ADAPTING MATERIAL TO USE THE SOUNDS OF WORDS TO INCREASE COMPREHENSION

Recently I bought a spelling activity game to use with my learners. The goal of one version of the game is to find and use alphabet letters obtained when landing on the letter space while moving around the board, in order to spell short words. Drawings illustrate familiar printed words spelled out letter by letter. To be assured that the learners were able to match usual sound with each letter, I had them match the letters printed on the gameboard with randomly selected colorful oversized letters while saying the letter, a simple regularly decoded word using the letter, then finally saying the usual sound of the letter.Then, I had the learners match letter tiles to the letters, while repeating the same process as with the large letters.

The next step will be to help the learners use The Sounds Of Words to discover the "sound spelling" for each of the illustrated words. Once they are able to sound out the words, they will play the game by moving around the board to obtain letter tiles. Finally, the learners will use the tiles they obtain to match and cover each letter of the target words, spelling the words with the tiles. For each word they cover completely, they will spell the word aloud and then name the word. To further improve comprehension skills, they may later do activities matching words and pictures, playing matching word games, writing sentences using the words, doing crossword activities with the words, etc, etc, etc.

And, because many of the words illustrate the usual letter sounds, the learners will continue to improve their skills, learning to read, spell, and write, The Sounds Of Words!