It breaks my heart that many teachers do not really know how to teach their students to read. It seems like it should be something that is taught in college or at least at the Masters level. But still there are many teachers that just don’t even know where to begin to help their students learn to crack the code of English. Many phonics programs require hours of training and materials that are really expensive and cause teachers to not seek out training. One book that can help teachers and is inexpensive is Recipe for Reading. This book has pretty much everything you need to teach kids how to read with the packet index cards and some paper. My resource How to Teach CVC Words
can help
What is Decodable?
One important thing that teachers need is to understand which words are decodable and which words are not decodable yet. The yet is the big word there because eventually most of the words in the English language are decodable if the rule is taught. English is about 97% decodable.
So the word cat is a consonant vowel consonant word and is easily read by beginning readers but the word like is a vowel consonant e word that is taught as a skill later on in school. This makes long vowel words seem hard for young children. Teachers need to have decodable text available that match the skills they have taught so if they’re teaching CVC words they should only be reading CVC words. These books may be boring and may seem dry but they are very exciting for children who are learning how to read because they feel successful. If teachers are not given these kinds of books it makes teaching hard ,but they can write their own sentences and their own stories that only include the words that they have taught. It’s not easy but it can be done so that your child or children can be successful in reading and not feel frustrated because words that they do not know how to decode are not included.
The next problem that many teachers have is how to teach children to blend letters together. We know what the word is so we are able to sound the word out. Children that are not familiar with sounding words out find this task very daunting.
Ways to Teach Blending
One way to help the students Master blending words together is to start with only two sounds. Now some people start with the first letter and second letter. This goes against the teaching of syllable type because if I show a child the letter g and the letter o and I am blending it like it is going to be a CVC word it will not say go it would say g- o like the beginning sound of in got.
Another way to blend is to use the two letters. Have children read at, in, up, ot, it, ub. When they master blending two letters you can move on to 3 letters. In the beginning I feel it’s very important to pick the letters that you use for blending.
What do I mean by that I mean that you should not be picking the letter b as a first sound in a word because b is letter that stops meaning that you can’t stretch it out. A letter like m can be stretched out mmmmmm, which helps students to blend it to the next letter. Letters that are good for you elongating their sound are the vowels, the letter f, the letter L ,the letter m, the letter n, the letter s and the letter z. So when you teach a blending consonant vowel consonant words mat is a good one because the m is easy to elongate and the a is easy to elongate and the t is stopping anyway. Letters like K & C and H are hard for students to hold and then it makes it hard for them to blend the words together. Using easy words helps them learn how to blend cvc words.
If you try to be conscious of this in the beginning it will help your students to feel more comfortable with the skill of blending words together. You can write your lesson using 8 to 10 words that you will build in the beginning and 8 to 10 words that you will have them build in the middle and then five or six words that they will write at the end. And when you are picking these words try to make sure that at least some of them start with these letters that can be elongated and held so that your child can feel successful sounding out the words that you want them to spell. This resource can help you teach cvc words
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Practice Blending CVC Words
I also feel that you should be picking words that the children will see in whatever text you will have them practice. So if the story that you’re going to be reading that day has all words with that -at family :cat hat mat fat set Pat, those are the words that they should be building. If you have them blending words with the vowel o but reading sentences with the -at words it causes frustration. They must blend cvc words over and over again. The whole idea of teaching students how to decode is to help them feel like they understand how language works. If you do not teach them explicitly and systematically how to crack the code of English they will never feel successful.
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We Have to Teach Kids to Blend Words
It is the biggest crisis that is facing our country. Students are not learning how to read in the lower grades and then there is nobody to teach them when they get older. Students in middle school do not know how to blend cvc words. Plus if they’re not mastering the skills by third grade the gap will have widened so much that students may never catch up. If they have one or two teachers that really know how to teach reading in the lower grades they will be able to fly. They will learn the steps to blend words together and then putting syllables together which will help them read bigger and longer words.
When they can read those words they can figure out what they mean and then they can start with comprehension. I read somewhere that Anita Archer said, “There is no comprehension skill to overcome the fact that you cannot decode the words.” This is so true and it is scary how many children cannot read simple words fluently.