Phonemic Awareness Skills – Mapping Out A New Route To Success!
Learning to decode words can be hard, especially for kids with dyslexia. It isn’t that kids with dyslexia aren’t smart; they are actually brilliant! The problem lies in the fact that they learn differently than other children. Because of this, they need to have strong phonemic awareness skills!
Kids with dyslexia usually lack the ability to engage the left sides of their brains to use step-by-step thinking. In addition, since they are routinely taught to read and decode words through the use of phonics, which is another left-brain activity, they fall into desperate attempts to read and decode words.
Consequently, this leads to three bad decoding habits called the Three Pillars of Poor Reading. These pillars of poor reading are guessing at words, memorizing words, and trial and error reading. In order to offset these three bad habits, it’s crucially important that kids with dyslexia have strong phonemic awareness skills!
The One Thing That Makes All The Reading Difference
If your child has dyslexia, then decoding abilities are most likely weak. One of the first steps to remedy this situation is to make sure phonemic awareness skills are strong. Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize, use, and manipulate individual sounds of spoken words.
Phonemes are the smallest units of our spoken language. In the English language, there are forty-four specific phonemic units. Examples of these phonemic units are “at”, “im”, “ex”, “us”, and “od”. Words are built by adding letters and syllables onto these basic phonemic units.
Kids with dyslexia shine when they gain a firm understanding of phonemes and the ability to use and manipulate them. They intrinsically understand that words are built with these small units of sound and use their unique insights and abilities to gain phonemic awareness skills.
Operating from the Right Sides of their Brains isn’t “Wrong”
Kids with dyslexia work primarily from the right sides of their brains. This means that bit-by-bit thinking and phonics are like speaking a foreign language to them! Right-brain dominant learners learn by seeing the “whole” of something first.
From there, they go back and break it down into smaller chunks. Because of this, the process of decoding words step-by-step is counter intuitive to a child with dyslexia. This is why phonemic awareness skills are so important for the child with dyslexia.
Teaching kids to decode words with phonics is a cruel thing to do! Children with dyslexia are hands-on or tactile learners. This means they need to move to learn, and the larger the movements, the more learning sets in for them. Matching and circling pictures to sounds (phonics) doesn’t make sense to these kids. It simply doesn’t stick.
When kids learn to decode by using phonemic awareness skills, they naturally learn to sound out words instead of guessing at them. They engage in strategies for sounding out words instead of using the Three Pillars of Poor Reading.
Puzzling Children: The Answers To Odd Behaviors
A child with dyslexia can be perplexing. One minute, letter/sound (or any other reading and spelling rule) combination is strong, the next minute, it’s like new information. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that not enough large motor movement was used when trying to teach them the first time around.
It’s commonly thought that a child with dyslexia should move tiles with fingers, write in sand, or mold letters out out of clay to learn letter phonemic awareness skills.
Although these activities are a step in the right direction because they are multisensory, these activities clearly don’t involve enough large motor movement for a child with dyslexia to set in learning for the long term.
How Movement Makes All The Difference!
Developmentally, large motor movement is important for retaining information. Kids will naturally walk before learning to grasp small items with their tiny fingers!
But for kids with dyslexia, the need for large motor movement remains through life. By nature, they are tactile learners, so it’s important to use large motor movement for these kids to learn letter/sound connections as well as for decoding words and gaining phonemic awareness skills.
When the wrong learning methods are used, a child with dyslexia shuts down. Kids with dyslexia try hard but rarely please teachers or parents. It’s hard for them to make the grade, and they’re smart enough to know it. Can you see why 48% of the American prison system has dyslexia? If only the right methods were used early on, then this frustration could be avoided!
Trial and Error Is Random At Best
Because the wrong learning methods are used for the bulk of kids with dyslexia, they resort to using bad reading and decoding habits out of desperation.
The most common of these bad habits is guessing at words. Another is trying to memorize words. The last of these bad habits is trial and error reading.
Trial and error reading is far and wide the most difficult and trickiest to treat and correct. This bad reading habit is where the reader learns a certain reading or decoding rule, which is awesome.
Randomly using the rule creates big problems! Instead of applying decoding rules or phonemic awareness skills to the right situation, the reader uses rules and phonemic awareness randomly. Obviously, a child with dyslexia needs strong, consistent strategies and not randomly applied rules!
Eliminate These Bad Habits Now!
So…how do you stop a child with dyslexia from engaging in trial and error reading? Like any bad habit, it can be done with a few consistent changes.
Following are four tips to help your child correct this pesky decoding problem!
1. A phoneme-based decoding program is needed for kids with dyslexia. These kids don’t connect with phonics-based instruction and must have strategies in place to decode words. They desperately need an Orton-Gillingham (or similar) based program that strengthens phonemic awareness skills.
Check out the Bravo! Reading Program for the perfect balance of large motor movements, phonemic awareness building, brain-based learning, and a multisensory approach to decoding.
2. Kids with dyslexia need to be gently corrected as they make trial and error decoding mistakes when reading. This means someone needs to be listening to them as they read. When a trial and error mistakes happen, your child needs to be gently corrected or rerouted. Letting a child endlessly decode words incorrectly only instills bad habits.
3. Provide large motor movement activities for teaching your child to decode words. Decoding is difficult for the dyslexic child, so large motor movements are crucially important for learning to set in. This means the shoulder, arm, and hand all need engaged at all times.
4. Find a reading passage that’s easy for the reader and make two copies of it. Both of you will read along at the same time – slowly and succinctly. If your reader tries to engage in trial and error reading, you’ll automatically decode in the proper method to set an excellent example.
Trial and error reading is a bothersome problem, but with these four easy methods of treating it, your poor reader is on the way to reading success!
