This week, I'm sharing a short video with quick tips for helping your students remember short vowel sounds.

Clearing Up Short Vowel Sounds with Movement Cues

If you work with early learners or dyslexic learners, you may need a great deal of practice with short vowel sound production. Many children will confuse vowel sounds in phonology work, reading, spelling, and sometimes running speech. This may occur for several different reasons. Some children may find sound discrimination tricky, and others may struggle with recalling the sounds when given a letter representation. Some students may also struggle with phonological processing, have speech sound errors, sound substitutions, omit sounds, add sounds, or distort sounds. If this is the case for your students, keep reading. This week, I'm sharing some tips for teaching short vowel sounds. 

Closed syllables, a syllable with one vowel followed by one or more consonants, make up almost half of all syllable types. When we can engage...

Recently, I've gotten a lot of questions about fluency and how to teach scooping. I made this video to help answer some of your questions and share a tip I have for building scooping skills. 

How To Build Fluency

There is also a past blog post, Building Fluency In Our Students, that you might want to read for more information about this. Find it HERE.

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Individual phoneme production is an integral part of reading and spelling instruction. As educators, we need to be solid in understanding and implementing individual speech sounds. Students need to be able to isolate phonemes to segment. The skill of segmenting is the ability to take apart individual phonemes and sounds within words. 

Throughout history, scholars have been fascinated with understanding the production of sounds. This work primarily rested with phoneticians, linguists who specialize in phonics, especially the work of Dr. Daniel Jones.

Professor Daniel Jones's system of Cardinal Vowels is one of his most lasting legacies. His chart, developed in 1917, is still referenced as we work with sounds and articulation. I was so excited when I came across the 4th edition of his book An English Pronouncing Dictionary (1937), in which his Outline of English Phonetics chart shows his system of Cardinal Vowels and the English Vowels.

I will leave the...

Asking students questions has long been a teaching tool used to assess student knowledge, engage in conversations, and promote comprehension. Research shows that using questions in instruction is more effective than without; however, not all questions are the same. So often, we ask questions at the end of an assignment or lesson to determine student learning outcomes. When asked this way, our primary focus is on comprehension of a lesson or reading assignment, etc., but what if we used questions within our explicit instruction to guide students to learn a new concept? 

Can our instruction include a discovery model of a concept while still being explicit instruction? 

My answer is yes!

In our Orton-Gillingham approach, we use explicit and thoughtful questions to lead students to discover a concept. We do this in a multisensory way in which students engage in more than one sense at a time (see, hear, feel, move). 

"Explicit instruction does not leave anything to chance...

If you are anything like me, you ran out of space on your bookshelf a long time ago but can't stop buying books! Seriously though, as educators, I believe that we are lifelong learners, and therefore, I tend to seek out books that further my knowledge and help me improve my craft of teaching. 

If you follow me on Instagram, you will often see me sharing books for educators and students. In October, I shared my list of books every dyslexia educator should own. Read it HERE.

Now, I'm sharing ten more books about literacy, writing, learning, and dyslexia that I think are worth the reading. 

Working memory is a topic that often comes up in meetings with parents and schools surrounding dyslexia. Some children have a learning profile that indicates a need for further assistance with working memory. You can catch an entire episode on working memory on the Together in Literacy podcast. Find the episode HERE.

 The first two books I recommend are an excellent way to...

While we want to be alert for the early indicators of dyslexia, there continues to be some misunderstandings surrounding reversals and dyslexia. One of the most frequent questions I receive from parents and educators alike is, "Is there a link between reversals and dyslexia?" 

While many people identify reversals as a dyslexic trait, this is not a characteristic associated with dyslexia. There is no evidence that dyslexic minds see or read letters or words backward. In addition, dyslexia is not caused by a problem with vision but is linked to a phonological processing deficit. See the International Dyslexia Association definition on dyslexia below . 

Reversals and Handwriting Development

Many children reverse letters as they begin to learn to read and write. As students learn letters and handwriting skills, we may see letter reversals until age 7 to 8. This is a normal age range for children to still have some reversals in their handwriting. Backward writing and reversals...

If you are in the world of dyslexia, then understanding and advocating for accommodations is part of the journey. Accommodations are essential for our children because they act as a bridge to access the curriculum.

Things like extra time, not marking off for spelling errors outside of a final draft, and not requiring reading aloud in front of peers are examples of some accommodations. While many people may not fully understand accommodations or how they work in the school and work setting, it is vital to address that they are tools and in no way unfair. Accommodations are not cheating or a crutch but a tool our students use to level the academic playing field and ensure equal learning access.

This week on Instagram when I shared the alphabet chart I use with my early learners, including mouth formation cues and corresponding keywords, I received a question about the research behind articulatory awareness regarding reading instruction. It is so important that our work be grounded in current research, so I appreciated this question and want to address it here. 

In my work with students, we focus on the speech-to-print approach. I explicitly teach phonemes, or those individual speech sounds, to students. We begin by introducing the sound and connection to the mouth formation. Research shows that our brain makes memory traces of sounds by paying attention to our mouth formations. When we begin with this sound, we're laying the foundation for knowledge of graphemes. This articulatory awareness anchors our phoneme-grapheme correspondences.

Obviously, I am a big proponent of beginning my literacy instruction by focusing on speech production and then linking that...

Word chaining and the building of words should be a part of every literacy lesson for beginning readers. When students build words based on the sound symbols explicitly taught, they engage in the orthographic mapping process, which is essential for reading and writing. This linking of speech-to-print is critical for learning to read, and it's fun! Students can participate in hands-on manipulation of letters to create, read, and manipulate new words.

Why is it essential to link sound to letters?

This mapping of speech to print can immediately unlock reading for children. How wonderful is that?! 

Dr. Martin Kozloff (2002) stated, "If a child memorized ten words, the child can only read ten words, but if a child learns the sounds of ten letters, the child will be able to read 350 three-sound words, 4,320 four-sound words, and 21,650 five-sound words."

There is no guessing when one can map the speech sounds to the representation within our orthographic system....