Skills Taught in my Reading Wellness Course: A Comprehensive Guide

I wanted to dedicate this blog to the 50 or so educators and parents I’ve recently worked with these past 2 months.   I’m overwhelmed by their dedication and desire to reach their struggling readers.  They aren’t backed by a shiny corporate sponsor.  They aren’t getting awards for spending hours of their time learning what steps to take to help a struggling reader grow.  They showed up to do the work.  Lack of time and money, they showed up. It’s never easy to teach an older struggling reader.  

I want to also share one thing teachers and parents of struggling readers know to be true…that these struggling readers don’t get to participate within their community in the same way as their peers.  They are often left out of really cool opportunities and labeled as lazy or troublesome.  Life offers students so many ways to participate and help our communities and our world.  However, for a struggling reader, they are often left in the back of the classroom, year after year, as the learning gap grows, due to their reading struggle.

THESE educators who I’ve met these past few months are different.  I’m so happy I can reach so many global educators to commiserate and share with them solutions for many of their older struggling readers.

The Reading Wellness course is for educators and parents who teach older struggling readers. It follows decades of research around direct and explicit multisensory teaching with the unique benefit of mindfulness strategies to ease the anxiety older readers have. The Reading Wellness course is designed to provide struggling readers with a solid foundation in essential reading skills. The framework addresses fluency by focusing on phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and the strategies for understanding text. It includes direct instruction in spelling, as well as the basic skills for capitalization and punctuation. 

This blog will delve into the key area of phonological awareness to provide a better understanding of the skills taught in my Reading Wellness course. 

One common misconception is that a student “knows their sounds”.  Older students shouldn’t go back to this “basic” learning.  Students have said to me, “I know my sounds”.  Show me the data.  How do you know?  Such a simple fix, and yet, students, educators and parents can’t show exactly what they mean by, “they know their sounds”.  There are rules around sounds.  It’s not only about the sound.   

Here are two ways students who “know their sounds” may still struggle phonemically:

1. Pronunciation- They pronounce simple sounds incorrectly.
2. Blends, digraphs, suffixes, syllables- they don’t know these rules
3. Vowel confusion because they don’t know the rules

Let’s dive a little deeper…shall we?

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is the understanding that spoken language consists of parts, such as words, syllables, and phonemes. This includes:

• Word Awareness: Recognizing that a spoken sentence consists of separate words.
• Syllable Awareness: Understanding that a word consists of separate syllables.
• Phoneme Awareness: Knowing that a syllable consists of separate sounds or phonemes.

Phonological awareness can be taught and learned, and in Reading Wellness, this instruction is explicit and sequential, beginning with word awareness. Research has shown that appropriate explicit instruction benefits all children and is critical for many students who do not develop sufficient skill without it. This instruction helps children understand that words consist of a sequence of phonemes, which is essential for reading and spelling.

Phoneme Awareness

Phoneme awareness covers several sequential skills: isolating sounds, identifying sounds, blending, segmenting,  and manipulating them. In the younger years, or for students who don’t struggle, learning how to blend, segment, and manipulate sounds in words progress naturally at a normal rate.  

However, before moving forward, struggling readers need to revisit these basic steps, not in the same form as was taught in their younger years or for readers who pick it up naturally.  For an older struggling reader, phonemic awareness instruction continues.  They learn to blend, segment, and manipulate sounds taught in a multisensory way, differentiated specifically for their individual needs, based on frequent progress monitoring.

Phonemic Awareness and the Alphabetic Principle

English is an alphabetic language.  This means that letters represent sounds that form meaning when put together. For readers to begin mastering reading, they must develop an understanding that words can be divided into smaller segments of sound. For example, the word "cat" has three sounds or phonemes: /c/ /a/ /t/. This awareness of phonemes as separate segments of sound is essential.  It sounds simple, and even struggling readers can do this. But this is where us educators, without clear data, will try the wrong action steps and strategies, guess and assume, and prolong the reader’s struggle.  

The ability to pay attention, monitor and collect data, is essential for those working with a struggling reader.   The faster you know and implement the RIGHT action steps for older struggling readers, the faster they’ll gain skills and knowledge.  We can’t assume they ”know their sounds” without collecting the right present level of performance (PLOP). This progress monitoring and development of phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle is directly and explicitly taught throughout Reading Wellness, beginning with basic letter-sound correspondences and progressing to more complex ones, like building with blocks, one on top of the other.

Sound Mastery

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in the English language. It cannot be broken down or segmented further. Learning to pronounce a phoneme individually, without adding a sound or distorting the sound, requires practice. And this is one of the MOST COMMON parts to fix. The sounds in a word are often influenced by the phonemes that are around them.  

To help readers learn and memorize alphabetic sounds and rules that go with them, it is important to help them identify individual phonemes and minimize any addition or distortion of a sound. For example, in segmenting the sounds in the word "mat," the sound of the letter "m" /m/ should not be said as /mu/, and the sound of the letter "t" /t/ should not be said as /tu/. The reader should segment the sounds as /m/ /a/ /t/, not /mu/ /a/ /tu/.  A majority of my struggling readers pronounce sounds such as /b/, /p/, /d/, which are puffs of air, as, /bu/, /puh/, and /duh/…these are wrong and can be fixed easily with practice. These mistaken distortions are common reasons older struggling readers have low accuracy.

Knowing “their sounds” is more than knowing basic consonant and vowel sounds.  I’m happy to help you get clarity by offering a free reading call to audit any gaps in your student’s instruction or support you with some next steps.  

Again, THANK  YOU to all the educators and parents that have come to the Reading Wellness Workshops and courses.  You’ve gathered data, taken the right action steps, instead of presuming and guessing.  Your reader’s growth is clear and evident.  Imagine how motivating it is to see growth!!  Never give up on a struggling reader…they need you!