Keys to Unlock the Joy of Reading
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee
Do you know someone who is a highly intelligent, creative thinker who loves listening to stories but yet never picks up a book to read for pleasure? He will have terrible spelling too, and struggles to remember spelling words from one week to the next, even including common sight words like friend, some or because. He relies on picture clues to read, so he might guess based on the shape of a word or the context. There’s a good chance this person has dyslexia, and has trouble hearing phonemes (the smallest unit of spoken-not written language) and then assigning letters to those phonemes (phonics). Decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) are two related skills that are both dependent on phonemic awareness.
The 7 Phonemic Awareness Skills required BEFORE beginning Phonics Instruction are:
- Phoneme Segmentation: What sounds do you hear in the word hot? What’s the last sound in the word map?
- Phoneme Deletion: What word would be left if the /k/ sound were taken away from cat?
- Phoneme Matching: Do pen and pipe start with the same sound?
- Phoneme Counting: How many sounds do you hear in the word cake?
- Phoneme Substitution: What word would you have if you changed the /h/ in hot to /p/?
- Blending: What word would you have if you put these sounds together? /s/ /a/ /t/
- Rhyming: Tell me as many words as you can that rhyme with the word eat.
Interested in learning more? Contact me at amanda.marion@booksmartify.com for a free consultation to see if the Barton is a good fit for your student.