Last time on Fluency and Me, we looked at the blocks students face when they have poor reading accuracy: poor sight word memory and poor decoding skills. Sight words are always a work in progress since they change as the student ages.
Decoding strategies on the other hand…they change a bit depending on the level of text and the size of a word. However, all rely on a mastery of symbol/sound relationships or knowing what sound each letter/letter combination makes. Instruction begins BEFORE learners even enter a school. They are looking at TV adverts, pretending to identify letters on their cereal boxes, or scribbling on paper trying to imitate handwriting.
This happens in a pretty predictable pattern:
1. consonants/short vowels (also digraphs)
2. long vowels spelled with silent ‘e’
3. predictable vowel teams (with common suffixes)
4. pattern based vowel teams (different sounds depending on context/spelling)
5. multisyllabic words created by simple prefixes and suffixes
-this is where students meet open (long vowel) syllables and the schwa syllable
6. multisyllabic words with root words
Ordinary Dave knows all this, but like most people, he doesn’t know WHY he knows all this. Good readers automatically pick up the patterns in text. Remember whole language? It’s the idea that if you read enough text you will eventually pick up on those patterns without someone pointing it out to you. You can write well because of the amount of text you’ve been exposed to. You make connections quickly and without a whole lot of conscious thought. That’s how the top 10% of students learn. (Yes, those kids that blow the bell curve for us average folks.) 80% need a combination of the two, at different points in development. The rest of them? They need to be told, repeatedly, exactly what letters do, when they do it, and why.
Repeatedly.
I can hear it already. Just how many is this ‘repeatedly’? I’ve taught short vowel, closed syllable words for months now! Can’t I move on to silent e words yet?
How many times do they need it to reach mastery? So they no longer have to stumble through the words. So they take no more than a second when asked: “What sound does ‘g’ make?” (The hard sound for ‘g’ should always be taught first, by the way.) When they can use sounding out and blending skills without prompting and don’t freeze when they come to a word with more than five letters in it.
This won’t happen with one class or even a week of classes. It will happen over the course of months, and sometimes, even years. So take that time. Throw away the scope and sequence for a while and go where the student ACTUALLY needs to go, not what the next page in your manual tried to tell you they SHOULD need. It will make all the difference.