Students circulate among many teachers, focusing on different skills as they learn to read. In a recent lesson, Max Thomas worked with first-graders who read aloud from a storybook.
MV Elementary adopts phonics-based method to teach kids reading
Most of us probably don’t remember much about how we learned to read — mastering the association of shapes with sounds and ultimately linking them into words and sentences that unlocked compelling stories and ideas.
Learning to read and write English — which is replete with exceptions and doesn’t follow straightforward patterns — can be especially challenging. “There are 26 letters, but 44 different sounds,” Methow Valley Elementary School (MVES) Literacy Support Specialist Cara Christensen said.
Christensen is one of a legion of teachers and reading specialists who work with elementary students in small groups to help them learn the art of reading. Students circulate among teachers as they learn to recognize sounds, syllables and letters and form them into words. The lessons include word games and tactile activities like drawing letters in trays of sand to help kids develop muscle memory.
This year, MVES is using is a new approach to teaching reading that gives students the rules they need to know, Christensen said. It’s based in phonics, using the relationships between sounds and letters so students can decode new words.
In a session with first-grade teacher Amanda Grace, students swapped letters on a magnetic board, changing “rug” to “rag” as Grace sounded out the vowels and consonants, and then “rag” to “rat’ and “rap.”
The approach is systematic and structured so that children learn letter sounds and patterns. Words such as “no,” “go” and “so” are decodable, but students have to memorize “sight words” — those really common words that don’t always follow patterns, like “and,” “I,” “was” and “the,” Grace said.
Learning through games
Phonics doesn’t have to be boring —– there are games and multisensory exercises to support basic concepts, Christensen said. As she coached students through drills that incorporated elements of play, students gave thumbs up or down as Christensen rattled off a list of real and nonsense words.
On boards with letters arrayed in front of them, students tapped out letters that made sounds for Timothy Tiger and Gordo Gorilla, and took away letters that didn’t match. The children used various techniques — one boy even did it with his eyes closed, counting each letter on the board as he recited the alphabet.
Kids learn that vowels are special because they’re in every word. They learn that vowels typically make at least two different sounds, depending on the letters around them. Other lessons focus on individual letters and “digraphs” — sounds like “ch,” “wh,” “sh” and “th.”
“It’s really frustrating for kids to learn to write a word like ‘which’ —– how to make that sound,” Christensen said.
Phonological awareness — children’s first identification of sounds, without written language — begins before kindergarten. It include awareness of rhymes, syllables and alliteration. Rhyming is one of the first skills kids learn — they can pick out the word that doesn’t belong in a series like “cat,” “bat” and “rug,” Christensen said.
She uses colorful blocks help children recognize syllables — for example, starting with “bobcat,” the students took away the block for “cat” to leave “bob.”
Teachers use hand signals to demonstrate vowel sounds, part of the multisensory approach. Sensory activities like stamping words in Play-Doh help keep kids engaged, Grace said.
Sand boards are great for teaching students to form letters and spell out words. “For most kids, it’s a risk-free way to learn,” because they can just shake the board to start over, Christensen said. The boards keep exercises from being stressful, since kids can draw patterns in the sand or play tic-tac-toe, she said.
Seeing the drawings in the sand also provides immediate feedback to Christensen about students’ mastery of concepts and where they may need help.
In another class with teacher Max Thomas, a more advanced group took turns reading aloud from a storybook, while classmates on bean bag chairs read quietly and did exercises on laptops. These first-graders were already reading difficult words like “bucket” and “volcano” and sentences like “It would be fun to live on the island of Hawaii.”
The progression of learning
The Common Core standards used by schools in Washington set out the progression for literacy instruction. In kindergarten, students learn how words are organized on the printed page, and they build on their understanding of rhyming and syllables. They start to recognize common words and different vowel sounds.
In first grade, children add to their understanding of printed language and read words with different vowel and consonant sounds. They start to read multisyllabic words and words with irregular spellings. In second grade, students incorporate more irregularly spelled words and vowel pairs and increase reading comprehension.
At higher grade levels, students learn about themes, characters and plots and build nonfiction reading skills, fifth-grade teacher Brooke DeVlieg said. At that level, reading is incorporated into all the subjects they study, including science, math and social studies, she said.
Teachers match older students with “just-right” books so that students become more excited and confident about reading. There’s still support from reading specialists for targeted skills, DeVlieg said. “Reading is a complicated skill and process to learn. Our job as educators is to meet the individual needs of every student to improve their reading skills and level,” she said.
Generally, about 5% of the population picks up reading right away and doesn’t really need to be taught. For another 30% who’ve been exposed to language and sight words, reading clicks easily, Grace said. But more than half of children need more intensive education — 40% need systematic, progressive instruction in sounds and letters. And for 20%, reading is a real challenge — one of the biggest challenges students will face in their academic career, Grace said.
New literacy curriculum
This past fall, Christensen and fellow Literacy Support Specialist Katie Hover received intensive training in the Orton-Gillingham Approach, an evidence-based technique that builds on phonics and patterns and helps children learn sequentially.
The method covers all the skills students need, and includes ways to track students’ progress so that teachers can incorporate techniques as needed, Methow Valley Elementary Principal Paul Gutzler said. “That had been a missing piece,” he said.
The multisensory approach involves learning by listening, speaking, seeing and writing. It breaks reading and spelling into smaller skills involving letters and sounds and then builds on these skills over time.
In recent decades, the pendulum has swung between a phonics-based approach and a whole-language approach. In the whole-language approach, students are given books and encouraged to figure out words based on context and illustrations. But children taught with just whole language often don’t have the skills to take a word apart to look at specific sounds — only a small percentage learn to read that way, Christensen said. “It seemed it wasn’t working as well as it should — something was missing,” she said.
When Gutzler started at MVES four years ago, teachers stressed the need for a cohesive literacy program that would help all students reach their full potential. The school incorporated a more structured, systematic approach, but it was interrupted by the COVID pandemic, school closures and remote learning, Gutzler said.
With so many children learning from home, as parents across the country saw their children struggle to guess words without tools to sound them out, some parents began lobbying for a different approach to teaching reading. Christensen pointed to coverage in the New York Times and the podcast series Science of Reading that questioned reliance on the whole-language strategy.
Although Orton-Gillingham is new at MVES this year, for years, the school had been using a phonics-based curriculum built around the science of reading that was blended with the whole-language approach, Gutzler said.
With the return to full, in-person instruction, teachers and administrators have seen tremendous gains from students, Gutzler said.
Still, teaching reading is hard work that has to be completed over the course of several school years, Gutzler said. Reading instruction is very complex and highly individualized so that it can meet the needs of all learners, DeVlieg said. And teaching reading also involves continuous learning for the teachers, Grace said.
