LE Podcast #50:Moving Students From Letter Sounds to CVC Words: The Secret Sauce
LE Podcast #50:
Moving Students From Letter Sounds to CVC Words: The Secret Sauce
A Short Story
It was my first year teaching first grade, and I had a bright and curious student. But when it came time for her to read independently, she struggled. She was unable to blend words together, even though she knew her letter names and sounds. I used all the strategies I could, but when those didn’t work, I did some research and found the connection that phonemic awareness has with reading. When she and I started blending and segmenting sounds and blending those letters, things started to change and everything fell into place for her on the day she read a word and said, “I read it!”
I want to share with you essential building blocks that can help your students move from letters to reading CVC words. Before we begin, let’s start with some vocabulary we’ll use during these show notes today.
Phonemic awareness - the ability to blend, segment, and manipulate phonemes. This is oral and doesn’t involve letters or print.
Phonemes - our smallest units of sound.
Alphabetic principle - taking the sounds and connecting it to written letters.
The Checklist That Students Need Before Reading CVC Words
These foundational skills must be in place if we want to support our students efficiently.
Letter name knowledge - They have to be able to look at the letter and know the name and sound of that letter.
Automaticity - Simply knowing their sounds isn’t enough. Students must be able to say their letter sounds automatically, which is what will help them blend and decode words.
Phonemic awareness - blending and segmenting is critical for our students.
Phonological Awareness and Its Importance
Phonemic awareness falls under something called phonological awareness.
Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that covers larger units like rhyming, syllables, and sentence segmentation.
Under this umbrella is phonemic awareness (blending, segmenting, manipulation of sounds)
Research says that three phonemic awareness skills are crucial when students start to read and they must be automatic in them: blending, segmenting, and phoneme isolation.
Blending:
“What’s my word? C–a–t.”
“Cat!”
Segmenting:
“The word is cat. How many sounds do you hear?”
“Three!”
Isolation:
“My word is cat.” What sound do you hear at the beginning?”
/c/
Phonemic Awareness Myths
False: Phonemic awareness should be practiced without print.
Research says that we need to connect phonemic to print as early as possible.
When we build the alphabetic principle, we are teaching them sounds and how to map letters onto those sounds.
Our ultimate goal: students who are reading and writing, not just excelling in phonemic awareness.
False: The goal is to get students to be amazing at phonemic awareness.
Of course, we want our students to be successful in phonemic awareness, but our ultimate goal is to get students to read.
Phonemic awareness is a means to an end - it’s a scaffold to support reading and spelling.
Research says that connecting phonemic awareness with explicit phonics instruction had greater success.
If we are to focus on phonemic awareness, we need to focus on skills that focus on decoding and encoding, like blending, segmenting, and phoneme isolation. We need to incorporate these with our explicit phonics instruction.
With so many different curricula right now, I want you to keep in mind that we need to apply phonemic awareness to print, and the print we are applying it to needs to be aligned to the skill you’re focusing on for that lesson.
False: We don’t have to teach phonemic awareness while teaching letter sounds.
While you’re teaching letter sounds, ensure you’re working on phonemic awareness orally with these lessons. This is because we are building letter automaticity.
We also need them to know what to do with these letters, which is to blend and segment them.
Frontloading this orally for them while teaching letter sounds will help them when they’re reading CVC words.
How to Build Phonemic Awareness Orally While Teaching Letter Sounds
Practice blending and segmenting orally
To practice directionality, use a horizontal stoplight image with green, yellow, and then red so students can understand we read from left to right. Green means go, yellow means to slow down since each word has a vowel, and red means we stop at the end of a word.
“The word is cat.”
Students tap out the sounds they hear in cat.
As they’re doing this, their hand is going to move to green (/c/) to yellow (/a/) and to red (/t/).
You can also do this activity with pop-its by popping each sound or by stringing three beads on a pipe cleaner and pulling the beads over from left to right with each sound.
Practice letter sounds
When we’re creating this bridge for our students, we need to continue to work on letter sound knowledge because students need to become automatic. We do this with:
Visual drills
This is a stack of cards with letter names on them and when you show them the letter, they say the sound.
Listen for: the correct letter, automaticity, and their pronunciation.
Auditory drills
Give students a sound and have the students write down the sound.
Look for: students hearing the sound, connecting it to its letter form, and forming that letter correctly.
Vowel intensives
Give students a strip of paper with the vowels on it.
Level 1: “The sound is /a/.” Students point to the vowel and say, “A says /a/.”
Level 2: “The syllable is ab. What vowel do you hear?”
Level 3: “The syllable is rib. What vowel do you hear?”
Letter Grid
This is a 4x2 or 4x3 grid with all of the known letter sounds.
Students simply tap and read the letter sounds as they go.
How to Connect Letters to Phonemic Awareness
Begin with writing and Elkonin boxes.
“The word is bag. Can you segment the word?”
Students have pushed all of their chips into each of the boxes and segment the word.
“What do we hear at the beginning of the word bag?”
Students say, “/b/” and pull the chip down and replace the sound with writing the letter.
Then, they blend it again with the letter b and the two remaining chips.
Repeat the process with the other letters.
With this activity, we are slowly showing them that the letters they know are attached to the sound that you can blend and segment.
Practice decoding
We start this by successive blending before moving on to traditional blending. This reduces the cognitive load by having students blend only a couple of sounds at a time.
Students will do this by blending the first sound, then blending the first sound again with the second, then blending the first and second sound while adding in the third.
/c/ → /c/ /a/ → /c/ /a/ /p/
Setting this up in a pyramid is a great idea with the c at the top, the ca in the middle, and cap at the bottom.
When you start here, you can then have them begin reading words by giving them just one word on a card, and then eventually word lists, or even reading words in a sentence.
The best advice is taking baby steps and working on the foundational pieces.
That’s a Wrap
In order to get students to blend those CVC words, let’s ensure:
Students have foundational skills of phonemic awareness (blend, segment, isolate).
Students have letter name and letter sound knowledge.
We are incorporating letter sounds in our cumulative review as we move towards phonics-based CVC work through visual drills, auditory drills, and vowel intensives.
Students have strong letter sound knowledge and phoneme knowledge because:
Letter sound knowledge + phoneme knowledge = decoding
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Other Resources:
Check out these awesome resources at Literacy Edventures that correlate to this interview!
Unlocking SOR Virtual Conference:
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Unlocking SOR brings together incredible presenters that share their thoughts, insights, and practical strategies.
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