Sound Wall:
- sounds with words
- vowels (all 22) with macrons and breves in a particular order which match the shape of your mouth (see Redcliff's Wall), from wide ē through to very small and narrow ū, displayed in a 'Vowel Valley"
- also, note the schwa (Hebrew for 'empty)
Orthographic Mapping:
- sounds --> blending/segmenting --> 'sit' s..i..t (but children often continue to segment and then blend over time, long after you would expect them to recognise by sight a word that they've been exposed to on multiple occasions); on average, we should gain sight words by seeing them from between 1 and 4 times, but these children don't have strong phonemic awareness - when playing sound swap they are the ones who struggle because the sounds actually don't hold any meaning to them yet.
- Because they don't have those sounds, they can't pin a letter (grapheme) to a sound (at this point C. showed us her 'tubes' - like finger puppets - with the letters written on them... 's', 'i', 't')
- We need to teach phonemic awareness really really well. It goes further than just: initial phoneme, final phoneme, medial vowel, and, e.g., to more advanced phonemic awareness, like "what's 'nose' backwards?" Zone.
