Guidelines for Exemplary Phonics Instruction

1. Guidelines for Exemplary Phonics Instruction Builds on child’s rich concepts about how print functions

2. Phonics Terminology • Consonants • Vowels

3. Consonants • Consonant Blends: two or three letters combined each retain their original sound • Consonant Digraphs: the letters are combined to produce a new sound e.g. th, sh, ch

4. Vowels • Long • Short • Vowel digraphs: two letter that have one sound (generally long) e.g. coat, meat, wait • Vowel blends or dipthongs; each vowel keeps its sound e.g. oi, oy, ow, ou • Vowels influenced by consonants r and l e.g. gall, far, fir, for, burr, her

5. Phonograms Letter clusters that often form the basis for word families e.g. at – cat, hat, mat, sat Children map sounds onto larger parts of words rather than onto individual letters

6. Three Stages of Learning Words • Logograthic stage – words are learned as whole units e.g. STOP sign • Alphabetic stage – use individual letters and sounds to identify words • Orthographic stage – see patterns in words, and use these pattern to identify words without sounding them out

7. Builds on a foundation of phonemic awareness • Meat – eat – chicken • Coat – oat – jacket

8. An exemplary phonics program includes: • Is clear and direct • Is integrated into a total reading program • Focuses on reading words, not learning rules • May include onsets and rimes

9. May include invented spelling practice • Develops independent word recognition strategies, focusing attention on the internal structure of words

10. Develops automatic word recognition skills so that students can devote their attention to comprehension, not words

11. Instructional techniques for word identification • Children’s names • Hearing sounds in words • Word walls • Word families • Making words • Word sorting • Word parts • Predictable books

12. Instructional Techniques for Word Identification … • Cloze procedure • Masking words • Minimal cue messages • Oral reading