken sounds in our language.  

⭐️ Start with the Alphabet to build fluency in letter recognition, phrases, and punctuation. 

Our spoken language has a natural rhythm in which we group words into phrases to aid in expression and meaning. This prosody or the intonation, rhythm, and emphasis is key in fluency. 

In reading, phrase reading becomes a bridge from word reading to more fluency reading. A great way to introduce the concept of phrasing to your students is through explicit teaching of phrasing through the alphabet. 

Teach phrases with the alphabet through Alphabet Walks©

Alphabet Walks© are designed for multiple practices with a multisensory approach that focuses on letter knowledge and fluency. Adding movement to learning the sequence and letters of the alphabet is a lot of fun! Watch the video clip above 👆 to see it in action. I have used these for many years with my students, and they are always a big hit! 

How to use Alphabet Walks©

• Lay the cards on the ground in a line, spacing them apart so that you can step between the cards.
• Students say the letter names while focusing on fluency and the phrasing of the card in front of them
• The student says the letter sequence phrase on the card in front of them and then steps to the next card.
• Students continue through the alphabet walk©

My students beg me to set these up, and we get so many quick, targeted, and fun practices! When working with small groups, I have them already laid out on the floor and students do an alphabet walk© on their way to the reading table. Our letter warm-up is done on the way to work! Yeah! 

 For management purposes, I have students form a line. The first student begins with the first card, and the second person in line can begin their alphabet walk© once the person in front of them has reached the third card. This flow continues for the group. I find that they love to go through the walk a few times - and it aids in building their letter recognition fluency and phrasing fluency. 

I created multiple sets that build in difficulty and skill. The groupings change from set to set. The purpose of this is to work on different phrasing options. When practicing these with your students, be sure they aren't singing the alphabet but looking at the letters and saying them with appropriate phrasing. Click the image above or HERE for the resource. 

Teach punctuation with the alphabet arc

Using the alphabet to teach punctuation is a great way to build fluency, phrasing, and even tone with young learners. Teach students what each punctuation mark means and how your voice should sound when encountering a punctuation mark. 

Practicing with the alphabet is an easy way for students to focus on punctuation while removing the cognitive load of decoding. This quick resource is one that I have used to scaffold learning for my students of all ages. Click HERE to check out the resource shown above. 

Once students are familiar with punctuation, or if they continue to struggle with heading periods, commas, etc., have students highlight the ending marks prior to reading. Reference to an anchor chart for what each of these marks means for fluent reading. Having students note the punctuation ahead of reading can bring attention to the writing conventions and their usage. 

 Teach alphabetizing with the alphabet

The alphabet sequence is the perfect way to introduce the skill of alphabetizing to your students. Sequencing is sometimes difficult for students with dyslexia but providing a systematic approach that links their alphabet knowledge to alphabetizing sets them up for success. 

I use a fun approach that I call "Walking the Dog." This strategy provides an explicit,  multi-sensory approach to understanding and practicing alphabetizing skills. 

1. Provide students with a list of words or a group of word cards. Students identify and underline the first letter in the word. If there are words with the same first letter, move to the next letter and determine if the letter is the same or different, and circle/highlight the letter. 
2. Students move a little dog down the alphabet arc or alphabet strip as they "walk their dog" down the alphabet. When they come to a word that begins with that letter, the dog stops. If you really feel like bringing giggles into your lesson, have the dog bark. 🐶. 
3. Students will number, write, or move the word card to be placed in alphabetical order. 

While this skill is often introduced in the younger grades, if you have older students who need practice, this is still an appropriate activity to use to build strategy and knowledge of alphabetizing skills. I just leave off the "barking" part for older students and highlight with different colors, but you know your students best.  

If you want a full resource for teaching this strategy, you can grab my alphabetizing resource in my TpT shop HERE or by clicking the image above.

Helping our students, especially our dyslexic learners, build their letter knowledge and bridging this knowledge to other areas of the alphabetic principle assists them in later reading and spelling applications. This foundational of the alphabetic principle is necessary to teach and doesn't need to be boring, and we can make this learning multi-sensory and scaffold to meet the needs of our unique learners. 

Next week, we will look at linking phoneme-grapheme linkages to our alphabet arc instruction and how to scaffold that instruction to meet the needs of our learners. 

Have a great week!

Casey

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