Three Ways to Use an Alphabet Arc for Word Building, Part 3

Today's blog is part 3 of a 3 part series on word-building tasks you can incorporate into your lessons using your alphabet arc. If you missed part 1 or part 2 of the series, click each link to learn additional skills to build with the alphabet arc. 

Practice makes permanent! This saying is something that I come back to often as I reflect on my lessons. Am I providing enough practice for my students to solidify their learning and gain automaticity in word reading? We know that the brain needs to make new neural pathways to convert our oral language to the linguistic code as there is no specific reading center in the brain. It's hard work! 

Children who are learning to read need to spend time decoding - the practice of linking speech sounds to print. This decoding work is the heavy lifting that needs to occur during reading instruction to allow for the orthographic mapping process to occur. 

Orthographic mapping is the process that we use to become successful readers. It involves the linking of spoken sound units to letter representations within our language. It connects to spelling, pronunciation, and meaning to immediately retrieve words and combine this knowledge with unknown words. For more information on orthographic mapping, click here for the post.

While some children may transfer knowledge in one-to-four exposures, many need more practice to automatize their reading. Those with dyslexia need explicit and systematic instruction in phonics and ample opportunity to bridge this knowledge to practice. 

A great way to provide practice that allows for this bridge of knowledge is with word-building skills. The alphabet arc offers students an effective way to practice the sound-symbol relationships, those phoneme-grapheme correspondences, to reinforce the orthographic mapping process. 

Using your alphabet arc for word-building tasks

Explicitly teaching reading and spelling together is a powerful and effective approach. There is no need to wait to apply spelling linkages. When we teach decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) together, we are helping children map the sounds to print.

Where to begin? 

Link sounds to print right from the start. Before spelling words, students can practice linking the individual sound they hear with the corresponding grapheme(s) (letter/s) representing a single sound). 

You can use the alphabet arc for this practice by providing students with a word or picture and have them echo the sound and then pull the corresponding grapheme (letter). You can scaffold this instruction to have students identify the sound in the initial, final, and medial positions. 

Explicitly teach phoneme-grapheme correspondences. Connect sounds to letters from the start. This instruction helps students link the sound that they hear with the letter representation for that sound. Over time, more and more phoneme-grapheme correspondences are taught. 

If you need to scaffold for students, you can provide only those letters taught to place on the alphabet arc or on a sound mat. This works well for students who may be overwhelmed with the alphabet arc when working on linking sounds to letters. 

FREEBIE ALERT! I made a bundle of printable sound mats that you can access in the freebie library! Don't have access yet? Click here to join the community and gain access.

Add daily review of previously taught sound-symbol correspondences to your reading lesson. By having students connect sounds to print by mapping the sounds to the letter representations, they solidify the connection between what we hear and what letter represents that sound. Students then practice applying this skill to spelling by segmenting words into individual phonemes and writing down or pulling from the alphabet arc the corresponding graphemes. Read more about spelling linkages HERE in this blog post. 

Segmenting and Blending Tasks

Beginning readers need to possess phonemic awareness, especially in the area of segmentation and blending. Segmentation facilitates the activation of connections between phonemes and graphemes and blending facilitates the application of a decoding strategy for reading unknown words. These two imitate the process of orthographic mapping.

The power of segmenting connects to both decoding, reading, and encoding or spelling. Segmenting is the ability to identify and segment individual phonemes (sounds) within a spoken word. 

Elkonin boxes, pom-poms, mini-erasers, colored tiles, etc. provide a place marker for students to hold the individual phonemes in their phonological memory. The procedures are such:

• Teacher says a word. 
• Students echo the word. 
• Segment each sound as you tap or place a marker of some sort to represent each sound.  
• Student then blends the sounds together to read the word or puts the word together orally. 

For example, for the word fit, we would segment the sounds into /f/-/i/-/t/. There are three sounds within this word, so students would pull a pom-pom to represent each sound. Students then blend the sounds to read the word. 

We want to remember that phonemic awareness lays the foundation for reading and that students who struggle with phonics and decoding often have severe weaknesses in phonological awareness.

Word ladders or word chains

Chaining, or word ladders, is a powerful way to build phonemic awareness, decoding (reading), and encoding (spelling) all at once. This activity helps students link speech to print as they manipulate the sounds within words.

If you learned that phonemic awareness could be done in the dark, and once letters are added, it becomes phonics, this is true. However, research shows that when we link sound to letters and manipulate these, it helps to solidify the speech-to-print connections, which is part of orthographic mapping. This means that even with our early learners, we can begin phoneme manipulation tasks. 

Building new words based on previously taught phoneme-grapheme correspondences is crucial. Phoneme manipulation requires students to utilize their understanding of segmentation, blending, the position of sound within the word, and the ability to isolate and change the sound to create a new word. A lot is going on with this task. 

How to get started with phoneme manipulation tasks 

• Identify previously taught phoneme-grapheme correspondences (those letter representations that have explicitly been taught and linked to sounds)
• Prepare your word list ahead of time. This is key to student success and makes your lessons move smoothly. 
• Provide the student with a word.
• Student echos the word and then segments the sounds in the word. You can have the student tap the sounds, pull a manipulative, or draw a line for each phoneme.
• Student then pulls the corresponding letter representation.
• Read the word. 
• The word remains, and the teacher provides a new word where only one phoneme changes. The student identifies where the sound changes and switches the letters to make the new word. 
• Continue with this procedure as you build new words. 

I've included a video at the beginning of this post as an example of word ladder/chaining in action. 👆 

Word chains are an easy and fun way to build phoneme manipulation into lessons within lessons and can be scaffolded to meet the needs of all learners. 

I hope you have found this series useful in helping your students build letter knowledge and relating this to other areas of the alphabetic principle. This will assist our students later with reading and spelling applications. As you can see within this series, teaching the foundational of the alphabetic principle doesn't need to be boring. We can use different ways, including multi-sensory, to meet the needs of our unique learners. 

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Have a great week!

Casey