Color can add hands-on interaction to assignments

Not every assignment that your child is asked to do will be as "hands-on" as she might need. Some worksheets and study guides tend to be so non-engaging that they end up being more busy-work than instructional aids. However, there are specific modifications you can make to the assignments which can increase her whole-brain involvement without affecting the intent of the assignment (or the grading of it).  One of the easiest modifications is to add extra concept-bridging steps to the assignment through the use of color.

No, I am not talking about coloring pages here.  Handing a child a picture to color rarely engages his brain in any way that reinforces learning.  On the other hand, asking a child to add colors to a diagram, text or drawing in a way that requires analysis of the words or pictures will make a significant impact to his learning.

A net and its solid.

Add color.  Highlighters, markers, crayons, and colored pencils are indispensable when it comes to helping your child sink her brain into a pencil-and-paper assignment.   In a recent math lesson, one of my students was having trouble visualizing the net of a geometric solid.  He couldn't see how the faces of the 3D drawing matched the faces of the net diagram. Ideally, we could have cut out a series of nets, then folded and taped them together to build paper models of the solids-- and we did do one just to make sure he understood the concept-- but that's very time consuming and we had many different solids to figure out.  This was a case where "hands-on" had to be a little more creative, and color-coding became the hands-on bridge from looking at a simple assignment to actually being able to work with it and analyze it.

The net and solid, color-coded.

For this assignment, I had him color-code the faces of the solid figure and the corresponding faces on the net; he was then able to make the connection between the 2D and 3D figures.  Once he could see the way the faces related to each other, where they connected, and the shape of each one, he could more easily match the solids to their nets.






Another use of color can help students understand math processes. For example, some of my students have struggled with long division or multi-digit multiplication, getting lost with all the different numbers that have to interact with each other.  Here we see a number multiplied by 23.  The digits 2 and 3 are color coded to match their products as the number is multiplied out:

In this way, a student can see that 1353 is the complete product of 3 x 451, while 9020 is the complete product of 20 x 451.  Notice the "placeholder zero" is colored an almost invisible gray to reflect the "invisiblitity" of the ten's place zero that makes 23 = 20 + 3.    Division can be analyzed the same way, writing each digit of the quotient in a different color so that the student sees what is happening in the process:

Color coding is equally effective in studying spelling rules.  Students who cannot identify the individual phonograms in a word are stuck with memorizing the unique spelling of every word they encounter, which severely limits their ability to spell. What they need is a way to see the phonograms in a word as they study its spelling. While my favorite hands-on spelling instruction is done by manipulating movable letter tiles, or physically cutting up words into syllables and letter combinations, this is not always practical. Instead, students can be shown how to color code the various phonograms in their spelling words.

Color-coded phonograms.

In this assignment, for example, a student might have been told to simply copy his spelling list.  That's easily done without involving much of the brain, even if he has to "copy each word five times each." Instead, modifying the assignment to add in some color-coding will require the student to analyze and interact with the words in a more hands-on way, which can increase the likelihood of actually learning to spell the words.



For the example above, the student may the words himself, changing the color of his pencil for each phonogram.  He could also write them in regular pencil and then underline the letters in different colors.  Highlighting or using colored pencils to circle the phonograms in a pre-printed list could achieve the same purpose for students who have diffficulty with writing.

The directions for the above example could go something like this:
1. Separate each word into syllables.*
2. Write single-letter vowel sounds in black, single-letter consonant sounds in blue.
3. Write double letter (same letter) consonant sounds in red, two-letter consonant sounds in green, two-letter vowel sounds in purple.
4. Underlined silent e..
5. If a separate, single-letter consonant or vowel sound follows another one, give it a different color (e.g., the "c" in escape, or the "a" in creation).

(*Note: I was taught that syllables are officially divided in the middle of double consonants: bel-low.  However, for the sake of identifying phonograms, the sound of a double letter such as /l/ occurs once in the word, so we can treat "ll"  as a single phonogram spelled with two letters, just like ph or sh, which are never separated.)

Color-coded roots, suffixes and prefix.

Besides learning the spelling of words, adding color can help children learn the meaning of words.  Vocabulary study often emphasizes prefixes, suffixes, and roots from Greek or Latin.  Color-coding can be very helpful for this as well.  Simply highlighting prefixes in one color, and suffixes in another, can help a student focus on the base words and analyze the meanings of words.  Or in a list of words that share certain roots, highlighting each root in its own color can call attention to the shared meaning of the words.

This concept can be easily extended to have students color-code the roots to match the corresponding key words in their definitions:

As you can imagine, analyzing words this way gets the hands, eyes, and brain involved in a manner that simply copying the words over and over cannot do. Similarly, color can be used to analyze text.  People have used highlighting to mark important information for years.  Why not use a variety of highlighting colors more intentionally?  If your child's assignment involves reading for information, he may use color to match information in the text to individual questions, either before he writes his answers, or afterwards.  While it may seem redundant to mark up a text in this way, the process actually increases reading comprehension by engaging the brain in a more concrete way than simply writing an answer.  Some schools teach this technique of "justifying" a response, requiring students to mark the information in the text that supports their answer:

This worksheet becomes more effective when the student

 uses color to match textual information to the questions.

Adding the targeted use of color to an assignment is limited only by the imagination.  A science diagram can be color coded to indicate the function of various structures. A history article might have facts highlighted that correspond to opposing political views. Whatever the student is asked to learn, color can help add hands-on interaction to even the most black-and-white of worksheets.

Phonograms? Phonemes? I just want my child to learn to read!

Now learn your ABC's right quick,
Or go get walloped with a stick.

This rather threatening verse in the classic book Heidi appears when the little Swiss girl begins to teach her goat herding friend Peter to read.  He is more than a little intimidated!  (Yes, I know, Heidi was not originally written in English, but it's the same idea.)  Learning to read and write in English can indeed seem a daunting task.  People point to sentences such as

 

and decide that the language is simply "not phonetic," therefore impossible.

It's not, really.  English is phonetic.  It uses letters to represent sounds, and these letters are written in the order that the sounds appear when the word is spoken.  It's not as straightforward as a reading Spanish, of course, in which each letter has a single sound, but for that you can blame all the early settlers and conquerors of the inhabitants of the little island known as England.  They all left their marks on the language.

The problem, then, is that you can't simply learn 26 letters and sounds and be done with learning to read, much less to spell.  Last time I counted, there were about 70 phonograms in the English language.

A phonogram is the written representation of a single vocal sound-- a letter or combination of letters  (from the Greek:  phono=sound + gram=writing).  The letters "ph" make a phonogram for the sound  /f/.  A phoneme is a distinct vocal sound, like /f/, /ah/ or /sh/, that you combine with others to speak words.  A baby's first word is often a combination of two phonemes, /m/ and /ah/, repeated: "mama."

Although phonograms and phonemes are different things, every spoken word will have as many phonemes as there are phonograms when the word is written.  There is a 1:1 correspondence-- in the word "cat," for example, when spoken, there are three distinct sounds /k/ /a/ /t/ each represented by a single letter in the written word.  Three phonemes, three phonograms.

The confusion for reading and spelling English stems from the following issues:

1. Many phonemes can be spelled in several different ways;  and
2. Many phonograms can represent more than one sound.

For example, the single letter "a" is a phonogram for the vowel sound in the words April, amber, and all.  Meanwhile, the sound /ay/ can be represented by a, ay, ai, ei, and eigh.

So how do you teach a child to read English without confusing him?  Should you teach him all the phonograms and each sound they can represent, or should you teach him all the phonemes and all the ways they can be spelled?

Well, if done correctly, the child eventually ends up with the same information either way.  And in general, you're going to start off simply, introducing a few short words with distinct phonemes that can be represented by single-letter phonograms.  Cat, bat, sat.  So in the beginning, it isn't a huge issue.

Sometimes where you go from there depends on which curriculum you use.  For example, The Writing Road to Reading is organized by phonograms.  The student learns all the sounds represented by "a," all the sounds represented by "b," all the sounds represented by "ough," and everything in between.  On the other hand, Reading Reflex focuses more on the phonemes.  The student learns all the ways to spell the long /a/ sound, the /k/ sound, etc.  You may prefer one or the other, or a combination of both.

Still, 70 phonograms!  That seems like a lot.  But it is not all done in a single week, or even a single year.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  (A very user-friendly way to eat the elephant is the new Spelling You See program.  I have only seen the samples online, but they look excellent!)

Which bite you offer first is up to you.  My favorite introduction to reading is Dr Seuss' ABC.  It introduces the basic alphabet and the concept of letter-sound representation, and throws in those very important rhymes that are essential to developing phonemic awareness.  But wherever you start, you can make it fun!

Here's where the hands-on part comes in.  When a child is beginning to read, she can increase her mastery of the reading and spelling when she:

1. manipulates letter tiles or puzzle pieces to represent the sounds in the order they occur as they are spoken:

The moveable letters are perfect for showing how rhyming patterns work.  Simply by changing out a tile, you can turn "dish" into "fish,"  "dawn" into "pawn."  Internal and end sounds can be changed, too, so that the student learns to focus on each phonogram in the word-- "dish" and "dash" are different words, as are "fish" and "fin."  When the student has mastered three-phoneme words, he can combine them to make compound words: pigpen, dishpan.  Later he can use the tiles to break longer words into syllables:  car pen ter,  so fa, sing er.

2. forms phonograms out of clay, string, or pipe cleaners to spell words;

In this case, you might have the child form the letters to spell "pan."  Then have him add the sound /t/ at the end and read the new word.  Finally, he can add the /s/ and have another word.  This kind of word-building is used in the series Sequential Spelling, which has wonderful lists of words that students learn to spell one sound at a time.

3. writes letters in a tray of sand or baking soda as she says each distinct sound of a word;

Writing in the sand is a also great way to work on the fine-motor skills of forming letters.  Just be sure the student is forming the letters correctly!  If your child struggles with printing or cursive, a great handwriting program that is developed by a physical therapist is Handwriting Without Tears.

4. divides words into syllables and mark each distinct phonogram in a word by circling or underlining with a separate color.  In this example, the student has first divided all the multi-syllable words, then circled all the multi-letter phonograms (missing the "ee" in Queen), and has begun to mark the separate single-letter phonograms:

The pencil-marking activities are probably best done after a student has had practice using the letter tiles.  What you have your student marking depends on what they have learned.   Some reading programs have the student indicating certain spelling rules they recognize in the words. In Writing Road,  for example, the students learn 5 reasons for using a "silent e," and when they find one they underline it twice and identify it with a number, 1-5.  They also number different sounds for multi-sound phonograms:  the ch in "choir" gets a 2, the ch in "Charlotte" gets a 3.

Each of these four techniques can be used during different practice sessions, to reinforce the student's mastery of phonogram-phoneme patterns.  Some activities may be more beneficial than others for particular students at different points in their learning.  For example, the clay models of the letters are suggested in Ron Davis' book The Gift of Dyslexia because, as he theorizes, the dyslexic student sees the letters 3-dimensionally, and forming them in clay helps the brain transition from the 3-D image to the printed 2-D version.  So this might be a critical activity for certain children. On the other hand, you wouldn't expect a beginner to take a pencil and mark all the phonograms in an entire paragraph.  But all of these activities can help the child focus on the details of the words, add variety and interest, and ultimately make the student a better reader and speller.


A complete list of phonograms (accurate to the degree that your dialect of English matches mine) can be found here.