Reading Problems:

Helping Kids Read By Sound

 

            Today's Snack: Successful reading requires a lot of "ingredients." Here's a granola recipe with nine ingredients that is as tasty as it is nutritious:

 

            4 ½ C. old-fashioned oats, uncooked

            1/3 C. sliced almonds

            ½ C. shredded sweetened coconut

            2 tsp. cinnamon

            ¼ tsp. salt

            ½ C. honey

            ¼ C. apple juice

            ½ C. raisins

            ½ C. dried cranberries

 

            Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine oats, almonds, coconut, cinnamon and salt. Separately, whisk together the honey and apple juice. Pour it over the oats mixture. Stir to coat.

 

            Spread evenly on a large baking sheet. Bake 25 to 30 minutes 'til golden brown, stirring twice.

 

            Let cool. Stir in raisins and cranberries.

 

            Makes snacks for 12.

 

 

 

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Supplies:

Next page, photocopied for each student or displayed on a wall

Pencil if you're doing this on paper

Divide students into teams and give them one point

for every additional word they can come up with

 

 

It is easy to tell that students aren't being taught to read with phonics - by sound. With phonics, a reader is using the correspondences between the sounds that the alphabet letters make, and the written symbols for those sounds - the written alphabet letters.

 

When you learn to read with the power of phonics, you "see" the sounds in the letters, and you not only pronounce words with high accuracy, but you read them accurately, too.

 

Unfortunately, over a generation ago, most schools switched to teaching reading with mostly silent techniques, generally called the "Whole Language" or "balanced literacy" philosophy. The power of phonics is missing . . . and so is quality instruction and its results - highly accurate decoding and high reading comprehension.

 

This is the reason so many students have such low reading comprehension. What they "see" when they read is garbled, and so it is not correctly stored in their brains. When they try to "retrieve" a word from their memory in order to write it, it comes out garbled - because it was stored that way.

 

So . . . no matter how old a student is . . . it's never too late to help improve his or her phonics skills, which is the quickest way to help students understand what they are reading, and enjoy reading more.

 

Here is a list of commonly mis-read words that is taken directly from student writing samples. This shows that students are not using phonics skills to "decode" what they read, or to "encode" it into their own writing. A lack of phonics skill is at the root of almost all spelling disability. The more you help students read "by sound," the better their comprehension as well as writing skills will improve.

 

Have the students study these six misspelled words, say them aloud, and use their sense of sound to determine what letters are missing or in the wrong order. Then they should rewrite the word with the syllables separated, in order to make the separate sounds more apparent. The correct words are listed below.

 

 

prat

 

 

prisner

 

 

aks

 

 

ekspensive

 

 

closet (as in nearest to something)

 

 

angel (in geometry, such as a 90-degree)

 

Answers:

 

 

part (here's an example of a very simple one-syllable word that is obviously not pronounced as "prat," and yet because of the confusion caused by the Whole Language reading philosophy, many students store this word in their brains as "prat")

 

 

prisoner (root word is "prison" - the "o" is missing -- pri son er - phonics helps you decode and spell by sound, but the roots of vocabulary words also guide the reader and writer, not just memorizing patterns of letters and guessing at what they mean or how they are spelled)

 

 

ask (this one-syllable word is one of the most commonly mispronounced and misspelled words, and is an obvious sign of a lack of phonics instruction)

 

 

expensive (often, the sound "ks" is spelled with the the phonogram "x" - another phonics rule is that English words don't end in a "u" or a "v" - so this word requires a silent final "e" to finish it correctly - ex pen sive)

 

 

closest (it is common for a Whole Language-impaired reader to not be able to "see" a second letter in a word, such as the second "s" in this word - clo sest)

 

 

angle (with phonics training, the student would know that the "ge" sound is pronounced "je" - an "angel" is a heavenly being - to get that "hard g" sound, this word must be spelled an gle)

 

 

 

Now divide up into teams, take a few minutes, and list more words that are commonly misspelled because students don't "see" the letters when they read them or write them. Earn one point for every word you can list.

 

Keep noticing the sounds the letters make when you read, and you'll be a better reader and writer, which will make you a winner both in and out of school!