It is an exploration of ways to provide access, and an invitation to experiment with our methods and synthesize our understandings.
Where does today’s work meet the phonics lessons you already teach?
What might it change about how we teach high-frequency words?
Where does phonemic awareness show up in what we mark, say and hear?
How can this apply to differentiation and ELL learners at all levels?
How can we add elements of decoding to every lesson, especially when introducing curricular vocabulary?
No need to answer them yet.
Rules and terms come first, usually through worksheets, before students have had anything to notice.
We start from sentences students already say and understand. Slowed down, their structure becomes visible, and students can try small changes and talk about what each change does.
Terms come after students have noticed the pattern.
No one can count every sound a voice can make. But linguists have catalogued about 3,000 that the world’s languages use to tell words apart.
PHOIBLE 2.0: 3,183 sounds across 2,186 languages
English uses about 44 of them: 24 consonants and 20 vowels. The count shifts with accent; many North American analyses land nearer 40.
The languages in our building use different sets. Tagalog uses about 21 sounds, Arabic 34, Ukrainian 38, and nsyilxcən, the syilx language of this valley, about 44, nearly all of them consonants. Look at the red: English carries far more vowels than any of them.
That includes every parent, teacher, educational assistant and speech-language pathologist a learner meets.
So the entry point is the same for every learner: point to the word, or the part of the word, as you say it and as they say it. Slow down so they can see it, hear it, say it and write it while they think about it. That feedback is what joins the systems.
24 consonants
20 vowels
The count shifts with accent. Many Canadians say hot and saw with the same vowel, and an r-controlled vowel is a vowel plus r, which is why counts run from about 40 to 44. The symbols are from the International Phonetic Alphabet, so /j/ is the y in yes.
Each IPA symbol stands for one sound, a simpler code than English spelling, and you still read it slowly, as a new reader does. And notice /rid/: the IPA says which read this is. English spelling can’t.
Notice the last line: no question mark in IPA, only must at the front.
A new reader meets this line much as you met the IPA: a row of 22 plain symbols.
Say it slowly and give each sound a circle: 16 sounds from 22 letters. The e of ice makes no sound of its own, so it gets no circle.
A bond bar joins the letters that spell one sound: the digraphs sh, ea and th, and the trigraph oul.
Colour sorts the sounds in both lines: vowels red, consonants black, sh and th green. The l of could belongs to its vowel, so it turns red too.
A syllable swoop cradles each beat: seven words, seven beats, and every swoop holds one red circle.
Say them slowly: /a/, then /b/.
A sound circle marks each sound. /a/ opens the mouth, so its circle sits high. /b/ closes the lips, so its circle sits low.
Open sounds are vowels. Their circles, and their letters, are red.
Keep going: /a/, /n/, /a/, /n/, /a/. A banana.
Say it slowly and feel the rhythm: open, closed, open, closed.
Sound circles go back to the Soviet psychologist Daniil Elkonin /dəniˈil ɛlˈkoʊnɪn/, who had learners push a counter into a box for each sound before they learned letters.
The alphabet, with the vowels in red.
One letter to a beat: every letter gets its own circle, and the wave rises at each vowel. W, double-u, has three syllables, so it takes two beats.
The usual song squeezes L, M, N, O and P into three beats: L-M and N-O run together like digraphs, and only P stands alone. Watch the lower line jump ahead.
We don’t need a new song. Keep the old tune, but hold the beat through L, M, N, O, P, so each letter keeps its own sound. Learners who need extra help often have to untangle this part, not because it is hard, but because we squeeze it.
These spellings are harder than CVC, CV or VC words, but they are common and patterned, and they can be learned. Mark the sounds while decoding and spelling. Then over-practise each one as a question and a statement, in short sentences where every other word is already familiar.
Start with a sentence the learner already says. Show the cards and say it slowly, and let them watch your mouth; then they say it, read it and write it.
Move the operator to the front and the statement becomes a question. Say both.
Swap one card: could becomes would. Every pass reads she, would and could again, so high-frequency words and odd spellings get practised in context.
Tip it into a question again, and let the learner choose the next card to change.
Swap the action. Keep the action cards in a stack, and lift the top one off to reveal the next.
Swap the actor the same way: pull the top card off the actor stack.
Lay ing over the e of write. Does it still make sense? He would writing doesn’t, and the learner can hear it.
Swap would for is, and it makes sense again. We aren’t teaching grammar here; grammar jumps in, and the learner notices.
Is tips into a question the same way.
Let the learner add a word on a blank card. He can read a banana is silly, but it still works as a sentence.
Elkonin also studied play. This is structured play: one card at a time, with words the learner chooses, in stacks that grow as their words do.
Now put quotation marks around a banana. It becomes words on a page, the words we sounded out, and Can he read “a banana”? is no longer silly.
Cut out the operator cards and the sentence cards, and start with would, could and should. Say each sentence and let the learner watch your mouth; then they say it, read it and write it. Change one card at a time, let them choose some of the cards, and notice what it is like for both of you.
Where could this go in helping students build sentences and experiment with adjectives and adverbs?