After a year of kindergarten instruction including additional reading support, and again in 1st grade  LJ was still having significant difficulty learning to read. One area of weakness, despite receiving instruction, was in phonological awareness. We were asked for our input and to work with LJ for a few weeks. What has happened?

When we began with LJ we first wanted to know, what level of phonological awareness did she have? Although the teachers were asking her to identify the first sound in a word we discovered her awareness of  “word” was not quite there. So to began LJ needed work at this level, identifying how many words are in a spoken sentence. Soon she could identify words in simple spoken sentences.

The next step on the continuum for phonological awareness is an awareness of syllables in words. Could she clap syllables? LJ had difficulty accurately clapping the syllables in words.  So, we began with clapping compound words. By the end of the week LJ not only could clap compound words but was now consistently clapping syllables in spoken words with 90-100% accuracy. LJ was moving forward with phonological awareness.

Perhaps two keys to LJ’s success can be applied to other students:

1) know a child’s current level of understanding and begin instruction there

2) use the developmental stages of phonological awareness

LJ now detecting words and syllables, was ready to learn about sounds in words. This level of phonological awareness – phonemic awareness – awareness of single sounds- was more challenging for LJ to grasp. We honored all of LJ’s attempts. For example she offered rhyming words for our first requests to tell us the first sound in a word. We explained the difference between rhyming words and the first sound in a word. We then used tactile cues, used pictures and provided lots of modeling and cues.

The next week LJ was giving more correct responses and was showing a revealing smile that she was getting sound awareness. We increased the challenge of identifying the first sound in words by using less familiar words and words with stop sounds (b, t, k, etc.). We also moved on to only using spoken words without picture support.

We thought we’d share LJ’s success with you….here is a short clip from a video of my last day working with LJ, checking her ability to identify the first sound in a word. The words selected were not previously used for teaching but novel to this task.  LJ is able to identify first sounds accurately and with a nice level of automaticity. 1st Sound Segmentation

LJ will need to review this skill to ensure mastery and apply this skill to her reading, writing and spelling tasks. The teachers will begin work on the next step in phonological awareness – final sound segmentation and then continuing on with phonemic awareness. LJ is now making progress.