Segmenting is a key component of teaching spelling and it’s a skill you work on with your students time and again. But have you ever practised segmenting with your colleagues?
Practising with other teachers ensures you’re all on the same page when it comes to segmenting (which is especially beneficial for any new staff members). It also allows you to share best practice and classroom experiences, such as how to answer curly questions that students ask during Sound Waves brainstorming sessions.
Brainstorming may seem like a simple activity, but it’s a powerful learning tool and an essential element of the Sound Waves program. Use brainstorming to instigate a creative dialogue about how words work and why graphemes do the things they do. Read on to find out how you can make the most of weekly brainstorming sessions to help your students develop their phonics skills.
Systematic synthetic phonics has been in the spotlight lately, with the trial of a Year 1 Phonics Check in South Australia and the New South Wales government allocating funding for decodable texts. So what exactly is systematic synthetic phonics? What evidence is there for its effectiveness? And how does Sound Waves fit into the picture?
The first year of school is a big deal for students, full of excitement, change and a new beast called written language. While we have a natural capacity to learn speech, we must be taught explicitly how to read and write. This makes the first year of school a big deal for teachers too, as it’s the opportunity to lay the best possible foundation for students’ reading and spelling success in the future.
Segmenting words into phonemes (sounds) and graphemes is an essential skill for spelling success. Some words are fairly straightforward to segment, such as shop (/sh/o/p/) or chain (/ch/ai/n/), but what about fox or argue?
