Orthographic mapping is now considered “the most current theory of how children form sight word representations” (Torgesen 2004b, p.36)    From David Kilpatrick’s book, “Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties.”   In my previous blog, I described the importance of phonological blending and letter-sound knowledge to phonic decoding, or word identification. Today, […]

  The National Reading Panel report stated: “The process of decoding words never read before involves transforming graphemes (A grapheme refers to a letter or letters used to represent a single phoneme or sound) into phonemes and then blending the phonemes to form words with recognizable meanings. The PA (Phonological awareness) skill centrally involved in […]

  “Cipher skills are not optional for developing skilled reading in an alphabet-based written language.”   To build this cipher knowledge, which is the ability to use the code of written English to decode and pronounce words, students need to be taught the code in an explicit and systematic manner. Ideally this should be taught […]

  “Perhaps the most important goal, in the interest of giving students a productive knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, is to convey to them the basic alphabetic principle. Very early in the course of instruction, one wants the students to understand that all twenty-six of those strange little symbols that comprise the alphabet are worth learning […]

  “We human beings have to learn to read. That means we must have an environment that helps us to develop and connect a complex assortment of basic and not-so-basic processes, so that every young brain can form its own brand-new reading circuit.”     From Reader, Come Home, The Reading Brain in a Digital […]

  In the first part of this blog, I defined the first of the “Big Five” essentials for reading: Phonological awareness. I also shared my preferred order for teaching each of the skills under the phonological umbrella. In the second part,  I discussed activities and resources that promote and develop overall phonological awareness, and then […]