#WesternDLD2 Final Project
by Elaine Kwok
Drills
Description
Visual drill: All letters of the alphabet
During the visual drill, the child is asked to read from a stack of cards with different letters of the alphabet.
Auditory drill: All letters
During the auditory drill, child is asked to listen to some sounds and write the corresponding letter in a sandbox.
e.g. Tutor ask: what says /s/, child would write s and c in the sandbox.
Blending drill: All Letters
During the blending drill, I set up 3 stacks of card with letters of the alphabet as follows:
Child is asked to first read phoneme by phoneme while pointing to each card. Then, child will read the CVC word by blending all the phonemes.
The auditory drill is an ear training exercise. Several cognitive skills are targeted. The child will need to: identify an auditory input, match the input to an orthographic representation of the sound, write the grapheme. The writing of the graphemes helps visually reinforce the connection between phoneme and grapheme. The use of a sandbox adds tactile stimulation to stimulate multimodal learning. A suggestion for a sub-step here would be allowing choice of several letters. (i.e. letter identification not recall, this step can be useful in the beginning of learning, or when working with children with working memory challenges).
In “A Review of the Current Research on Comprehension Instruction”, Butler, Urrutia, Buenger & Hunt summarized the literature and found that multisensory teaching methods or the use of manipulatives can be powerful teaching tools for reading instruction. However, there is a lack of evidence to warrant a recommendation in the classroom.
Anecdotally, I have seen the benefits of multisensory teaching. The sandbox dictation (auditory drill) has been particularly successful in my experience. I have seen some children with reading disorders who developed an aversion/fear to pen and paper writing. In some cases, I think children’s self-esteem is severely impacted by their past failure to write the ‘correct’ word on a page. I think the sandbox takes out some of the negative emotions children have developed towards pen and paper. I also like that errors on the sandbox can be easily removed without any traces. One theory is that there may be an organization/motoric impairment in children with reading disorders. The use of a sandbox is perhaps an easier way for children to correct their motor execution errors (which I often see in orthographically similar letters e.g. b vs p).
Evidence-based Comment
The visual drill reinforces grapheme to phoneme matching (phonics). To encourage student’s motivation, I could have introduced the letters of the alphabet using visual mnemonics (e.g. the animal mnemonics we saw in class). Also, in line with the response to intervention teaching model, I can find out the letter of the alphabet that a child is experiencing challenges (common examples are c for both /s/ and /k/ sounds), and come up with creative mnemonics for those letters.
The blending drill explicitly teaches children blending skills. Since the stacks of consonant cards are randomized, many of the CVC words are non-words. Many CVC real words are rote memorized by school age, introducing non-words encourages children to use their blending skills to read a word.
According to the assigned reading “National Reading Panel Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction”, the several moderators of successful reading programs are:
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Explicit and focused instruction on one or two PA skills
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Instruction on phoneme manipulations with letters
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Small group rather than individual or classroom instructions
In the O-G program, letter-sound association, blending or sound manipulations are all explicitly taught. Children are also given a lot of drills and practice on these phonological skills.
Tier-2 Adaptation/Suggestions:
I think the visual, auditory and blending drills could be combined as one activity at Tier 2 level.
Here is an example of a Tier 2 activity:
A card (with a letter of a consonant) will be assigned to each student, their job is to tell a friend what their card says without showing the card (the visual drill part). The friend who is guessing will need to listen and write the letter in a sandbox (auditory drill). The pair of students can each take turns saying and writing. While still holding on to their assigned card, students will form groups of 6 for a blending drill. The teacher will assign a vowel to each group. Students will take turns putting their card in front of and behind the vowel to make ‘funny words’ and read them aloud as a group.
I can also see the possibility of parental involvement in the drill work. For example, children can take home a page of ‘new words’ they learnt to read in the classroom and they can take home to ‘teach’ their parents how to read some non-words using their decoding skills.
I also came across a worksheet to introduce blending in a classroom. This 'spellathon' game could be a fun worksheet for students to make up real and non-words while practice saying them (click on the image to link to the source).
Here are some extra-resources for creative & multisensory phonics teaching:
http://www.adventuresinliteracyland.com/2014/03/inspiration-for-multi-sensory-phonics.html
