Introduction
Teachers of students with dyslexia should prepare themselves with a toolbox of strategies that can help their students to develop skills in areas that will allow them to become successful readers. In this post, five instructional strategies will be introduced that can be useful for students who may have dyslexia. Each strategy is explained with which component of literacy that is targeted, the goal/objective/purpose, directions, assessment, materials, and expected outcomes of using the strategy. There is hope that by sharing these strategies with preservice and veteran teachers that our students with dyslexia can receive supports in the classroom to help them to develop ways to effectively learn to read text and be successful learners.
List of Strategies
Strategy:
Elkonian Boxes
Targeted Component of Literacy:
Phonemic Awareness
Goal/Objective/Purpose:
Students will use Elkonian sound boxes to segment and blend the phonemes in words.
Directions:
- Each student will be given an Elkonian sound box print-out and counters (coins, cubes, tiles, beads, etc.).
- The teacher will choose words for students to practice depending on the level of difficulty and students’ needs. Example:
Two-phoneme words: so, be
Three-phoneme words: ball, hat, chip
Four-phoneme words: flop, crash
Five-phoneme words: number, stripe
- The teacher will first review with students that words are made up of sounds, and that they will be practicing listening for the sounds that they hear in the words that they will be given. It is important that the teacher explains that they will be listening to the words, and not looking at words.
- Next, the teacher will show and count the students the number of squares in the Elkonian sound boxes to explain that these will represent how many sounds they will hear in words. Then the teacher will model pushing up one counter into the square for each sound in an example word. For example, “In the word ‘is’, I hear /i/ (move counter into first square) and /z/ (move counter into next square).”
- The teacher should model blending the sounds back together by sweeping their finger under the boxes and saying the word again.
- Allow the students to practice this skill with additional pre-selected words. Give appropriate feedback as necessary to ensure that students are segmenting the sounds into the boxes with one-to-one correspondence (one counter per sound per box), and that they are blending the sounds back together into the word. Repeat this activity with words with 3, 4, or 5 phonemes.
- Follow up the lesson/strategy by reflecting with students on how using Elkonian boxes helped them to listen to the individual sounds in a word.
Assessment:
Assessment of this strategy is informal and observational. The teacher will observe that students are able to move one counter per sound into each Elkonian box in order to see that they can segment the phonemes in words. The teacher will also observe that the student can “sweep” the sounds back into the word to show that they are able to blend together the segmented sounds into the word that was given.
Materials:
Elkonian sound box print-out
Counters (coins, cubes, tiles, beads, etc.).
Word lists of 2, 3, 4, and 5 phoneme words
Expected Outcome:
Students will be able to use this strategy to connect that words are made up of individual sounds (phonemes), and that these phonemes can be segmented into their sounds and blended together into words. Practice with the strategy of Elkonian boxes is a way to concretely show the sounds in words with objects to segment and blend phonemes in words.
Strategy:
Change a Letter
Targeted Component of Literacy:
Phonics
Goal/Objective/Purpose:
Students will substitute sounds in a word by changing one letter in the word to make a new word.
Directions:
- The teacher will instruct students to write down a word on a dry erase board. Example “hat”
- The teacher will read and instruct students to read the word.
- The teacher will then ask the students to change one letter. Example: “change ‘h’ to ‘c’”
-The teacher will instruct the students to read the new word.
-Repeat this process so that students are able to change letters in the initial, medial, and final position of the word.
Assessment:
Assessing this activity is observational and ongoing. The teacher will evaluate the students ability to change the letters and blend the sounds of the words together to make the new words.
Materials:
- Dry erase boards
- Dry erase markers
Expected Outcome:
This activity, which can be used as an extension of the Elkonian Boxes strategy should help students to manipulate and substitute the sounds in words as they are writing the visual representations of the words using letters. This should reinforce their phonemic awareness and phonics skills.
Strategy:
Sound Walls
Targeted Component of Literacy:
Phonics
Goal/Objective/Purpose:
Sound walls focus on organizing the different sounds (phonemes) of the English language into the ways that they are articulated. They are distinguished by how the sounds are made by the position in the mouth, movement of air, and the voicing of the sounds. These phonemes are represented with the different letters or combinations of letters (graphemes) and placed on a wall for reference based on their classifications. This strategy allows students to understand the phonology of the sounds of the English language and how we represent those sounds into graphemes in a way that shows how mouth movement and sound production affects how we hear sounds.
Directions:
- First, teachers should explain that students make different sounds that they hear in words based on the movement of their mouths.
- Teachers will introduce the different phonemes of the English language first with the class. They will discuss how the mouth looks when it makes the sound, whether air moves, and if there is vibration in producing it. Once all sounds have been introduced and differentiated, then they will be accompanied with their letter or letters (grapheme) that make the sounds. These will be placed on the wall.
- Once the teacher has matched the graphemes to the phonemes and placed them on the wall, then teachers can add a word to the sound wall to allow students to remember a keyword for the sound.
- The sound wall can be used for daily review and discussion of all of the phonemes and graphemes that have been introduced in the class. Activities such as picture or word sorting can be used to identify which phonemes students hear.
- Teachers should encourage independent use of the word wall to problem solve how to read and spell decodable words using the sound patterns that have been introduced using the sound wall.
Assessment:
Assessment of the sound wall can be informal and observational. First teachers should assess the students’ ability to produce the phonemes and their understanding that these sounds are represented by one or more letters of the alphabet.
Teachers can assess if their students know what graphemes make certain sounds by holding up a flashcard of the grapheme and asking students to use the sound wall to determine the sound it makes. For example, the teacher holds up a flashcard of the letters “ee” and asks students to say the sound it makes based on where it falls on the sound wall.
Teachers can also assess the students’ knowledge of the sound wall itself by asking them to recreate it. This can be done in a literacy learning center where children place picture cards in the order of the sound wall based on their speech production.
Materials:
Grapheme cards- These can be teacher-made or bought from online resources such as www.tools4reading.com
Expected Outcome:
In using this strategy, students should be able to build stronger connections of sounds and print (phonology). Since the English language has many sounds and even more ways to represent those sounds, this is a strategy that can help students to visualize how to produce these sounds with their mouths and how to read and write them based on their speech articulation.
Strategy:
Reader’s Theater (Shaywitz 2020)
Targeted Component of Literacy:
Fluency
Goal/Objective/Purpose:
Reader’s theater is a way for students to gain reading fluency with accuracy and rate, by reading texts aloud and with expression.
Directions:
- The teacher should choose a story or script that is broken into parts, or roles. This should be carefully chosen and differentiated based on student’s reading ability.
- Parts should be assigned to children. This can be done in pairs, groups, or a a whole group.
- Students should be given ample time (days to weeks) to practice reading their parts orally with guidance and independently. During this practice time is when the teacher can assess and support students accurate reading and expression of the text.
- Once students can confidently read their parts, they may choose to perform their assigned parts in front of an audience.
Assessment:
Teachers can observe students’ fluent reading during practice in order to provide more support for students who are struggling with decoding and expression of the passage.
Materials:
Copies of scripts or stories broken into parts, or roles
Expected Outcome:
According to Shaywitz, reader’s theater is a research-based strategy to help readers, especially those with dyslexia, to be able to practice reading aloud and with fluency in enjoyable ways (pg. 294, 2020).
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