Spelling starts with hearing. (And so does reading.)

If you've ever seen an English Bible translation made for deaf people, you may have initially wondered why it was written in such simple language.  Of course, it is not an indication of a lack of intelligence. It is because the written word is based on letters representing spoken sounds.  People who don't hear the language, then, must memorize the spelling of every single word they read. Unlike hearing people, they have no massive collection of speech "files"-- the sounds of the letters, the patterns of the words and sentences-- to draw from. Instead, the language areas of their brains are filled with the complex patterns and nuances of signs (at least for those who learn sign language-- not all do).  When a deaf person is learning to read print, then, each word has to be learned without the prior knowledge of what the word sounds like or how it is used.  So learning to spell and read English is at least as difficult for a deaf person as it is for an English speaker to learn to read Chinese.

I know there are people who insist that some children can only learn to read by sight, and that "phonics" will not work for them at all.   While that may be true,  in my experience those children would be extremely rare.  The increase in horrendous spelling habits I have seen in recent years has more to do, in my opinion, with the lack of a solid foundation, rather than an explosion in true dyslexia.  I suspect that many people who have attempted to teach a child to "sound out the letters" without success have begun before the child has developed adequate phonemic awareness and auditory processing skills-- that is, before the child can distinguish and identify separate sounds in words.  This is why many effective remedial reading programs, and dyslexia specialists, begin with identification of sounds.  (See Reading Reflex and Barton Reading and Spelling.)

Reading by sight-only can be done, as many literate deaf people can demonstrate, but it is unnecessarily difficult for people who have normal hearing.  It means you have to use a lot of visual memory just to comprehend what you are reading.  Yes, I've seen those memes that "prove" that people only read the first and last letters of words, but that is not true for a beginning reader, or anyone else seeing a particular word for the first time.  To fluently decode new words and to spell well, a child needs to be able to match the letters they see to the sounds they hear or have heard.

Phonemic awareness begins with hearing sound patterns.  This is why nursery rhymes and Dr Seuss books are so important for pre-reading.  Children hear the rhymes and begin to distinguish sounds and recognize sound patterns.   Although one might think that any child who can speak can also recognize sounds, there is another level of connection that needs to be made before a child can begin to read phonetically.  Some children make this connection naturally, while others may need a bit of help.

The colored golf shown balls above can be used to increase a child's phonemic awareness in a fun way.  Each ball represents a separate sound. (Note that a sound such as /ay/ can be represented by different letters-- a, ae, ay, eigh-- but is still a single sound.)  "/Ay/" could be represented by the blue ball.  "Ape" has two sounds, /ay/ and /p/, so would be represented by two balls.  "Tape" has three sounds:  /t/, /ay/, and /p/, so three balls would be used.  "Tapes" would use four balls, to represent the  four sounds /t/, /ay/, /p/, and /s/.

To play the sound balls game, you would start by saying a one- or two-sound word and having the child identify the sounds and place a ball down for each sound heard.  Words such as a, pay, say, day, I, pie, lie, my, oh, dough, no, sew, and toe are examples.  When the child has mastered identifying the separate sounds, ask him what would happen if you replaced one sound with another--  take the /p/ out of pie and use replace it with /b/.  (buy)  Take the /i/ out of pie and replace it with /ay/.  (pay) Have the child physically take the ball out of the correct position and replace it with a different colored ball.

This activity should be done in short sessions.  It is better to do it a few minutes a day, every day, rather than an hour or two once a week.

Three-sound words are the next step.  Have the child identify the separate sounds in words like cat, sit, top, live, ham, .  Words with vowels in the middle are easiest, but you will eventually want to work on words with consonant sounds back-to-back such as try, ask, blue.

Next, try four-sound words: seeds, sled, trip, lights, chimp.  Start with a single ball for a single sound, sound and add one ball/sound at a time:  I /i/  Put /p/ in front:  pie.  Put /s/ at end:  pies.  Put /r/ between p and i: prize.  The middle sounds are more difficult, so you may need to keep working on first and last sounds for a while.

While you're working on the sounds, don't feel obligated to stick to real words.  You can also use nonsense words like gat, glat, frub.  The important thing at this point is the sound discrimination.

Please bear in mind that the more sounds there are, the more memory is required to process them.  Some children may stall out at 3-sound words.  That's fine; try a four-sound word every once in a while but don't push to the point of frustration.

Once your child is comfortable using the colored objects to represent the letters, you can begin to introduce the letters.  This is where Scrabble tiles, alphabet puzzle letters, or other manipulatives are used.  (Paper, felt or craft foam squares with letters written on them work fine.) Four at a time is probably sufficient, and it is probably best to start with sounds that are represented by single letters.  For example, the letters s, t, o and p can be used to form op, top, stop, pot, and pots.  ("Post" has a different sound in the middle, so don't use that one.  If it happens to show up, you can simply explain to your child that letters can stand for more than one sound.)  Later on you will need tiles with letter combinations that represent a single sound, such as ch, ck, wh, th, sh, ll, ue, ew, ay, etc.  Please note that consonant blends (dr, br, sl, tr)  are still made up of separate sounds, so they do not get their own tiles.

So that's how you use manipulatives to increase phonemic awareness and begin to build a great foundation for reading and spelling.

For a complete list of phonograms and the phonemes they represent, jump to this post, available Tuesday 6/16.