Alphabet knowledge

Onset and Rime

  • Onset: The initial consonant sound or consonant cluster of a syllable preceding the vowel (e.g., dr in "drowned").

  • Rime: The vowel sound and all subsequent consonants in a syllable (e.g., owned in "drowned").

  • Rhyming vs. Alliteration:

    • Rhyming: Matching the ending vowel and consonant sounds of words (e.g., coffee and toffee).

    • Alliteration: Repeating the same initial sound across words (e.g., "Peter Piper picked…").

Phonological Awareness vs. Phonemic Awareness

  • Phonological Awareness: The broad awareness of spoken language structures, including words, syllables, onset-rime, and phonemes.

    • Instructional Activities: Singing songs, chanting nursery rhymes, reciting poetry, finger plays, and sound games.

  • Phonemic Awareness: A sub-skill of phonological awareness focused on isolating, blending, segmenting, and substituting individual spoken phonemes (sounds).

  • Supporting Struggling Learners:

    • Students with speech or hearing impairments, unidentified ear issues, or auditory processing challenges require additional modeling and explicit practice.

The Literacy Hierarchy

  1. Word Boundaries

    • Recognizing spaces between words (e.g., distinguishing "meatball spaces" between words from "spaghetti spaces" between individual letters).

  2. Syllables

    • Segmenting and blending larger rhythmic parts of words.

  3. Onset and Rime

    • Dividing syllables into initial sounds and ending word patterns.

  4. Phonemes and Graphemes

    • Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in spoken language.

    • Grapheme: The written letter or group of letters representing a phoneme.

Concepts of Print

  • Core Understanding: Learning how print is organized and functions in books.

  • Key Skills:

    • Directionality: Reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and executing the return sweep to the next line.

    • Book Handling: Identifying the front and back cover, holding the book right-side-up, and locating where reading begins.

  • Classroom Strategies:

    • Print-Rich Environment: Labeling classroom objects (e.g., door, desk, screen) to connect objects to written words.

    • Shared Reading with Big Books: Modeling tracking and sweeping text for the whole class.

    • Explicit Instruction: Pointing out capital letters, word boundaries, and basic punctuation marks (period, question mark, exclamation point).

The Alphabetic Principle

  • Definition: The concept that written letters and letter patterns correspond to the sounds of spoken language.

  • Progression of Learning:

    1. Letter Names

    2. Letter Shapes

    3. Letter Sounds

  • Vowel Markings:

    • Breve: Symbol used to indicate a short vowel sound.

    • Macron: Line symbol used to indicate a long vowel sound.

Early Writing Development

  • Three Components of Emergent Writing:

    • Mechanics: The physical act of writing (e.g., pencil grip and motor control).

    • Composition: The intended meaning children assign to their written marks.

    • Orthographic Knowledge: Understanding how the written language system and spelling conventions work.

  • Six Stages of Writing Progression:

    1. Drawing

    2. Wavy scribbles

    3. Letter-like scribbles

    4. Random letters in a line

    5. Patterned letter strings

    6. Conventional writing

  • Classroom Support:

    • Provide a dedicated writing area with varied writing tools, paper, and a scrap paper bin.

    • Engage students in purposeful writing tasks (e.g., classroom mailboxes, creating lists, co-writing rules, and drafting personal notes).