Early Decoding:The Lesson Breakdown
Wouldn’t it be wonderful that as soon as students knew their letter sounds and could blend phonemes, blending CVC words would be a breeze? We can dream, can’t we!? Sometimes it’s not always that simple. We still need to explicitly teach them how to put all of the reading pieces together. CVC instruction still needs to be systematic, logical, practiced in whole group and small group, and needs to follow a “gradual release” model - I Do, We Do, You Do.
I’ve found that having a prerequisite list to word reading is super helpful when beginning to learn CVC words. I’m here to share that with you today, along with what it looks like to put CVC instruction into practice in a classroom setting.
Prerequisites to Word Reading:
Phonemic Awareness (blending, segmentation, isolation)
Students must be fluent in all three, but we’re focusing heavily on blending and segmenting so they can read and spell words. When we read a word, we read each sound (segmentation) and blend them back together to read the word. This happens quickly and easily for us, but takes a lot of time for our students.
As teachers, we need to make our students masters at blending and segmenting orally. We can do this every day with a simple phonemic awareness warm-up from day one. “The word is /c/ /a/ /t/. What’s the word?” “Cat!”
Knowledge of Letter Sounds
Students must have a solid foundation of letter sounds. So solid, in fact, that they shouldn't really be taking time to think about the letter sound as they’re reading the word. We want them to be automatic in this skill. They should say them in a “snap!” because this promotes faster blending.
Here’s some food for thought on this:
David Kilpatrick says: “Poor name and letter sound learning is not based upon visual memory, but rather on the difficulty with phonological retrieval of those sounds and names.”
Kate Nations says: “There is...abundant evidence that in alphabet languages, phonological decoding is at the core of learning to read words.”
The jury is out, folks!: Understanding how graphemes map to phonemes is essential for decoding and reading.
CVC Instruction in the Classroom
When we make the shift from sound instruction to decoding, we need to make sure we include some components we need to incorporate daily that will help us:
Phonemic awareness warm-up: Yes, still! This only needs to take a few minutes, but it’s an essential practice. Keep it super simple and add in picture support. Here are two quick activities that cover a lot of ground:
Blending: Show them a few CVC picture cards and distribute them. Ask: “My word is /c/ /a/ /t/. If you have that picture, say the word and flip it over.” Any activity where you are segmenting the sounds and they’re blending it with picture support is a great activity for a phonemic awareness warm-up.
Segmenting: During this portion of the lesson, each student gets an Elkonin box and three manipulatives (chips, erasers, etc.). Give them 4-5 CVC words that they can segment. For example, if the word is bag, students will push up one manipulative for each sound they hear and then blend the word together.
Take a look at my sample lesson here to see what this looks like!
Three-Part Drill (visual, auditory, blending): For kindergarten, it’s best to choose one or two to focus on each day since the entire three-part drill can be a tad time-consuming. Remember that it’s okay to do what you can.
Visual: Here, we are building automaticity in their known letter sounds. Put all the known graphemes on flashcards and flash through them one at a time as students give you the sounds.
Auditory: Here, we are asking the students to put their sound knowledge into print. Ask students to write different sounds. “The sound is /m/.” Students reply, “M says /m/.” With this drill, ensure that you plan out the letters that are in your stack - be aware of what sounds they’re reviewing.
Blending: Use the visual drill cards you already have and make a CVC pattern by placing a vowel in the middle and a consonant on each side. Place the cards face up and touch each sound, blending and segmenting the cards together. Then, flip one of the cards to create another word. For example, if the starting word is cat, flip the c to make bat, then flip the t to make bag, and so on.
Bonus - vowel intensive!: We need students to understand that each word has a vowel, and a vowel intensive is a great way to do this. Give students vowel strips and ask them to listen for a vowel sound. Then, gradually introduce CVC words to see if they’re able to isolate this sound.
Handwriting Instruction
We must tie in handwriting when we can so that students can be efficient. In fact, they should be as efficient in handwriting as they are in producing sounds! This often falls by the wayside, but it’s so important for writing fluency.
Brainstorm CVC words for the day and practice each letter’s formation. For example, if students are spelling words mad, hat, tap, and map, you may want to practice forming the letters h, t, p, a, and m.
Decoding Lesson
We’ve provided practice with:
phonemic awareness (blending and segmenting orally)
letter sounds in isolation
printing those letter sounds
After all this, we can now ask them to begin decoding words.
Grab some Elkonin boxes, dry-erase markers, an eraser, and some manipulatives.
Say a word: “The word is mad.”
Students push up one manipulative for each sound they hear in a word and repeat, “/m/ /a/ /d/.”
Ask: “Where did you hear that first sound?” Students show where. “What letter represents that sound?” Students reply, “The letter M.” Then, they put the letter in the box to show where they heard that sound.
Continue this process for the other letters, then have students place their finger under each sound and have them blend the word back together. Continue with other words.
Since we only have about 10 minutes of focused time, we must move on to and choose either dictation or word reading.
Dictation: Keep things simple at this stage. Give students a few sounds and ask them to write the grapheme. Then, ask students to spell two CVC words connected to those sounds. Using this as an informal observation or exit ticket is a great idea. “Spell /m/. Spell /t/. Spell /a/. Now, let’s write the word mat.”
Here are some awesome dictation sheets for you to get started!
Word Reading: Give students one word at a time and provide a dot under each letter sound as touch points. Then, draw an arrow that reminds them to return to the beginning of the word and blend it together. This teaches students to pay attention to the sounds in the word.
Now, our lessons won’t always look like this, but they will in the beginning. The best thing about a lesson like this is that it bridges the gap that students need to get over in order to decode words. This lesson provides a great scaffold to get your students where they need to be: reading words!
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