Nancy Young, Ed.D.
2024 | 15 minutes
Every student deserves classroom instruction and support that is differentiated for their intellectual ability and academic readiness. All instruction should recognize individual strengths, interests, and varying needs, and be provided in ways that are both effective and fun!
(Young, 2024)
The journey to becoming a fluent reader and writer varies in difficulty. However, look closely at the children climbing the Ladder. What do you notice?
Hopefully, you see smiling students. This is intentional, as the journey toward literacy should be joyful for every learner! To support a joyful journey, effective instruction and practice opportunities should consider the needs of the learner while also being fun. This helps ensure smiles all around as each rung is mastered.
As you systematically design fun and effective instruction and practice opportunities that are based on need, it is important to consider five skills that underpin the ability to read and write accurately and at an appropriate pace.
To decode the written word into spoken language requires the basic understanding that letters represent sounds in our speech. Children in the dark green area of the continuum gain this understanding very early and seemingly effortlessly, while most students in the red area of the continuum are likely to require a great deal of explicit instruction to jump-start the process.
Although decoding and spelling are reciprocal processes, going from speech to written text is generally more difficult and takes longer to master. Students in the red and orange areas of the continuum are likely to require a great deal of instruction and practice as they learn to spell. Although spelling skills develop through exposure to text while reading, some students in the light and dark green areas may benefit from targeted spelling instruction based on individual need.
Vocabulary knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension. Instruction to support vocabulary development must consider that the general vocabulary knowledge students have will vary across the continuum. Background knowledge (both the content being studied and the home environment of the student) will impact the design of support needed to strengthen vocabulary development.
The purpose of reading is comprehension, which is the ability to process words in written text and to understand their meaning when combined. To comprehend, readers must integrate what they are reading with what they already know. For some students, reading challenges are not due to their difficulty decoding the words but their difficulty comprehending the text they are trying to read.
Fluent writing requires transcription (e.g., handwriting, spelling) and generation (composition – generating ideas and expressing knowledge using text) skills. Writing places demands on processes such as attention and working memory. Developing the skill of writing generally takes a great deal of practice, and many students will benefit from learning specific strategies to support the writing process.
Bring games of all types into your instruction and practice to make learning fun and effective (Berninger & Wolf, 2009). I have always found that games are a great way to provide unobtrusive practice. Supplies for these games can be inexpensively created (e.g., use scrap paper) by educators, parents/caregivers, or even students. For example,
Research indicates that children need to physically move more often (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). This is especially true for many students who have ADHD (Barkley, 2016). In addition to the physical and emotional benefits of movement, there is evidence that skill-based movement may also enhance learning (Mavilidi et al., 2018).
Drawing on this research, I’ve used movement in my classrooms, at home, and even in virtual lessons with students who needed explicit decoding instruction. And we had fun doing it! For example, the use of keywords when teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences can be enhanced when every keyword is aligned to an action that can be acted out. My keyword for the letter sounded as /b/ is “bat.” Students pretend to bat at a ball with a baseball bat! My keyword for the letter sounded as /k/ is “catch.” Students pretend to reach up to catch a ball!
Of course, these new correspondences will need to be applied during writing and reading instruction and practice opportunities. Enhancing with movement, however, will get students out of their chairs and having fun. Once taught, these same movements can be used for review while playing extended code-related games in the classroom, gym, living room, and backyard (Young, 2017).
For students in the red and orange areas of the continuum, using handheld-sized grapheme cards enables tactile engagement while learning new sound-symbol relationships. I have found the use of colored cards helpful. I prefer using blue for consonants and red for vowels because these colors are easy to obtain. Using a magnetic board and magnetic grapheme “tiles” is another way to increase tactile engagement. The magnetized tiles can be pre-purchased or you can make your own by adding a small piece of magnetized ribbon to the back of the grapheme card.
In addition to handheld cards and magnetized tiles, it is effective and fun for students to each have a small whiteboard with a set of markers. I’m a big fan of whiteboards because they are fun, and they are also very forgiving when a mistake is made by a young learner who is still learning to form letters or a student with dysgraphia. A quick erase and the student is back on track!
In my teaching practice, as symbols were learned, whiteboards were regularly used for what I called “color spelling.” During color spelling, students not only had to spell the word correctly, but they also had to use the blue marker for consonants and the red marker for vowels. The switching of markers required students to think about the correct spelling, and the tactile engagement seemed particularly fun, especially for students with ADHD.
For some students, dramatizing concepts is the key to getting ideas flowing for writing or to understand the meaning of a complex word, expression, or concept (Mavilidi et al, 2017). Sometimes called “embodied cognition” (Fugate et al., 2018), this fun and effective way of learning entails using the body as a learning tool for comprehension rather than a specific spelling skill. For example, students can act out alone or with others the meaning of vocabulary words. Many small words have multiple meanings, and these can be acted out as students not only consider their meaning, but also whether the word is a noun or verb, and so on.
Dramatization can also be used to develop text comprehension. Acting out specific parts of a story is not only enjoyable, but it also gets students up from the carpet or out of their chairs while still being engaged in the learning. The use of props can make it even more fun.
During the generation stage of writing a story, acting out ideas is fun and it helps minimize the pressure of the planning process for students who find writing difficult. For students with ADHD, I often found that allowing these students to act out their thoughts during the brainstorming stage was an engaging and effective way to begin writing. Even just walking around a table or the room seemed to reduce the pressure for those who experienced writing challenges, and helped free the mind to think creatively about what might be written.
Every year in the United States, the Scripps National Spelling Bee takes place. What is common to these top spellers? They know a LOT about words. Winning a spelling bee entails not just learning how to spell words, but also learning why English words may be spelled the way they are. This involves learning about the units of meaning (morphemes) that make up words, and studying the origin of words and how they have changed over time (etymology).
Developing the knowledge needed to participate in a spelling bee can be gained through a guided-inquiry approach to learning about the English language. Studying words in such an intellectually engaging and explorative manner may be appealing to advanced readers who may require some support in improving their spelling.
Despite the demonstrated skills of many who win spelling bees, the whole concept of digging deeply into words and their origins can be the basis for numerous fun activities. For example, a two-pronged approach to spelling bees can be organized. One prong focuses on the traditional spelling bee, recognizing some students will enjoy and are ready for this competition. Another prong offers a more team-based approach, enabling more students across the continuum to participate. The latter could delve into word exploration through numerous games such as “What is the word origin?” (using words with distinct patterns such as /f/ spelled ph, which denotes Greek origin), or “How many morphemes are in this word?”
As you implement these effective and fun ideas, I encourage you to keep looking at:
The goal is for students to happily climb the Ladder of Reading & Writing. As adults, we must provide appropriate support for each of our students during their climb. It is also important for us to recognize that a student’s happiness may stem simply from being given daily opportunities to read about and/or write about what interests them. The joy of literacy is the goal. Let’s always have this in mind as we provide effective and fun ways to master skills along the way.
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