5 Tips for Building Strong Decoders
If you came to me as an educator, coach, or principal looking for ways to improve your reading scores, I would ask to see your ELA block schedule. When looking at the phonics/word study portion of your block, we’d look closely to determine if the following were included:
Blending routines
Opportunities for independent practice
Time spent in connected text (decodable and regular, uncontrolled text)
Daily encoding practice
Connection to vocabulary
More on those in a moment. I decided to write this post because more and more I hear that schools are adopting “science of reading phonics programs” and not getting the learning outcomes they had hoped for. I think this is because teachers, coaches, and principals haven’t been taught how children learn to read—specifically how that process informs instruction. Unfortunately when we skip the knowledge building piece and only adopt programs, we have no choice but to follow that program without questioning it. We follow it with fidelity because our administration asked us to.
However, strong decoders aren’t built by phonics programs– strong decoders are built by knowledgeable teachers. Don’t get me wrong, a systematic program with a scope and sequence and curated word lists, sentences, and decodables is KEY. But in my opinion, the value of the five principles above aren’t typically emphasized by popular programs, and are rather learned through experience “on the floor” while we are teaching and getting to know what our students need more of and what they need less of.
Today I want to break these down for you so that you have the WHY behind the pieces that programs typically don’t explain or provide.
Whole group and small group blending routine
This one is at the top for me because we all know how hard it is for our students to blend, which is why I recommend a structured blending routine during whole and small group. Getting past sound-by-sound blending (e.g a student says /m/ /a/ /p/ and then says map) and moving into automatic word reading (e.g just looking at the word and saying “map”) is really the point of phonics instruction, and it can feel like a huge mountain to climb for so many children. Incorporating a blending routine helps students understand the abstract task of stringing together sounds in order to read words.
There are different types of blending you can try, but my two go-tos are successive blending and continuous blending.
Successive Blending
I prefer to use successive blending for students who, despite several attempts, still struggle to blend the first two sounds together in a word.
To teach successive blending, first model for students how to touch and say the first sound, then say the first two sounds together, then add on the last sound.
Ex) /m, /ma/, map. Then, practice the strategy together, supporting students with extra modeling if need be.
Successive blending is imperative for some students who struggle to hold the correct sounds in order in their phonological working memory. It can be the antidote to keeping the phonemes in a word “tidy” in the brain, so students can recode the word correctly. If you need a resource to support you in teaching successive blending, these print and go successive blending mats will set you up for success. I use these in small groups and centers (with a supporting adult) daily.
Continuous Blending
Continuous blending is very similar to successive blending but can only be used in words with continuous sounds. Continuous sounds are sounds that can be sung or held onto, such as /m/, /s/, /n/, or /f/. All vowels are also continuous sounds. To teach continuous blending, first model for students how to sing the sounds in a word. Then practice the strategy together. I prefer to do this whole group, every day, with my CVC slides because I can display the whole word and run my finger beneath each letter as I say the sounds. Then I can just forward to the next slide for kids to try it on their own.
I display the slide and run my finger from left to right as I say the sounds.
Ex) Display a CVC word to model continuous blending with. The word must start with a continuous sound. Touch the first letter and sing the sound, then, without taking a breath, move right into the next sound as you touch the next letter, and move right into the final sound as you touch the last letter. If the word is “mat”, it would sound/look like this:
Deep breath in….
/mmmmmmmmmmm/ /aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa/ /ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt/
Then, with a different word, ask students to try it with you. Ask them to take a deep breath in and sing the first, then second, and final sound without pausing between sounds. Sometimes the pause between sounds is the barrier that kids need removed in order to “unlock” or blend the word correctly. For this practice I would do 10 words daily in whole group, using both review words, current words, and words from later in the scope and sequence so that all students are getting what they need.
Opportunities for independent practice
With all the hype around the importance of explicit instruction in lieu of “less direct instruction” activities like independent reading, I see some classrooms going to the extreme and dissolving independent practice altogether. Don’t do this. Yes, it is true that allotting twenty minutes of sustained silent reading (SSR) each day when children have not yet learned how to decode is a terrible waste of instructional minutes. However, the “you do” component of “I do, we do, you do” is a critical factor for success in the gradual release model for learning. In the classrooms I coach in, kids do much of their independent practice in centers. But they aren’t just off on their own for the duration of small group time. There are supporting adults at these centers providing corrective feedback when necessary. This makes independent practice efficient because even if students are making errors, the errors are being corrected, which has positive learning outcomes. Depending on your grade level, this independent practice might be letter sound identification, blending, reading/spelling words, rereading decodable texts, etc.
If we don’t give students a chance to practice on their own, they may never gain the independence needed to decode unfamiliar words, read challenging texts, or spell without support!
Time spent in connected text-decodable and non-decodable
Reading connected text is a critical component of daily reading instruction (daily means daily, aka every single day and multiple times each day). Connected text is any text that allows the student to apply the skill they have learned within the context of a real text. Depending on the grade level, children need a lot of practice with newly learned phonics skills in decodable text, as well as opportunities to “flex” their decoding skills in regular, non-decodable texts.
Decodable Texts
I incorporate decodable texts a few ways. First, I have students begin each phonics lesson by rereading our new decodable passage from the day before. The reread provides an opportunity to build fluency and orthographic mapping of newly learned words. At the end of the lesson we read a new decodable text. Once the passage is read twice, it goes into a three prong folder. Students read from these folders at a decodable text center for 10 minutes and add a sticker each time they read the text. Once they add five stickers to a text, the text can get removed from the folder. While they read, a partner gives corrective feedback by following along and pausing the reader when they make an error. You can model how to give corrective feedback for your students at the beginning of the year I ask my students to say “pause, go back to this word (point to the word), say the sounds”.
Non-decodable Texts
To ensure students have access and opportunities to read uncontrolled texts, each day when students come in they are asked to pick a book from our classroom library and whisper-read to themselves. I give them whisper phones to make it more engaging. We also do this after recess for 5-10 minutes as well as at the end of the day. I roam around to students, asking to listen to them read. I start this practice in grade 1, and hit it hard in grade 2.
Daily encoding practice
We know that spelling is important, but I think we often forget how much it contributes to reading skills. When we have mastered the spelling of a word, our brains store a mental image of that word, so that the next time we see it in a text, we can recognize it and read it automatically without having to sound it out. Spelling helps create this automatic word recognition because it helps our brains create and store these mental images. If I didn’t know the why behind spelling, I wouldn’t value it so much in my instruction. My routine for spelling is:
Teacher says the word
Students say it back
Students say the sounds
Students write the letters as they’re saying the sounds
Students say the word
Students spell the word aloud
You can gauge whether your students need all of the above steps to spell words; asking students to say the sounds is a scaffold that can be removed when you feel like students are ready.
Connection to vocabulary
One of the key elements in the orthographic mapping process (the process by which words become stored for automatic retrieval and recognition in the future) is vocabulary. Students must know the meanings of words they are decoding in order for those words to become permanently stored. Students who enter kindergarten with a strong vocabulary will have an easier time decoding. Think about it, if a student is sounding out the word “fig” but has never heard of a fig before, when they blend the sounds together their brain will unsuccessfully search for a familiar word. However, if they’ve heard the word “fig” before, and know the meaning of that word, when they attempt to blend the sounds /f/ /i/ /g/ together, they will have an easier time attaching the sounds and decoding the word.
One easy way to incorporate meaning is to write a list of words on the board or poster paper during whole group instruction. Then, play “guess my word”. For this game, you need to create “I’m thinking of a word that…..” sentences. Essentially you are describing one of your target words and asking children to determine which word you’re thinking of based on the meaning. For example:
Let’s say you wrote the below three words on the board:
clock
duck
cluck
You might say, “The word I’m thinking of is used to describe the sound a chicken makes”. You can ask students to think of the answer and give a thumbs up when they have it, then you can say, “On the count of three, whisper the word”. This gives students time to think of their answer (retrieval), and involves all students in responding.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t an exhaustive list. It was inspired by my quest for understanding why sometimes, even when we implement a reading program that is deemed evidence-based, we don’t see the outcomes we wish to see. I believe this happens because teachers weren’t taught how to teach children how to read. If I didn’t understand the process of orthographic mapping, I wouldn’t know how important it is to incorporate meaning into my decoding lessons. If I didn’t know that spelling has a huge impact on reading outcomes, I wouldn’t value or prioritize spelling during my instruction. Effective reading programs are a tool for building strong decoders, but it is teacher knowledge that influences what we prioritize for instruction, and thereby the force that moves children from sounding out to automatic word recognition.
