phonics – SJB Teaching

March 6, 2014April 14, 2018

Teaching the split e phoneme

This is a method I picked up from Sue Kerrigan at Let Me Learn. It’s simple but very effective and I have used it successfully with a group of children who were finding words like “cake” and “make” really tricky to spell.

I took two pieces of card and wrote “a” on one and “e” on the other and then I attached them with a bendaroo, leaving a letter sized gap between them.

Then we sounded out some words: grape – g-r-a-p – and wrote the “gr” on a mini whiteboard, put our “a__e” sound card next, which left a space just big enough to write the “p” between them.

We did this with a few more words until they were happy with the idea that the a sound could be made by a split “a” and “e”. By the end of the session most of the children could spell split e words. The rest needed another session to reinforce the concept, but they did all get there.

What spelling tricks have you tried that have worked? Let me know in the comments below – I’d love to hear about them.

May 8, 2013April 14, 2018

Phonics in a School for the Deaf

As a teacher who has been learning sign language (BSL) for the last few years, I have often wondered how you would teach a deaf child to read. Recently I was lucky enough to find out, when I spent a few days observing and teaching in a school for deaf children.

The first lesson each morning was visual phonics.

Each sound has a sign associated with it which is related to the relevant fingerspelling sign and to whereabouts in the mouth the sound is made.

The children do have time each week with a speech therapist, but as they obviously spend more time in class, the class teacher also has responsibility for this aspect of their learning. She gets them to touch her throat so they can feel how the sound is made, and then they touch their own throat to see if the movement is the same. They also put their hands in front of the teacher’s mouth to feel whether or not air is expelled for that particular sound, and they concentrate on the shape the lips make. All this means that even if they can’t make the sound properly, they can replicate the lip patterns, which is essential for BSL.

There are a range of hearing abilities in the class – some of the children are profoundly deaf and have been from birth; others wear hearing aids or have cochlear implants and have some hearing. Before lessons begin each morning, all hearing aids and cochlear implants are checked to make sure that they are working correctly.

Just like in a hearing school, the children practise the sounds they have already learnt before learning a new one, and the phonics lesson is split between oral practise and writing words containing those sounds. They find blending the sounds to form whole words difficult, especially those who are profoundly deaf. The children in this school will do the same national phonics test as their peers in hearing schools. However, because it is harder for them to learn, their phonics lessons continue into KS2.

The teachers and teaching assistants ‘listen’ to the children reading – the children read their books and sign each word to show that they recognise the word, and in a guided reading lesson the other children in the group are expected to follow, just as they would be in a hearing school. As you would expect, the teachers will question the children to check understanding, and they are expected to predict, make inferences etc just the same as their hearing peers in mainstream schools.

March 1, 2012April 13, 2018

A Multisensory Approach to Reading

A while ago a parent contacted me for help because her child was struggling with reading. He hadn’t picked up phonics in Reception with the rest of his class, and so now his Year 1 teacher wanted to send him back to Reception for another dose of letters and sounds.

His mother was concerned about the effect this would have on his self-esteem and also couldn’t understand how repeating a year of something that clearly hadn’t worked was going to help him move on. She asked if I had any idea for things she could work on at home with him that might help him progress.

My first thought was that if phonics lessons at school hadn’t worked at all, he was possibly a purely kinaesthetic learner. This line of reasoning was backed up by the fact that he learnt more physical activities easily: he had learned to ride his bike without stabilisers with no problems at all, and he was already quite accomplished at several sports. These were all things he would have learnt kinaesthetically. Phonics in school is taught in a visual and auditory way (see the letter, listen to the sound it makes). I know that some people claim that kinaesthetic learners are catered for because there are actions to go with the letters and sounds, but I’m a kinaesthetic learner myself and I know for a fact that tapping my arm whilst saying “a-a-a”, or holding a finger in front of my mouth to pretend I’m blowing a candle out whilst saying “b-b-b” wouldn’t have helped me to recognise either of those letters.

I suggested helping him experience the letters in a different way. He started getting to know the letters by using wooden ones (magnetic ones would do just as well) that he could pick up so he would be able to feel the shape of each letter. He explored which letters had straight edges, which had curved edges and which had sharp angles, and as he picked each one up we said together the sound the letter represented.

From there, I stayed with the idea of 3D letters but we moved on to making them. By using straws, rulers, pens, bits of string, blu-tack, sellotape, etc he was able to make his own 3D letters. With his mum he made some dough, which he fashioned into letter shapes and they baked them. Eating the letters afterwards brought in taste alongside sight, hearing and touch for a truly multi-sensory experience.

Now it was time to start relating these 3D letters to the 2D ones on the page. Again I wanted to bring in as many senses as possible so I used stencils to write out the letters on sandpaper so that he could trace his fingers over the rough surface to feel the shape of the letter. I drew big letters in chalk in his back garden so that he could walk around the shapes, and I got his mum and dad to take chalk to the park so that they could write even bigger letters for him to ride his bike round. Finally we looked at printed letters on paper. While he looked at each letter and we said the sound the letter makes, using my finger I drew the letter on his back so that he could feel the shape of it.

By the time we started looking at printed letters on the page without the additional extra-sensory support, he was so familiar with the shape of each letter that he was able to associate them with the sounds they represented without difficulty.

From then on his reading improved quickly and it wasn’t long before he caught up with the rest of his class. We avoided the knock his self-esteem would have taken by having to go down a year, and his confidence grew because he was no longer the only child in his class who couldn’t read. And that’s why I really love my job!

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