Hi I’m Kim Wakefield with Side-by-Side Educational Consulting, where we work side by side with educators to improve outcomes for all kids. Thank you for joining us again, we’re back to learn how to make spelling instruction more worth your time, you know you have those kids that ace their spelling tests on a Friday and then the next week they go to write a word and they can’t remember how they spelled it the week before. So we’ve seen this practice over and over again in classrooms where we know that spelling tests just don’t do it. Kids memorize a list. They write words five times each, and these strategies are just not cutting it for our kids. So let’s look at our first instructional toolkit strategy called phoneme grapheme mapping phoneme grapheme mapping is where students take phonemes which we know are the sounds in words, and they connect them to the sound-spellings which we call graphemes. By doing this, kids are able to intentionally think about each sound in the word, and how it’s spelled. In order for us to get to the skill of phoneme-grapheme mapping, students have to be able to segment words first. So check out our other videos on this topic. In phoneme-grapheme mapping, after students have segmented words into the individual sounds so for instance if we take the word: champ. /ch/ /a/ /m/ /p/ Now we’re going to take the mapping to the next level connecting it to phonics, so students are thinking about the sound /ch/. They’re going to check their sound spelling cards to see how that sound is spelled, and they’re going to write –ch– in the, in the individual box. The next sound in champ is /a/, again they’re going to check their sound spelling card. Find the card that matches it and write the spelling of the sound in the box. a. The next sound in champ is /m/ – sound spelling card spelled m write it in the box. And the next sound and champ is /p/, check their sound spelling cards /p/ is spelled p again students will write p in the box. As you can see this strategy of going through each sound /ch/ /a/ /m/ /p/ as it’s written in individual boxes allows us students to be able to see how the sounds are spelled in a word. We have lots of resources in our instructional toolkit on how you can use this strategy very strategically with your classroom. And when I am in classrooms, and I’ve used this strategy with my kids. It comes at the beginning of the week. So when we’re thinking of a Monday through Friday plan in regards to spelling instead of taking that critical instructional time on Monday to do a pretest, introduce your sound spelling with your sound spelling cards. Use phoneme grapheme mapping to make sure kids are aware of the sound symbol correspondences and focus on the sound spelling of the week. And then it will move us into our next strategies word building!
**Teacher Tip**
It is not necessary to instruct all the spelling words for the week with phoneme-grapheme mapping. Use the most complicated or complex words on your list or other words that follow your sound-spelling focus for the week. If you can, always build in repetition with previous sound spelling cards using new or connected words. Phoneme-Grapheme mapping is an excellent instructional tool to use on Day 1 and Day 2 of your instructional sequence. I have even seen teachers use the format for their spelling test at the end of the week.
The most influential part of this strategy is the metacognition. We want students to make a habit out of connecting phonemes to graphemic correspondences when they encode.
(Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping is based on the work of Gerald Glass, Marilyn Adams, Joe Torgesen and Kathryn Grace)
