Phonics Directed Drawings

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

 


Hi friends,


I’m so excited to release this huge set of phonics-based directed drawings. The bundle includes 108 different drawings in total which will have your students drawing and drawing and drawing!


If you’ve wanted to try directed drawings in your classroom, this is the perfect bundle. As it is phonics-based, the activities are purposeful and will help your students practice their sounds, learn how to draw, learn how to follow directions whilst also giving them the opportunity to write.


There are drawings included for:

  •          The Alphabet
  •          CVC Words
  •         Digraphs
  •          Long Vowels
  •          R-Controlled Vowels
  •          Diphthongs

Every drawing comes in 6 different templates so that you have plenty of options to choose from. Here they are:




The sheets are perfect for Kindergarten, First Grade and Second Grade.


What's Included?

Here is a list of all the drawings included:



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SCIENCE OF READING: WHAT IS WORD MAPPING?

Sunday, March 20, 2022


Word mapping is a concept that you have most likely come across over the past few months. It has been popularized by the Science of Reading but is definitely not a new concept. Word mapping, also known as phoneme-grapheme mapping, is an instructional activity where students link the 'sound' part of a word to the 'letter' part of a word.


Word mapping ties in with a reading theory known as 'orthographic mapping'. In a nutshell, orthographic mapping is 'the mental process we use to permanently store words for immediate, effortless retrieval. It is the process we use to take an unfamiliar printed word and turn it into an immediately recognizable word' (Kilpatrick, 2015). There are many wonderful, free resources out there that describe the theory behind orthographic mapping, so I won't bore you with facts, diagrams or lengthy explanations. Instead, I'll use this space to show you how word mapping works, and how you can implement it in your classroom. If you would like to learn more about orthographic mapping, I highly suggest researching David Kilpatrick and his associated texts.


What is word mapping?


Each word has 3 components - its sounds (phonemes), its letters (graphemes) and its meaning. Word mapping is an instructional tactic that you can use to help your students connect the sounds (phonemes) to the letters (graphemes) in a word.


To simplify the process of word mapping, here are the steps:

1. The student says the name of the word/picture aloud and meaning is ascertained.

2. The student orally breaks down the sounds in a word into phonemes by tapping or using manipulatives.

3. The student represents the phonemes with letters or letter combinations (graphemes).

4. The student reads the entire word aloud.




The word mapping process is different to decoding because students begin with a whole word that they break up, rather than a combination of letters that they must combine to form a word. It is the process of breaking words up and focusing on the phonemes/graphemes that helps to improve word recognition and store it into long term memory.


Which parts of a word stay together as one phoneme/grapheme?


Since releasing my Science of Reading Bundle, the most common question I've been asked is which parts of a word stay together and which are split into separate phonemes/graphemes. Many teachers are used to splitting words into letters or rimes. For example, c/at or f/e/e/t. The word mapping approach has students split letters into individual phonemes or sounds. This means that cat would be split into c/a/t and feet would be split into f/ee/t. The 'ee' in feet makes one sound so it's a separate phoneme/grapheme. I also wanted to note that blends are separate letters and not treated as a single sound as you can still hear the individual sounds in blends. For example, the word crab would be split into c/r/a/b. I've created a cheat sheet below which details the phonemes/graphemes that are separate, single sounds. 



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WHY SOUND WALLS ARE SO POPULAR

Monday, February 7, 2022

 



The teaching world is abuzz with sound walls at the moment and for good reason too! Sound walls are heavily aligned with the Science of Reading and are one of the most useful displays that you can have in your classroom. I’m excited to share the NEW Sound Wall that I have just created as well as more details about how sound walls work, plus reasons why all early elementary grades absolutely need them.

 

 

What is a sound wall? 


Let’s first dive into what exactly a sound wall is. The current norm is to display alphabet posters that have a total of 26 sounds, however in contrast, a sound wall organizes and displays the different sounds or phonemes that we hear in speech. For example, the phoneme ‘r’ can be represented by the graphemes r, wr, rr and rh. When sounds are organized this way, it becomes much easier for students to utilize this knowledge when reading and spelling words.

 

Sound walls are displayed in two sections; a vowel section and a consonants section. The sections are commonly displayed side by side.


The vowel section, known as a vowel valley due to its shape, is displayed in a particular order to demonstrate the gradual change in mouth shape as you read through the phonemes.

 


The consonants section is organized a little differently; the phonemes are organized by the manner of articulation which relates to how sounds are made using the mouth. For example, p, b, t, d, k and g are known as ‘STOPS’ because when each of these phonemes are said aloud, the vocal tract shuts, the air pressure builds up and is then released in a short burst.

 



 

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