It’s the beginning of second grade. A phonics assessment for Julia shows that she can decode 10/10 of CVC words, 9/10 short vowel words with blends and digraphs and 5/10 CVCe words. So for the next weeks during small group instruction Julia’s teacher zooms in on how to read and spell CVCe words. Soon, her teacher asks her to read a decodable text with lots of CVCe words and a few short vowel words. Julia’s able to read the CVCe words really well, but has trouble with words with blends and digraphs and even some simple CVC words.
Sound familiar? We see this all the time (it happened to us in our classrooms). Students seem to have mastered a concept, and you move on to the next concept, only to find that they may not actually know that earlier concept as well as you thought.
In order for students to have enough working memory to fully understand what they read, they need to develop automaticity around phonics concepts. For example, they need to automatically know the sounds the short vowels make so they can decode any CVC word. Eventually, this even leads to automaticity in recognizing individual words (through orthographic mapping).
Automaticity depends on practice. We hear about practice a lot, but it’s not always clear what it means. We love this article on what good practice looks like; Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Practice Makes Perfect- But Only If You Practice beyond the Point of Perfection by Daniel T. Willingham. Willingham says, “For a new skill to become automatic or for new knowledge to become long-lasting, sustained practice, beyond the point of mastery, is necessary.” He continues to argue that “overlearning” is essential to promote automaticity in specific skills (like phonics) allowing for deeper comprehension. For us, this means that we need to be sure that we include plenty of review of previous concepts even if our kids have mastered those concepts. (Tip: Because Daffodil Hill Press Decodables provide multiple texts per phonics skill, they provide lots of practice. Each skilll is also cumulatively reviewed in subsequent books!)
Wiley Blevins recommends one nice system for review--blending lines. The teacher makes one set of blending lines to use for the whole week. The lines include the current concept the class is working on (and often words with minimal contrasts here) as well as review words, challenge words, and continuous text. In this document, we’ve included one example blending line as well as a blank template. Students work to read these lines across the week - as a whole class, in partners, and individuals. The words can also be used for quick spelling and dictation, too.
We also recommend Enhancing Alphabet Instruction (Clark, Jones, Reutzel) as a good example for how to both teach and review the alphabet. They suggest multiple rounds of alphabet instruction with the letters done in a different order for each round.
The crucial thing to remember is that review needs to be a part of your phonics lessons to be sure your students are not only remembering what you've taught, but also learning phonics concepts to the point of automaticity.
Interested in fostering review and practice with blending lines and decodable texts? Our Daffodil Hill Press decodables in both English and Spanish provide blending lines along with each decodable book. Classroom Collections come with printed and spiral bound blending lines for student practice.
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