Hello Everyone!
This week I had a conversation with a few teachers about what support looks like in the classroom for students with Dyslexia. They were familiar with Tier 2 and 3 supports, but they wanted specific strategies to do with the whole class to help students feel supported. These strategies are dependent on grade level and are by NO means exhaustive, but they are a good starting point:
Phonemic Awareness Activities: Phonemic awareness involves the ability to identify, isolate, manipulate, and blend individual phonemes — the smallest units of sound — in words. When starting out, having students identify rhyming words, having students break up words into their smallest units of sound (What are the sounds in cat?) and then moving towards phoneme deletion (say cat, now say cat without the /c/), addition (say cat, now add /s/ at the beginning), and substitution (say cat, change the /c/ to a /b/.)
Dyslexia Reading Well has a great resource on the 44 phonemes of the English language.
Alphabetic Principle: Letter-sound correspondence, or the relationship of the letters in the alphabet to the sounds they produce is a key component of learning to read. To teach letter-sound correspondence, work with a few sounds at a time by teaching each letter of the alphabet and its corresponding sound. For each letter-sound relationship, instruction should include naming the letter or letters that represent the sound, and it should associate a picture cue of an object with the target sound to help students remember the relationship between the letter and the sound (i.e., apple A /a/).
The Florida University Literacy Institute has a great resource on the sequence to teach phonics.
Syllable Types: Teaching students syllables is a great strategy for helping students chunk long words into more manageable parts. There are six main types of syllables, and this article from Reading Rockets is a great starting point.
Morphological Awareness: Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. These units include root words that can stand alone as words, prefixes, suffixes, and bound roots, which are roots that must have a prefix or suffix added to become a word. A few different ways to teach morphemes across grade levels are through word sorts and word building.
The University of Western Ontario has lots of info here!
In the fall, Everyone Reading will be offering professional development sessions on these strategies and more – to help you and your students this year!
Professional Development Opportunities
thinkSRSD “How to Teach Writing” – August Session
This course will enhance how you teach writing (and close reading) based on the latest advances in the science of writing. thinkSRSD equips students with the strategies and discrete skills (word and sentence level) needed to write independently and effectively. It demystifies what effective writing looks like and how to produce it with its comprehensive, easy-to-use system. The approach has been proven to work in studies that meet the most rigorous research quality and outcomes. You’ll learn to help your students write better at the word choice, sentence formation, and paragraph genre levels so they can use their voice to share their messages with the world and improve it.
The course costs $395 and consists of 3 online classes from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Aug 3, 10 & 18. You will have access to eLearning modules that you will complete over 6 hours between the course meeting dates. You will also receive a book with a step-by-step lesson plan. The registration deadline for the June course is Wednesday, July 26. This course is also eligible for CTLE credit. To learn more and to register, please click here.
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ASPDP Course: Teaching Vocabulary All Day, Every Day
This workshop will address this simple view of reading by providing instructional strategies in three of the five pillars of reading: phonological awareness, phonics, and vocabulary because mastery of those pillars leads to proficiency in fluency and comprehension as well. It will concentrate on building a foundation of word recognition skills and enabling teachers and students to build a large and varied working vocabulary and strategies for acquiring new words. It will specifically address the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse students whose language comprehension may not match the demands of the school system. Those needs include activities that include and validate the students’ language and experience, as English is constantly being enriched by language and experiences that are not “standard.” Participants will embrace the idea of expanding vocabulary, not substituting one word for another. They will discuss and practice strategies for using students’ vocabulary to enhance their own.
Participants will learn a variety of quick and easy activities and drills to teach phonological awareness and phonics effectively and efficiently. They will also learn to teach vocabulary formally and informally, using morphology, syntax, and context clues, explicit instruction, and correct practice in targeted words, and by embedding vocabulary development into every activity during the school day.
Participants will also practice designing quick and effective assessments, which, instead of diagnosing students’ deficiencies, will reinforce skills taught and measure the impact of that instruction on students. To learn more and register, please click here.
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IMSE’s Comprehensive Orton-Gillingham Plus
Tuition: $1,500
August 14 – 18, 2023 (virtual)
More dates are available at IMSE.com
Course Description: The IMSE Comprehensive Orton-Gillingham Plus Course and Program is 30 hours of a hands-on, interactive, and personalized class that provides a complete understanding of IMSE’s enhanced Orton-Gillingham method, the essential five components to literacy, and the tools necessary to apply it in the classroom. After participating in this accredited Structured Literacy course, teachers will understand the structure and foundation of the English language and the research behind the science of reading. Educators will have a basic knowledge of how to assess and teach students in all three tiers of RTI, as well as students with dyslexia. Participants will evaluate and teach students in phonological skills, phonics/word recognition, spelling, writing, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This course includes an asynchronous component for fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The Comprehensive OG Plus course is appropriate for teachers whose students are emergent and beginning readers and readers struggling with word recognition. This course also includes an asynchronous component that shares research and strategies for teaching and assessing fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Upon completing this course, teachers can purchase two graduate credits.
