Teaching Students to read and spell

1. Teaching Students toread and spell Jo-Anne Gross Developer, Remediation Plus Systems “The pain of illiteracy and its consequences cannot be measured.”

2. "MODERN ILLITERACY IS A STORY OF NEEDLESS MISERY AND WASTE" Steve Pinker Professor and Director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT

3. From Dr. Reid Lyon, Chief of the NICHD In 1994 Dr. Reid Lyon stated: “The one area of significant research progress for those with learning disabilities/dyslexia has been in the domain of reading. There is now a great deal of knowledge about the cognitive and linguistic characteristics of reading disability and how these students need to be taught. The tragedy is that we are not exploiting what we know. If we were to consider analogies with the medical model it is inconceivable that had similar progress been made in Cancer or Aids that this would not have been used immediately in intervention.”

4. From the International Dyslexia Association Newsletter Fall 2005 "While vocabulary and comprehension are truly the ultimate goals of reading the teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency are steps that must be in place to meet the ultimate goal of comprehension."

5. To Build the Neural Pathways for Skilled Reading • In her book Overcoming Dyslexia Dr. Sally Shaywitz from Yale University states that at last we know the specific steps a child or adult must take to build the neural pathways deep within the brain for skilled reading. • If you truly care about reading and dyslexia (language learning disability) it is important that teachers know that we have entered a new era in which there is now a science of reading. • It is an era of tremendous hope. • We can change profoundly the lives of all who struggle with processing language. • We can greatly reduce the casualties of illiteracy by starting day one to teach preventatively.

6. How? We must accept the following and move forward speedily : • Whole language and Balanced literacy will never teach children and adults how to read if they have any kind of language processing difficulty. Actually with the research of the day, it is not the way to teach any student to read. • True reading and spelling are psycholinguistic by nature NOT connected to memorization but to true brain processing. • Language is a phonological process!!!

7. How do I teach my little ones inSK and grade 1 to read and spell? • Multisensory teaching is important so that strong modalities can support weak modalities. • The English Language has 44 sounds and 90 grapheme representations. In S.K. and grade 1 I will teach the first 26 letters and the sounds that accompany them. In mid grade one (after Christmas) I will start to teach the more complex sounds and rules systematically and explicitly. • I will take the letters, call them by their names with the alphabet song but tell the kids that`s the name of the letter, not the sound.

8. How do I teach my little ones in SK and grade 1to read and spell? • When I teach a,b,c,d,e,f, etc....I will connect the teaching of the shape of the letter, how to write it  and what sound it makes. • I will use those sounds to blend 3 letter words like cat, mat, pat, sat, sap, map, lap, let, met, pet, set, etc... • I will then teach the students how to blend more than 3 sounds to read slip, slap, lamp, fast, last, list, must, rust, etc... • I will NOT teach consonant blends as one sound. That`s erroneous.

9. How do I teach the students to spell? • I teach them to TAKE APART the  sounds they hear with colored tiles or magnets and I say, how many sounds do you hear in the word flip? plant? This process is called segmenting. • Can you see how the brain is working? We`re not memorizing, we`re reading and spelling with our brain! • To spell have the student say the word and spell it by segmenting the sounds sequentially and writing the symbol (the letter) that represents what he hears.

10. How do I teach the students to spell? • Reading and spelling are natural processes that must work in tandem! • In reading I see the sound and articulate it (decode). In spelling I segment the sounds in my brain, write the symbols the sounds make and get them out of my brain on the paper. That is called encoding.

11. What do you mean by multisensory? In the Remediation Plus System we use a rice tray, table tracing, stickies for linguistic gymnastics (playing with the sounds to substitute and delete phonemes), a ball for exercising the auditory processing, magnets to isolate the phonemes (speech sounds) and fingers to help with segmenting. It`s fun! That`s lesson 1 in helping your kids to learn to read and spell in the Early grades.

12. How do we proceed from the initial 26 sounds? • We systematically, explicitly and synthetically teach the other more complicated sounds eg., sh, ar, or, er, ir, ur, qu, tion, sion, oo, ou, ow, etc... There are 90 ways of writing the 44 sounds. • We teach the 6 kinds of syllables for success in reading and spelling multi-syllabic words. • We teach the 7 rules of the English language.

13. Check out our web site at www.remediationplus.com for a clip on how to remediate a student with a learning disability! Remediation Plus is multi-systemic helping all modalities to engage in the process of reading and spelling. It is brain based learning based on the theories of Dr. Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham and the new profound findings of the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Good luck! Jo-Anne 416-785-4666 jgross@remediationplus.com