One Task, Many Literacy Skills
Written by: Brianna Guild, MHSc SLP(C)
Date: November 17, 2024
Did you know that is it beneficial for instructional activities to work on multiple literacy skills simultaneously rather than in isolation? It’s true!
Here is one of my favourite quotes from Dr. Marnie Ginsberg, founder of Reading Simplified: “Most learning to read programs isolate reading subskills, such as oral phonemic awareness or letter-sound knowledge, into separate lessons. But the science of how the brain learns to read suggests that children learn to read by connecting their oral language systems with the new orthographic (or print) information. When we integrate multiple reading sub-processes in just a handful of activities, we are more likely to be efficient and effective.”
For example, what you see above may look like a simple spelling task where the student wrote 10 words, but many literacy skills were integrated into this activity including:
1. Basic Letter-Sound Knowledge
Spelling words with 4 sounds (primarily CCVC) that contain digraphs and/or consonant clusters.
Reviewing the spelling of all short vowel sounds.
2. Phonemic Awareness
Phoneme segmenting by first segmenting a word into phonemes (sounds), then mapping each phoneme to the grapheme (spelling).
Phoneme blending when the student read the final list of words they spelled (I always have students read their own writing at the end of the task, whether it’s words, sentences, or paragraphs).
Phoneme segmenting and blending are the most important phonemic awareness skills, and the efficacy of phonemic awareness tasks that incorporate letters is nearly double that of phonemic awareness without letters (National Reading Panel, 2000).
3. Letter Formation
Reviewing proper letter strokes, and the starting and ending point for each letter as necessary.
Words were selected to work on b, d, p reversals and letters that extend below the baseline like g and p.
Correct letter formation is a crucial part of becoming an efficient writer!
4. Morphology
Using the suffixes -ing and -ed, and reviewing their meaning (present and past tense).
Implementing the spelling strategy of spelling the base word first (e.g., step), and then adding the suffix (e.g., stepping) when spelling multimorphemic words.
When to use the doubling (1-1-1) rule: If a word has 1 syllable, 1 vowel, and ends in 1 consonant, double the final consonant when adding a suffix that starts with a vowel (e.g., -ing, -ed, -er). Read more about suffix spelling rules here.
5. Vocabulary
Reviewing the meaning of all words and discussing multiple meaning words (e.g., scan).
I hope this helps you see how spelling activity can work on many literacy skills!
Are you purposefully integrating multiple literacy skills into your activities? If you’re looking for an activity to help you do this, check out Say It, Move It, Spell It.
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If you're looking for spelling activities, check these out:
References:
Ginsberg, M. (2022). Science Shorts #3 - Integrate; Don’t Isolate Reading Subskills. https://readingsimplified.com/science-shorts-3-integrate/
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and U.S. Department of Education. (2000, April). Report of the National Reading Panel - Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf