Skills They'll Learn
When they begin, all children (unless they have impairments) use the same skills to read. Dr. Rollanda O'Connor says that they have to (1) "identify the letters," (2) "generate a sound for each letter", and (3) "then blend the sounds together to attempt to pronounce the word" (32).
We call this letter-by-letter reading. It's the counterpart of Spell With Sounds, (reading letter by letter vs. spelling with the sounds of the letters). Most children will have acquired the strategy before age 8 (grade 3), many will by grade K, and some children will have learned some correct letter-sound correspondences and will be using them to read words by as early as 4 years old.
When they begin, all children (unless they have impairments) use the same skills to read. Dr. Rollanda O'Connor says that they have to (1) "identify the letters," (2) "generate a sound for each letter", and (3) "then blend the sounds together to attempt to pronounce the word" (32).
We call this letter-by-letter reading. It's the counterpart of Spell With Sounds, (reading letter by letter vs. spelling with the sounds of the letters). Most children will have acquired the strategy before age 8 (grade 3), many will by grade K, and some children will have learned some correct letter-sound correspondences and will be using them to read words by as early as 4 years old.
A lot of simpler skills must be learned to read letter by letter, but it's helpful to think of the child as building up their knowledge of letters and the sounds they represent and building up their ability to use those letters & sounds to read new words that, with repetition, become words they'll instantly recognize, just like they did for all of us.
Some of the simpler skills that can be taught using the materials of the site are: (1) letter formation, (2) text direction, (3) letter-sounds, (4) letter-sound blending, (5) letter-sound segmenting, (6) spelling knowledge, (7) letter-sound changes with position, and (8) digraphs.
Target Skills
Some knowledge and skills you'll want the students to have before using our site are that (1) words are made of multiple, distinct sounds, (2) some of the sounds in words are the same as in other words -e.g. recognizing rhymes and making their own-, (3) letter-sounds can be blended into a word -e.g. saying 'at' after you say 'a' & 't'-, without seeing the letters, (4) we use letters to write the words we say, and (5) the names and shapes of some, if not all, of the letters of the alphabet. If you'd like to know more about what your child will be able to do after you use our site, visit our Materials page.
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Needs
Needs
Student Needs
Our site was made to address the most important problems that struggling readers face. As you may have guessed, “children with reading problems have the most difficulty with the third step, blending the sounds together” (O'Connor 32).
Our site was made to address the most important problems that struggling readers face. As you may have guessed, “children with reading problems have the most difficulty with the third step, blending the sounds together” (O'Connor 32).
Confusing letters and sounds is also a problem, and O'Connor's research tells us that "students who struggle with reading… make better progress when they learn and apply just one vowel sound at a time.” (56)
For this reason, our animations were made to support continuous stretched blending and our program starts with the short vowel sounds and stays with them until it's absolutely necessary for kids to learn the long vowel sounds. We want the foundation of reading that is letter-by-letter reading to be solid before it can be weakened with alternate sounds for the same letter (that is, before kids can forget the letter-sound correspondences they began with, which is when frustration and feelings of failure may ensue).
For this reason, our animations were made to support continuous stretched blending and our program starts with the short vowel sounds and stays with them until it's absolutely necessary for kids to learn the long vowel sounds. We want the foundation of reading that is letter-by-letter reading to be solid before it can be weakened with alternate sounds for the same letter (that is, before kids can forget the letter-sound correspondences they began with, which is when frustration and feelings of failure may ensue).
Look to our Supporting Research page for information about why the animations help with the 2 problems mentioned above, and check the Materials page for details about what the animations and worksheets look like. Lastly, the page that provides an overview of our User's Guide discusses what you'll find in our amazing guide, which has a recommended order for learning words, classifications as regular or irregular, and a pronunciation guide for each of our words.
Ensuring the children are learning and using a letter-by-letter reading strategy is important because children who are not using it with high accuracy by the end of grade 1 have already fallen behind and will have to receive extra support at school.
Signs a student is behind:
Ensuring the children are learning and using a letter-by-letter reading strategy is important because children who are not using it with high accuracy by the end of grade 1 have already fallen behind and will have to receive extra support at school.Signs a student is behind:
-The student starts reading a 3+ letter word but won’t make sounds of the
2nd/3rd/4th letter.
-The student looks away before attempting to read
any unknown word or skips them.
Please contact us with any questions about student needs or the site's resources by using the form on the Contact page.
All of the above quotes come from O'Connor, Teaching Word Recognition, 2nd Edition, The Guilford Press, 2014.
All of the above quotes come from O'Connor, Teaching Word Recognition, 2nd Edition, The Guilford Press, 2014.
Skills & Student Needs
