Bringing Reading Automaticity into Your Reading Lessons

Hi friends! This week I am going to chat about automaticity, how to build it in word reading with our students, and tips and activities to support this learning. 

What is Automaticity?

Automaticity is defined as fast, accurate, and effortless word identification at the single-word level. Although fluency involves reading words with automaticity and prosody at the phrase, sentence, and text level, accurate and automatic reading is needed to be a fluent reader. 

It is the part of fluency practice where we focus on accurate and speedy word recognition. For this reason, words are read in isolation. This is only one part of fluency instruction, but is often an area where dyslexic and struggling readers need additional practice. 

Students with dyslexia struggle with accurate and automatic reading at the word level. Automatic reading involves developing solid linkages between sounds and their letter representations, leading to fast and accurate retrieval and transfer of this letter-sound knowledge when reading known and unknown words. Research has shown that it is essential for struggling readers to have structured, systematic, and focused instruction when explicitly learning reading. 

As teachers and dyslexia therapists, we need to be prescriptive and diagnostic in our approach, explicitly teaching phoneme-grapheme linkages which builds automaticity on the sound-letter level. We can take this knowledge and transfer it to word reading. 

Working with onset and rime can be an effective way to build automaticity in word reading as phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping skills are developing. During onset and rime work, a student will change the beginning consonant sounds to build new words within a consistent ending rime, or chunk.

Let's take a look at exactly what onset and rime are defined as:

• Onset- The letter or letters at the beginning of a word, not including the vowel.
• Rime- The letters within a word from the vowel to the end of the word (-ack, -et, -ill, etc.).

Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and researcher of language, was noted to have "eloquently remarked, 'Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on'" (Wolf, 2008, p. 19). 

Building Automaticity with Onset & Rime

Next, I'm sharing some simple and fun ways to build automaticity. Let me know if you use any of the following activities. I would love to hear your feedback. 

First, you want to provide students with the opportunity to practice known phoneme-grapheme correspondence by choosing letter representations of sounds explicitly taught. Being strategic and systematic in the approach is necessary for our struggling readers. We want to make sure we are creating opportunities for multi-sensory practice in multiple ways.

Onset and rime flip books are an easy-to-make activity that reinforces learned phoneme-graphemes. Students can create these and practice reading the new word as they flip up the onset.

You can also use letter tiles to build phonemic awareness in connection to reading and spelling. Provide students with an index card and a rime. Then, have students make new words using letter tiles. This is an excellent opportunity to work on chaining within the construct of onset-rime. For example, have the student read the rime -ing, and ask them to add a sound to make the word ping. Then, change one sound to make the word sing, and so on. For additional practice, have students write the words in their spelling notebooks as they build them. 

You can also make simple games to work on automaticity. Spin and read are always a hit with my students. For games like this, be sure to have students identify if a word they make is a real word or a nonsense word. 

Some students will need to take a step back to allow us to move forward in our instruction. A student of mine struggled with the rapid automatic practice of reading words, so I took her back to onset and rime work in a multi-sensory way. We quickly took a strip of paper and added different onsets based on the sounds introduced. She could then slide the rime down the strip of paper and read the new words. Once she practiced with the blending strip, we were able to move to the automaticity charts. Finding ways to meet my students where they are and stretch their learning is one of my favorite things about teaching!

Activities to Practice Sounds

Providing students with activities to practice known sounds in word reading builds fluency and automaticity at the word-reading level. I created onset-rime reading charts for my students to help when they feel overwhelmed when encountering traditional word lists during intervention or in reading groups.

They have been a hit with my students! They love the colorful and engaging keyword and game-style format. We read for a set time, and then students count up the number of words they've read. My students love tracking their progress, and they end up reading so much more than they would have with a traditional list! They have such fun with these activities!

I created individual sets for my own use, and found that others were also interested in these activities. So now, I have the onset-rime packets available for purchase in my TpT store. Click each image to read more about each activity set that I created. 

Each packet includes a teacher guide, progress monitoring form, keywords, and several levels within the set. 

I've put together all five of the onset-rime packets into a bundle. Click here to see the additional packets that are included in the cost-saving bundle.

I appreciate your support! In honor of my birthday on May 1, I am having a birthday sale on my TpT shop! 🎈 Visit my shop on May 1, click here for the link, and grab some fun resources at a great price!

I hope you have found this post helpful and the tips beneficial. Leave a comment if you have any questions or are struggling with building automaticity with your students. I'd love to help!

Casey 

The Dyslexia Classroom