Ep #37: The Best Way to Teach Phonics (Part 2)

It’s also a huge job for parents because we support that and help that at home. Now, talking about reading might not sound like the most exciting topic in the world, but I actually think you’ll find it kind of fascinating, I certainly have. And we make it kind of fun too. I love to make it playful and so I hope you enjoy this series. It’s starting right after this.

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves because you know what? We all really need and deserve that too. I am your host, Amy Nielson. Let’s get ready to start the show.

So we are back this week talking about the science of reading, and it is so fun to nerd out about and learn about. And it is so impactful when we use it well to teach children to read. So today we’re going to talk about word recognition and we’re talking about models of the science of reading. There are typically two different concepts that we are kind of looking at, one of those is word recognition, and then another one is language comprehension.

So in this episode of our series on the science of reading, we’re going to be covering word recognition. Now, when we talk about the models around this, when we’re getting into word recognition, there’s a couple of different parts. So we’re going to focus on those three today. One of them is phonological awareness, and this one’s really important because for decades, science has identified phonological awareness as one of the critical components of children learning to read. So we’re going to talk all about that.

Number two, we’re going to talk about decoding, and this is where kids actually become code breakers. The letters and letter combos can be linked to specific sounds. When they know the code, they can read the words. And then we’re going to talk about third, sight recognition where kids use their brain’s file folder system to sort through and memorize words using orthographic mapping and this is how they kind of build their lexicon. It might sound a little fancy if you don’t know these words, but we’ll break it down. It’ll be really simple and I think you’re going to enjoy it.

So let’s start with phonological awareness. So when we’re starting with phonological awareness, the first piece that we really want to work on with kids is word awareness. So this is basically segmenting and counting words in a sentence. A really good activity for this is basically to just kind of help kids be able to count how many words are in a group, in a sentence. So you can start out with two word sentences, cat, well, I guess you could say Dan ran and then you can say the cat ran. And as you kind of increase, you have the kids segment and identify how many words are in a sentence.

So if you’re doing a two letter sentence, you want them to be able to identify that there are two words in it. If it’s a three word sentence, you want them to be able to identify that there are three words there and you kind of go up in difficulty as they become more proficient. Now, here’s what’s great about this, you guys. kids don’t actually have to be able to read to start working on this. So you can work on this with really young children starting maybe two, three or whatever, just kind of play it as a game and helping them start to kind of be aware of words.

Now, after kids have become proficient with word awareness, we’re going to start working on syllable awareness. This one’s a little bit more tricky, and you’ll notice that we kind of do this sometimes in preschool, kindergarten area, where we’re trying to help kids identify syllables. So we want them to segment down to the syllable. Now, how many times is your chin coming down when you’re saying a word or you can have them touch their elbow or clap out syllables, different things. But we want them to start to identify syllables and each syllable has a vowel sound and we want them to be able to find those in their words.

The next part we’re going to work on is rhyming awareness. Now, rhyming words happen when two or more words end in the same sound or rime, R-I-M-E. Now, this is really, really important because it starts to help kids identify patterns. And patterns make our lives easier. And so if kids can start to recognize patterns and words, they’re going to be able to read a lot faster. It just does some of the work for them. We reduce the work that their brain has to do, which makes them able to read faster and better. And they are going to enjoy it more and be able to read more successfully.

Okay, so rhyming awareness, we do this a lot with word families. If you’ve heard of word families, basically, we start with CBC words and words that end with the same vowel consonant at the end. And then we just switch out that beginning sound and we can kind of create sets of words that rhyme. Now, of course we can do that with other rhyming words as well, and this is again, a fun activity that you can do prior to kids actually being able to read. There’s lots of fun ways to practice rhyming words. You can do silly games with this.

We have lots of ideas on our website, so you’ll want to head over to planningplaytime.com and check it out and find some of the fun rhyming ideas that we have there. Now, I have a really fun activity to go with that that goes with the next part. And the next part that we’re working with kids in phonological awareness is first sound awareness, that beginning sound or initial sound. And we want them to find that word that comes before the rime, that first beginning sound.

Now, this is really, really important for them to be able to hear. They are going to be able to kind of read words easier if they can kind of identify that sound. But then we can also switch that out and change out the whole word while staying within a word family and practicing those rimes. And so these two work really well together.

Now, I was actually working with a child on this recently, I was talking with their parent. Their parent was so frustrated because they had all of these books that were kind of more based on a whole word type of method or what we’ve been using in schools for the past 20/30 years. And their child is just so frustrated because they can’t remember the words from one page to the next because these words are too big and not really working for them. It’s not based in phonics, it’s not based in phonemic awareness.

And this parent was telling me what a frustrating process it’s been to try to read these books and the child’s frustrated, the parents frustrated and it’s heartbreaking, it’s just so hard. So as we were talking, I was just sharing a couple of ideas on how to maybe switch over to using something that the science of reading has told us is going to make this a little bit better or a lot better at teaching real skills and helping this child decode and be able to read.

Now, of course you know I hugely believe in using toys and games to do this. So in this case we had some letter beads that were pop beads that we could put together. And so what we did was we found a vowel and then an ending consonant and we stuck them together with the pop beads. And then we would switch out the pop bead in front of that to kind of switch out and make rhyming words. And this cute little kiddo wanted to go ahead and write all the words too, which is fantastic, you guys.

If you can combine writing with the reading or with your activities, oh my goodness, that’s the magic secret source. So we built as many words as we could and when we ran out of words, we even made some silly ones because making silly words is really silly and it’s fun and kids love silly. And then we could say, “Oh, that’s such a silly word and it’s not real and that’s okay.” And guess what? It’s so great because they’re still practicing the skill of reading and finding that rime and that first sound awareness, all of that. But then also we get to kind of say, “Oh, that’s a word or that’s not a word”, and play a silly fun game with it.

So when we ran out of words with that, that combination of that ending rime, that vowel consonant at the end then we switched out the final consonant and we put a different pop bead on the end. And then we could start all over again with switching out the initial sound. And so we made a whole new list of words, and then we got a little crazy and we switched out the vowel sound. And we made another set of words. This activity is magic, it’s fun, and it is so simple to do.

Now, if you don’t have pop beads, now, by the way, I recommend them, they are so fun, but if you don’t have them, you can do this just as easily with some magnetic letters on your fridge. You could also do this with some of the Mega Blok LEGOs and you could write the letters on them with a marker. Or you can, if you don’t want to keep it permanently on there, you could do a piece of masking tape and then write the letters on there and stick those together and switch out the Bloks.

You could also do it with cars, a little piece of tape on a car or a little circular sticker on it, write the letters, drive the cars in and out to switch out the beginning sound or you can switch out the ending sound when you’ve finished a complete set of rhyming words. Now, all of these ideas are super fun, but you can actually start some of this before kids are actually ready to start reading. You can do this just in the car driving around with playing with it in your head.

So kids are aware of they can speak the words before they can read the words. And so you can kind of play some of these games just in the car driving. And this is really going to prepare them to be so ready when they actually learn their sounds and are ready to begin reading.

Okay, so moving on to the final piece of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. Now, phonemes are the individual sounds in words. We use 44 of them in English language. And if you would like a list of what those are, you can head over to our website and get a copy of that. They are the 26 letters of our alphabet and then combinations of those 26 letters. So we teach these over time and what we’re going to talk about first is just kind of the six stages of building phonemic awareness.

And then if you’d like some suggestions, real life suggestions on how to actually teach those sounds and what that process can look like as you’re introducing each one in the proper way to introduce it and then the order to introduce those sounds, those phonemes, let me know. And come over to Instagram and say hi. You can leave a comment on the podcast or send an email to amy@planningplaytime.com. Let us know that you would like to hear more about that and we’ll see if we can put together a freebie for you and get that into your hands to help you teach those kiddos those sounds.

So as kids are learning sounds, there’s a couple of processes that we’re going to work on. So the very first is blending. And blending is when we’re kind of helping kids take the different sounds of a word and blending them together. We’re going to teach them how to put it all together. So we start out kind of slow. If we’re doing the word hat for example, then you would start out with the h and ah and then t. And we say each sound individually. And then we’re going to try to say it fast and kind of smooch them all together, h-at, hat and we’re going to say it fast.

So that’s blending. It’s kind of a tricky skill. We have a really fun activity for that and our Racing Readers, let us know if you want the information for that or you can go to the podcast notes and see a link to go grab that. So that is blending.

Now, the next piece is going to be isolating. So what is the first sound that you hear in the word ‘bug’? Now, can they hear it? And remember, we talked about that in the phonological awareness. Can they hear that beginning sound? What if we ask you, what is the last sound that you heard? And we want them to be able to really isolate and hear the different sounds.

The next step is going to be just a little bit further, where we call it segmenting. We want them to be able to break down that word into all of the sounds in the whole word. So can they break that down, for example, the word cat into three distinct different sounds c a t? We want to hear all three different sounds that’s segmenting. Now, it gets a little more fun. We are going to talk about adding. So if you add a s to the word top, we’re going to make a new word and it is stop. Or if you’re going to add a s to the end of the word car then now we have the word cars.

So adding sounds or adding phonemes to a word can be really, really fun because we can see what we can make by adding a sound. Can we make it something completely different and crazy? That’s a really fun game to play. Once kids have mastered this skill, the next skill we’re going to do is deleting. Can we take something away and change a word? So in the word ran, if we delete, we’re going to take out, cross out, remove the r, then what do we have left? We have the word, an. Or if we take the word cleaned and we take off the ed sound at the end, then we have the word clean. And so this is deleting. This is again a really fun game to play.

And then our final stage, our final level of this phonemic awareness is substituting. So if we take the word ship and we change the sh, we’re going to take sh away and instead we’re going to use ch, then we change the word ship and made it into chip. Now again, I want you to notice with all of these activities I’m talking about in the phonemic awareness, you can do all of these just talking. You can do these as just out loud games. They don’t have to be something where kids are already knowing how to spell the sound sh or how to spell the sound ch. They don’t have to know all those sounds yet.

This is just an activity you can do with really young kids in a classroom, in a car to help start building that pandemic awareness. And actually scientists are telling us they recommend that we start doing this with preschoolers every day, a little bit of this. Starting as early as age two and three to kind of start building phonemic awareness skills just for fun, just as a fun game. Without having to, of course, really be writing or doing all the letters, they don’t even know the sounds yet, and that’s okay. They’re just able to do them orally.

They can speak them a lot earlier than they can read them because of course, we talked about in our last episode that our brain has developed. It comes with a speech area of the brain, whereas the reading area of the brain is something we kind of have to hotwire and create between the reading portion of our brain and the visual portion of our brain.

Okay, so we have kind of finished our portion on phonological awareness. And what’s cool again, you can use a lot of those activities prior to teaching kids the actual letter sounds and you can also use similar ones after in different ways. But now we’re going to talk about really starting to teach those sounds. We’re going to talk about decoding and this is where the magic starts to happen. This is where kids become empowered. They become code breakers where they can take letters and letter combos and link them to specific sounds and they can know the code and start reading.

Teaching children phonics is the difference between asking kids to solve an encrypted message without help and giving them a cipher to solve it with. Just to give you a little bit of an example of what this can look like, I recently started learning Korean, a little bit of Korean. Now, I’m not great at it yet, but I have been learning a little bit of it. And what I found so fascinating was that in the Korean language they have an alphabet.

Now, it looks completely different than the English alphabet that I’m used to, but they do have an alphabet. So I had previously looked at their characters and just thought it’s a character. I have no idea what that is. It’s kind of like an encrypted message to me. I have no idea what it is. But then as I kind of started to learn the letters of their alphabet and I learned that as you take these different letters that look completely different than letters I’m used to in English and you put them together to build syllables. Then I can actually decode and read Korean characters, even if I don’t know what they mean yet.

I can sound them out and read them and decode them, which is fascinating. So this is exactly what we’re trying to teach kids how to do with English language. We’re teaching them how to look at these letters, look at the code and then know what their cipher, what those letters and letter combos, the sounds that they’re supposed to make so that they can then sound it out and decode what that word says.

Okay, so let’s talk about then the best way to kind of introduce sounds. Let’s talk about the best way to do this. So the first time that we want to do is we want to kind of experience the new sound. When you’re introducing a new phoneme, we want to let them look at it, sound it out, kind of feel it out. We make the sound with our mouth and let them watch it. We maybe exaggerate a little bit and let them try it.

We have a funny meme on social media right now that people are sharing like crazy of this horse that’s making this just the weirdest face. Sometimes horses make funny faces and it’s like this is my teacher face when I’m introducing a new sound from the sound wall. And people have been sharing it like crazy because it’s hilarious because it’s so real. So we’re making the face and we’re teaching our kids how to make the new sound and it’s kind of fun.

Now, the next piece, part two is we’re going to make a list. So we want to make a list of all the words we can think of that have that sound. How many words can you think of that have this sound in it? And we’re going to play detective and kind of think and make a big list and it’s going to be really, really fun.

Now step three is we’re going to teach the letters. We’re going to show how to make that sound. So we’re going to go through our list of all the words that we made that have that sound in it and we’re going to circle the letter or letters used to spell that sound. Here’s where it gets really interesting because of course, sometimes in the English language we make the same sound using different letter combos.

So when we’re focusing on a specific one, then we are going to say, “Okay, there are some different ways to make this sound. Today we’re going to focus on the specific way of making the sound.” So, for example, if you’re teaching the sound, the long vowel a. Then there’s a couple of different ways to make that. So we could say, “Alright, we are going to focus today on all of the ay words and this way to make the sound a.” Or we could do the ai spelling and do all the words like that. And we’re going to kind of help them sort it into patterns but practice the one that we’re working on as we’re introducing a new sound and a specific way to create that sound.

So step four in teaching this decoding process is going to be to read and write that sound. We want practice and repetition. That’s what we want to do to kind of ingrain it in our brains because we want them to memorize it, keep it in their brain. So we are going to practice reading those words over and over and over again from our list. And then we’re also going to practice writing, what are fun ways that we can write this out? Can we do it in chalk outside? Can we do it on a big piece of paper? Can we do it with crayons? Can we do it with paintbrushes?

What are all the fun ways that we can write out these words? Decoding is kind of magical, it’s where it gets really, really, really fun. And if we’ve done the phonological awareness and phonemic awareness activities prior to getting to decoding, oh, my word, the magic is going to happen even so much faster. Now, there is a right order to teach phonics and teach these principles. So we’re going to start out with letter sounds. And then we’re going to work on CVC words, those consonant vowel consonant words. Then we’re going to move on to digraphs and then blends and then silent e.

And then we’re going to work on vowel teams and diphthongs, and then r-influenced vowels. And after that we’re going to do word endings and then contractions. So guess what? If you go and get Play to Read and you go through the units, guess what each unit is? Well, unit one is going to be letter sounds and then we’re going to go to CVC words and digraphs and blends and silent e. And we’re going to work our way right through it and go right in that order as suggested is the best order to teach phonics.

And actually at the end we have some bonus units to teach all these really cool extra spelling hacks because in the English language there are 31 spelling rules. And if you know all of them you can spell basically every word in the English language, almost every word. It’s kind of amazing. Are you curious what all 31 rules are? Because if you are, we just happen to have made a cheat sheet for you and it’s free and it’s on our website.

So we will drop the link to that in the show notes, if you want to know what the secret 31 rules for spelling are in the English language. There might be some in there you don’t know, but they’re kind of magic and they cover almost every word for you in the English language.

Okay, we have talked about phonological awareness. We talked about decoding. And so we’re going to get to that third piece I told you we’d talk about today, which is sight recognition or orthographic mapping. Now, for a long time there was a theory and I think people kind of thought that reading was mostly visual. We have of course, all heard the term sight words. We use them a little bit, and if those are the emphasis, then you kind of maybe want to listen to this because we’re going to talk about why we don’t want those to be the emphasis.

So if we were really just using the visual part of our brain for reading, kids would literally have to memorize tens of thousands of images of words because here’s what happens. Words come in different fonts. They can be all caps or all lower case. They could be big or small. And if we’re just looking at the visual, the picture, then every version of that would have to be a new screenshot in our brain for our sight to translate that into a word. Now, obviously we don’t want that.

So what we want to do is what we’ve talked about previously, which is we’re going to use phonological awareness and we’re going to use decoding to help kids be able to decode and read those words. But what happens as these kids decode and decoding decode and they become more and more familiar with a word, they do start to recognize it by sight. And this is where we get into those high frequency words or sight words is that kids have looked at them and seen them so many times that they can immediately recognize them. They know them by sight and they can read them without having to sound them out.

Now, here’s the challenge, over time, we have used a lot of flash cards and word walls and things to kind of try to teach those and help them memorize the sight words but instead we want to do something different. We want to teach kids how to decode them first, which we can do because there’s rules for decoding all of the common sight words. And what we’re going to do is help kids use their brain’s file folder system to sort words using orthographic mapping. It’s that process of organizing the spelling, pronunciation and meaning of words.

And adding meaning to a letter of a sequence of words allows them to stick in the brain, and ultimately they’re going to memorize 50,000 to 90,000 sight words or high frequency words over a lifetime. Pretty amazing. So if we’re not using flashcards and we’re not using word walls and we’re not doing the reading all of the sight words over and over and over and over again, then what are we doing? So I’m going to give you a six step process to do sound mapping and get those words into a child’s lexicon.

So the first one we’re going to do, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to tap it out. We’re going to tap out each sound in the word. Let’s use the word said as an example word for this. So we’re going to tap it out. We’re going to tap out each sound, s e d. We’re going to tap out each sound, then we’re going to map it. So we’re just going to have, you can use our science of reading resources that we have in our shop for this. And basically they’re going to slide a manipulative, a manipulative is just a little toy, a little item, so you can do a little circle or a little block or something.

So they’re going to slide a manipulative for each sound in the word into the boxes. So for the word said, we’re going to use three boxes. So you’re going to slide, sometimes I even like to use cereals, one of my secret hacks, the little fruit cereal because they love it. So you’d slide one in for each sound. So we’re going to slide one in when we say s and then e, we’re going to slide one in and then d. Now, obviously we know that the e sound is coming from two other letters, but they don’t need to know that yet. For right now, we’re just mapping it and tapping it. So we tapped it, we mapped it. Now we’re going to graph it.

Now, here’s where we go in and again, we have those three boxes because we know there’s three sounds in our word and we are going to write the letters now to spell that word, because this is how we’re doing our sound mapping. And we’re going to put it in our orthographic lexicon. So we’re going to do the first sound, we’re going to write s in the first box. Then in the next box, we’re going to do the next sound. So in this case we’re going to do the ai and that goes in box number two as they’re graphing it. And then of course in the last box, we’re going to do the sound d.

Now, we’ve gone through the first three steps, we tapped it, we mapped it, we graphed it. Now we’re going to write it. We’re going to just write the word on a line, you can just write it out. Then we are going to read it. We’re going to slide our finger under the letters as we read the word. And then of course we are going to last, repeat it. So we’re going to practice those different things over and over again. And what happens then is that we are putting it into our brain. We’re breaking it out.

We’re hearing the different sounds and then we’re spelling the different sounds and we’re working those phonological awareness, phonemic awareness activities that we did. We’re doing the decoding, we’re adding that all in with writing and building just these amazing connections in our brain that are going to help that kid memorize that word and put it into their orthographic lexicon.

Oh, my word, I feel like we covered a lot today, but you guys, this is the stuff. It’s so good. I’ve used this over and over and over again to teach kids to read and it works like magic. And here’s the best part, when you’re working with a kid that is discouraged, that feels like a failure, that is being pressured, and you as a parent or a teacher are feeling pressured to get this kid’s great reading level up. There’s so much pressure around that and it’s so hard. And then reading just becomes this chore and it becomes just this awful, horrible, hard thing. It does not have to be like that.

There is amazing science around how we can teach kids to read more effectively, how we can build the skills in them to help them become code breakers. How we can help them build that phonological awareness so that they just understand how words work and they understand the patterns. And so they can find the patterns, which helps them to be able to read words so much faster later. It’s powerful, I’ve seen it work over and over and over again. And it can be the most fun you have with your kid all day.

I have literally watched kids go from so discouraged and this is the worst thing ever and a parent, grandparent trying to bribe their child to read and it isn’t working to same child hours later, pulling out and doing these activities all by themselves in their free time just for fun. Literally putting the phone down and the games on their phone down to go play with their words. Can you imagine if we could get this to all children, how incredible would this be? How many more kids could learn to read? How many more kids could have the confidence to be readers? We can do it.

And this is why I am so, so, so passionate about adding play and the science and the magic of play to the science of reading because they’re both so powerful and they work so beautifully together. If you haven’t had a chance yet, check out the Play to Read program. It is powerful, it is magic. You can find it at playtoreadfun.com, go look today. It’s amazing.

And next week come back because we have one more episode in this series on the science of reading and teaching kids to read. And this part of the model of the science of reading is the language comprehension part of the model. I feel like this is the part that I knew the least about or was the least aware of. And it is fascinating and it is critical. I have read entire books about it. We’ve actually had a guest on the podcast, it’s a bestselling author on just a small piece of this because it is so important. And the research on it is so strong and kind of mind blowing.

Okay, that’s all I’m going to say about it today but come back next week and you’ll hear all about it. We have talked about how powerful the science of reading is and how impactful it can be when you stack that with the power of play, which is exactly what we’ve done with the Play to Read program. The Play to Read program takes the power of play and combines it with the science of reading and helps children become proficient, confident readers while having an absolute blast and building their fine motor skills, their communication skills and probably their relationship with you.

It is being used successfully all around the world and you can use it too today. Go to playtoreadfun.com to grab that program. Again, that is playtoreadfun.com to get Play to Read Fun today.

Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website planningplaytime.com. See you next week.