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All kids must learn the correspondence between individual letters and sounds. But the next
step is critical: understanding that certain groups of letters are pronounced alike in
families of words.
Fast decoders rely on common spelling patterns. And it's only when you decode quickly that
you can become a fluent reader.
The first word that I'm going to write is…
Fight!
Very good!
At Sudduth Elementary School, Tina Scholtes is teaching her first-graders about a handy
spelling pattern.
And we can change "fight" to…everybody look.
Might.
Very good. And we can change "might" to…don't say it 'til I write it.
Bright.
Bright. Very good.
In the beginning of reading, teachers will teach individual letter-sound connections
and then they'll start to focus on groups of letters, vowel teams or consonant clusters,
and eventually they'll even move to larger chunks of words that may be at the syllable
level or there may be prefixes or suffixes and the teachers trying to get the child to
move to larger and larger units which eventually include the whole word. So that the child
can quickly and automatically recognize the word at a glance so that they're able to pay
attention to the meaning of the story.
Ok boys and girls, you know, Ms. Scholtes has told you, that sometimes you can learn
many many words by just knowing one word, and that's what we're doing when we know the
word "fight." We can change the beginning sound and you will know a new word.
For example, a word that is not even right here that I guarantee you you can read is
this word. What is that?
Sight!
That is a word that is not even…:
For my children to be able to look at words that end in "ight" and figure out new words
is a big step, because "ight" is an ending cluster for a whole group of words. They run
into words that end in "ight" all the time.
We've got fight, might, right, bright, daylight, delighted, tight…
Thanks to this lesson, these first-graders are moving beyond letter-by-letter decoding.
By learning to read common letter groups at a glance, they're taking a big step toward
fluency.