-Vocabulary

-Language Structures

-Verbal Reasoning

-Literacy Knowledge

-Decoding

-Sight Recognition

Some letters have multiple sounds.

-Vowels represent 18 sounds.

-Consonants represent 25 sounds.

-Alveolar: The tongue touches the alveolar ridge. (behind teeth)

-Velar: The back of the tongue touches the velum. (back of mouth)

-Nasal: Airflows through nasal cavity.

-Fricatives: Air is forced through a small space.

-Affricates: Tongue is pulled back on the roof of the mouth.

-Glides: Consonant is followed by a vowel.

-Liquids: Floats/lingers in the mouth.

-Closed: CVC (cat)

-Open: CV (she)

-Vowel Team: CVVC (coil)

-R-Controlled: V-r (car)

-Vowel Consonant: VC-e, CVC-e (kite)

-Consonant -le: multisyllabic ending -le (table)

-Bound: must be attached to a word (-s books, -ing running)

-Teaching Reading Sourcebook

(pg. 63)

-Print can be used for different purposes.

-Print corresponds to speech, word for word.

-Printed words are made up of letters.

-Printed words are separated by spaces.

-Sentences in print are made up of separate words.

-Sentences start with capitol letters and end in punctuation.

-Text is read from left to right.

-Lines of text are read top to bottom.

-When one page of text ends, it starts again on the next page.

-A spine

-A title and a title page.

-An author and some have separate illustrators.

-Pages.

During assessment, students who are falling behind are pulled for additional support.

-Results in better spelling.

-Leads to longer, higher-quality compositions.

-Leads to faster reading.

-Is needed in everyday situations.

One of my favorite strategies is creating a print-rich environment, especially for emergent readers. Labeling objects, Read aloud, and shared writing activities.

Ultimately, fostering print awareness is about more than teaching children how to read, it’s about giving them the tools to see the world through a new lens. It’s about empowering them to find meaning, patterns, and structure in the chaos of symbols.

Syllables in Spanish is also more consistent. Spanish words typically follow a clear consonant-vowel (CV) pattern, which makes syllable segmentation and blending more predictable. For example, a word like camino easily breaks into syllables: ca-mi-no. In English, however, syllables are less consistent and often obscured by complex vowel patterns and silent letters, making phonological tasks more challenging.

On the other hand, English has a richer and more irregular morphemes. While Spanish uses affixes like -ito (small) or -mente (like -ly in English), English morphology is more varied due to its roots in multiple languages, especially Latin, German, and French. Understanding prefixes, suffixes, and root words in English can be more complicated—but also more powerful for expanding vocabulary and comprehension, particularly in academic texts.

Another key difference lies in phonemes and articulation. Spanish has fewer vowel sounds than English—just five compared to more than a dozen in English—making pronunciation more straightforward in Spanish. English learners from Spanish-speaking backgrounds often struggle with English vowel distinctions because they don’t exist in their native language (for example, distinguishing between bit and beet).

Ultimately, studying the structure of both Spanish and English has reinforced the idea that language learning is not just about acquiring vocabulary, but about understanding systems. When we as educators understand those systems, we can meet our students where they are and build meaningful bridges between their languages by relating their strengths and guiding their growth.

A great activity for learning the basic phonemes of words is to clap each sound out to form the word, which can also be a great technique for students sounding out syllables.

Teaching students to break down compound words like snowman or football into their meaningful parts helped them see how words could be constructed and deconstructed. Another powerful structure of English is articulation, how the position of the tongue, lips, and breath shape the sounds we make. It is vital for students to not only hear the sounds but feel them too. This connection helps to reinforce learning across listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Reading assessments are essential tools used to support student literacy development. Screening assessments are administered at the beginning of the year to identify students at risk for reading difficulties, allowing for early intervention. Progress monitoring assessments are given regularly to track students' reading growth and determine whether current instruction is effective. When students show signs of ongoing struggle, diagnostic assessments are used to pinpoint specific areas of difficulty, such as phonemic awareness or decoding, so that instruction can be tailored to meet individual needs. Finally, outcome assessments, typically given at the end of the year or program, evaluate overall student achievement and the effectiveness of the reading curriculum, often informing school-wide instructional decisions.

In the early stages of literacy instruction, learners often begin by identifying the shapes and names of letters. Visual recognition is a primary skill—learners must be able to differentiate between similar-looking letters, such as “b” and “d” or “p” and “q.” Over time, they begin to associate these visual symbols with the sounds they represent, paving the way for phonemic awareness and decoding skills. This also includes knowledge of alphabetical order, the concept that letters form words, and the awareness that written text follows specific directional patterns, such as left to right and top to bottom in English.

-b & d

-p & q

-m & n

I Do (teacher models the task)

We Do (teacher and students work together)

You Do (students work independently).

Manuscript: Involves forming each letter independently, with spacing between letters and words. Manuscript is a foundational skill for students, helping them with reading, writing, spelling, and communication.

Cursive: It's characterized by letters being linked together without lifting the pen or pencil from the paper, resulting in a more continuous, flowing script.

-Teaching Reading Sourcebook page 74

Explicit: Intentional daily instruction (each session should not exceed 30 minutes).

Practice: Continuous practice of a specific skill in and out of text, including meaning-making with decodable text.

Assessment Drives Instruction: Corrective feedback in the moment. Frequent formal and informal data collection drives grade-level and targeted remediation and acceleration.

It's a critical skill for learning to read and spell, as it helps children understand that words are made up of distinct sounds. This skill allows individuals to blend sounds together to form words, segment words into individual sounds, and manipulate those sounds in various ways.

One of the most impactful realizations is how critical these skills are in early literacy development. Research consistently shows that a child's level of phonemic awareness upon entering school is a strong predictor of future reading success. This underscores the importance of intentional instruction that supports the development of these auditory skills before children are introduced to print.

An important takeaway is the distinction between phonological and phonemic awareness and the need to teach them explicitly and systematically. Phonological awareness activities might involve clapping syllables or identifying rhyming words, whereas phonemic awareness activities require more focused work, such as segmenting or blending individual sounds within words. Understanding this hierarchy allows educators to scaffold instruction effectively, progressing from broader sound awareness to more specific phoneme-level manipulation.

Equally significant is the recognition that phonemic awareness is not inherently tied to print. Instruction can and often should begin with purely oral tasks to build a strong auditory foundation before transitioning into phonics and decoding. This insight helps clarify why some students may struggle with reading—not due to visual or memory issues, but because they have not fully developed the underlying sound-based skills.

Phonics instruction is essential because it equips learners with strategies to independently decode unfamiliar words, reducing reliance on memorization or guesswork. Effective phonics instruction lays the groundwork for automatic word recognition.

To teach phonics properly, instruction should be explicit, systematic, and sequential. Students must first develop phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words—before they can effectively connect those sounds to written symbols. Instruction should begin with simple sound-letter correspondences and gradually progress to more complex patterns, such as digraphs, blends, and vowel teams. Repeated practice through reading decodable texts and writing words using taught patterns reinforces the learning process.

The progression of phonics learning aligns closely with Linnea Ehri’s phases of word reading development, which provides a framework for understanding how students internalize and apply phonics over time: Pre-Alphabetic Phase, Partial Alphabetic Phase, Full Alphabetic Phase, Consolidated Alphabetic Phase, & Automatic Phase. Each phase builds on the one before it, once again showing the importance of a developmental approach to instruction. When phonics is taught in a manner that matches students' cognitive readiness and language/letter knowledge, it not only supports decoding but also empowers students to become confident, independent readers.

-Word Similarity

-Word Relationship

Irregular words pose a unique challenge. They do not conform neatly to predictable sound-letter correspondences, meaning that relying solely on phonics would leave students stumbling when encountering common but phonetically inconsistent words like said, does, or give. These are often taught as "heart words", a term used to emphasize that parts of the word must be learned "by heart" because they break expected patterns. However, most of these words still have regular components, and the irregular portion is typically just one phoneme or spelling pattern. Highlighting this distinction helps students build connections between what they know and what they need to memorize.

Teaching sight words, including both regular high-frequency words and irregular "heart words", is critical for building reading fluency. When students can recognize these words automatically, they free up cognitive resources to focus on comprehension rather than decoding each word individually. This is especially important in early reading development when text often includes many high-frequency words.

Effective instruction involves a blend of approaches. Teachers might use elkonin boxes, sound learning, or visual learning to help students memorize both the regular and irregular elements of words. By focusing on phoneme-grapheme connections, even in irregular words, students can gradually build a mental bank of instantly recognizable words. This not only boosts reading speed but also contributes to confidence and a sense of accomplishment.

Ultimately, knowing sight words, particularly high-frequency and irregular words, is foundational to reading success. These words appear so often in text that being able to recognize them instantly is crucial for understanding and fluency. Teaching them thoughtfully and systematically helps bridge the gap between phonics and fluent reading, supporting all learners in becoming capable and confident readers.

Syllabication, the process of dividing words into syllables, is a key tool that empowers students to decode unfamiliar multisyllabic words. It’s more than a strategy, it’s a bridge between phonics and fluency. When students learn to recognize syllable types (like open and closed syllables), they can apply this knowledge to decode words accurately and independently. This boosts students confidence, as well as strengthens their vocabulary and comprehension.

When it comes to teaching reading, writing, and pronunciation, syllabication is a foundational step. It aligns with what research shows about how the brain learns to read. As teachers, we must help students connect sounds to print in a meaningful, organized way. By teaching syllable patterns and division rules, we’re equipping students with tools that help them become lifelong readers. Instead of just memorizers of words.