Free Help for Sounding Out Words
Weak Decoding Skills are the Cause of Most Poor Reading Scores
Does your child struggle when reading a new or unfamiliar word? Is your child a word guesser, often blurting out the wrong word instead of sounding it out? Do you often feel your child needs help sounding out words?
Kids with dyslexia struggle to sound out words because decoding skills are weak. Decoding is the ability to translate a coded message into intelligible language. This simply means sounding out words. Do you see the connection?
Decoding is hard for kids with dyslexia because they learn differently than other kids. This doesn’t mean they aren’t smart! By definition, kids with dyslexia have average or above average intelligence.
Traditional Methods Don’t Work for Kids with Dyslexia
These kids need a different way to learn; that’s all. They need a decoding system that is based on movement taught in a multi-sensory way. Movement is important because children with dyslexia are usually hands-on or tactile learners. They learn best by doing, not by seeing or hearing.
They also need a multi-sensory approach to sounding out words because they have weakened visual and auditory processing systems. A multi-sensory approach uses visual, auditory, and kinesthetic activities to teach something.
Of course, there’s more that takes place in teaching your child to sound out words, but these two exercises help your child more than any others!
Phonemic Awareness Helps Kids with Dyslexia Sound Out Words
Research tells us that if your child struggles to sound out words, then a phonemic awareness-based reading program works best. Phonemic awareness is the ability to to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words. This includes syllables, beginning letters, and phonemes.
Phonemes are the small units of sound that our language is made up of. Examples of phonemes are “ip”, “ex”, “am”, “ot”, and “ug”. There are forty-four phonemes in our language. When your child has a strong working knowledge of these phonemes, then decoding or sounding out words is much easier.
Phonemes – the True Building Blocks of Decoding
If your child has dyslexia, using phonemes is the true building block of reading. In order to sound out words, your child must have a firm grasp of those forty-four phonemes. In addition, your child must be able to add chunks of other syllables and phonemic units to them to form multi-syllable words.
Research tells us that kids with dyslexia learn these phonemic units best when taught in a multi-sensory fashion. Orton-Gillingham methods also work well for kids with dyslexia.
Why Traditional Methods Don’t Work
Listening to a child with dyslexia read out loud can make your cringe. That’s because decoding skills are weak, which in turn, causes fluency to be poor. But the true cause of poor fluency and decoding skills in kids with dyslexia is because traditional reading programs have failed to meet their unique needs.
Traditional programs fail to understand exactly how a child with dyslexia learns. They fail to speak your child’s “learning language”. A child with dyslexia learns to decode words through movement. A multi-sensory approach to sounding out words is also needed.
These programs rely on phonics, matching, flash cards, and “drill and kill” methods.
This is like speaking a foreign language to a child with dyslexia.
Did you know that most kids with dyslexia are right-brain dominant? This means they are creative. They learn through movement, color, pictures, music, and rhythm. Traditional reading programs still focus largely on phonics, yet phonics is a left-brain dominant activity.
Phonics worksheets have your child circle pictures that match sounds. This doesn’t resonate with kids who have dyslexia. Remember, if your child has dyslexia, movement is king. Over and over again, kids with dyslexia are spoon fed activities that they are destined to fail.
As They Get Older, the Pressure Increases
Most people think it’s not too hard to sound out a three-letter word, but it can be a scary event if your child has dyslexia. When two-letter word decoding is weak or missing, then it’s absolutely daunting. Traditional programs force young, emergent, or dyslexic readers into decoding these three-letter consonant/vowel/consonant words too soon.
This causes a lot of damage!
There’s a Hierarchy to Decoding!
By making sure that your child masters decoding two-letter words before moving to decoding three-letter words, a strong decoding foundation is built. Fear and panic aren’t part of your child’s reading equation because reading strategies are present. Your child knows exactly what to do when coming across a new or unfamiliar word.
An example of a consonant/vowel/consonant word would be “sat”. The first letter is a consonant, the second a vowel, and the third is a consonant.
All too often, kids with dyslexia are forced to sound out these three-letter words when they don’t even know letter sounds, especially vowel sounds, which often trip them up. Instead of spending more time on foundational decoding skills taught in a way they can understand, kids with dyslexia are jumped into higher-level material before they are ready. Skills mastery is never achieved, and the chain of reading failure begins.
Once again, the dyslexic reader is left standing in the cold without a coat!
The Sensory Component to Sounding Out Words
Kids with dyslexia are usually weak in auditory and visual processing skills. This means that learning through traditional means that are primarily visual and auditory will be difficult. That’s why most kids with dyslexia are hands-on learners. Their other senses simply aren’t as strong, so they rely on doing something to learn.
Large Motor Movements Make all the Difference!
If your child has dyslexia, then movement is important for learning. This means that your child’s decoding program needs to teach through movement. And not every kind of movement works. Kids with dyslexia need large motor movement to truly set in skills. Moving a tile or circling a phonics picture isn’t enough movement for these kids!
Visual and auditory memory skills are usually weak, too. All too often, kids with dyslexia are only able to recall two or three shapes in visual memory. This means that they fatigue after decoding a two or three letter word. You see, each letter is a symbol or an image, so if they can only recall two or three shapes, then it’s going to be extremely difficult to sound out multi-syllable words.
When being forced to sound out three-letter words too soon, confusion and frustration mount. Your child starts to fear reading, avoiding it at all costs.
Traditional reading programs don’t spend enough time having children decode two-letter words, and this hurts the dyslexic child. This type of learner, who’s weak in visual and auditory processing, needs a lot of practice with two-letter words before moving on to three-letter words.
Most likely, this is because we don’t have a lot of two-letter words that follow phonetic spelling and reading rules. But that issue is solved by using nonsense words.
It’s common for traditional reading programs to either not teach or barely touch upon the decoding of two-letter words and have your child move right to three-letter words. This is usually done in the consonant-vowel-consonant pattern and can cause a lot of problems with the dyslexic reader. It’s too much, too soon.
The Seeing for Reading Pack
Check out the Seeing for Reading Pack to strengthen your child’s visual processing and visual memory skills. This Bravo! expansion pack focuses on visual processing skills that affect reading. Children with dyslexia benefit from the exercises in this digital download of over 260 pages.
So, What is Decoding, Anyway?
Do you ever get confused about what decoding actually is? It’s really quite simple. It’s just sounding out words! According to Merriam Webster, decoding is a way to convert something, such as a code, into intelligible form or to recognize and interpret a signal.
Decoding is the backbone of reading. If your child struggles to decode, then your child is missing strategies to sound out new or unfamiliar words. This leads to the Three Pillars of Poor Reading, bad reading habits, poor fluency skills, and weakened comprehension scores.
There are certain rules needed to read, and most kids learn them without much fuss. They make typical progress and can decode when necessary. Automaticity sets in and they don’t fear reading or panic when coming across new words.
Decoding Words Seems Like a Foreign Language to Kids with Dyslexia
But if your child has dyslexia, decoding is a foreign language. It doesn’t make sense to your child’s line of thinking and processing of information. The rules for decoding are lost on kids with dyslexia.
Unless you show them decoding rules in a way they can understand. Not in a way that worked for you or your parents. Not in a way that the schools push. Not with flashcards or phonics worksheets. Not with left-brain dominant reading activities.
Schools cater to the masses, and children with dyslexia are not part of this agenda.
With movement, color, brain-based learning, phonemic awareness, and a multi-sensory, Orton-Gillingham based approach, your child can learn to decode with ease.
The Bravo! Punch Pack
The Bravo! Punch Pack will give your child a set of tools to decode words using large motor movement in a multi-sensory way. It is teacher-recommended and a totally FREE resource to help your child learn to sound out two-letter words.
The first step of decoding is to know letter sounds, including vowel sounds, with automaticity. Once your child can do this, it’s crucially important that two-letter words are mastered. Due to weak visual and auditory memory skills, it’s important that kids with dyslexia aren’t forced to read three-letter words too soon.
Your child needs a strong decoding foundation for sounding out two-letter words with ease, and the Bravo! Punch Pack does just that!
The Bravo! Punch Pack is a shortened snapshot of the much bigger and more thorough two-letter word decoding portion of the Bravo! Reading System. The same multi-sensory activities are used in the Bravo! Punch Pack as Level 2 of the Bravo! Reading System.
The Bravo! Reading System uses large motor movements and brain-based learning to help your child overcome reading issues. Your child will move through the eleven levels of the Bravo! Reading System and develop reading and decoding skills in a new, unique way that works for kids with dyslexia.
The Bravo! Reading System was designed for kids with dyslexia who need movement to learn. Each level targets a specific decoding skill that makes reading difficult for kids with dyslexia. Step-by-step, your child builds a strong reading and decoding foundation, which in turn, makes reading fluency and comprehension skills stronger.
The Bravo! Reading System – Eleven Levels of Decoding Skills that Will Turn Your Child Into a Reading Shark!
How the Punch Pack Works
With the Punch Pack, kids punch a target beneath letter tiles with dot dabbers or bingo markers. This is a fun and perfect way to use large motor movements. Kids, especially those with dyslexia think it’s a blast to learn two-letter words with such engaged movement.
There is a Bravo! Bullseye (target) beneath each letter tile. Your child uses a dot dabber to punch the Bravo! Bullseye while saying the sound of the letter out loud at the same time. When both letters of the word are punched, your child moves to the Bravo! Bolt at the left side of the page.
So far, your child has been using the Bravo! Reading chunking process that breaks words down into smaller chunks and adds in movement to set in long-term learning. Now your child slides the dot dabber across the Bravo! Bolt while at the same time blending the two letters of the word together.
Brain-Based Learning at its Best!
This is a fantastic use of brain-based learning, as the body and brain work together to build new neural pathways in the brain. This wires together the sound and seeing portion of decoding while your child moves and speaks letter sounds, finally blending letters together to form a word.
This is the missing step that traditional reading programs and most reading programs aimed at dyslexia leave out!
Most of the words in the Bravo! Punch Pack are nonsense or made up words. This is because there aren’t that many two-letter words in our language. But there’s another reason for it. Right off the bat, we want kids to learn to decode correctly. Using nonsense words gets rid of bad habits before they start!
Kids with dyslexia get caught up in the meaning of words. They do this for many different reasons, but mostly because their worlds are often “topsy-turvey” because they perceive the world differently than others. Meaning sticks for them. Meaning makes sense.
Because of their love of meaning, kids with dyslexia make mistakes while decoding. They want the meaning of the word, they want to get to the end point of letting it roll off their tongues with ease, and they don’t want to wait for it. They don’t want to decode or sound out the word letter by letter with automaticity when that tantalizing meaning is right around the corner.
Automaticity Means it Happens without Thinking About It
Remember…automaticity is hard for kids with dyslexia. Meaning is what carries them. This rush to get finished usually causes them to guess at words, and usually the guess is wrong. But by using nonsense words with movement, color, and a multi-sensory approach, your child masters decoding two-letter words with ease.
With nonsense words, your child can’t search for meaning in a word, because there is no meaning. There’s no other choice than to decode the word letter by letter.
Once sounding out two-letter words is mastered, your child is able to move on to decoding three-letter words!
A Sample Page from the Bravo! Punch Pack
Kids Have Fun While Sounding Out Words the Bravo! Way
Kids with dyslexia revel in movement, and punching letters with dot dabbers to decode is right up their alley. Because of this, kids with dyslexia or those struggling to decode rarely realize that they’re reading. Sometimes, they even argue with you that they aren’t reading. They’re dot dabbing!
Here’s the great news. When reading and decoding exercises are easy and fun, then kids want to stay with it. And everyone knows that practice makes perfect, as long as it’s the right kind of practice!
When your child decodes the Bravo! way, it’s easy peasy! Even better, once your child can easily blend two letters together, then decoding confidence set in. Your child won’t be afraid to attempt decoding three-letter words. Multi-sensory words and difficult variants can be tackled instead of avoided.
These are natural decoding jumps. It’s also the logical way to teach decoding skills, especially to a child with dyslexia.
Get the Complete Bravo! Reading System and Get More Value!
When you order the Complete Bravo! Reading System, you’ll get the tools you need to help your child overcome reading challenges and save tons of money! The Complete Bravo! Reading System will make difference between stumbling over words and reading with confidence…for just $399.00!
The Complete Bravo! Reading System includes the eleven levels of the Bravo! Reading System, the Bravo! Beginner, and all of Bravo! Reading’s expansion packs. The expansion packs include the Bravo! Booster Pack, the Bravo! Super Booster Pack, the Bravo! Decoder Pack, the Race from Reversals Pack, and the “Seeing” for Reading Pack.
The Bravo! Reading System Gives Your Child the Tools to Sound Out Words with Ease
The Bravo! Reading Expansion Packs Pack the Next Punch Your Child Needs to Become a Reading Whiz!
Value:$1969.83
Your Price: $399.99
You’ll receive your copy of the Bravo! Punch Pack as a digital file, so you can get going right away! Although we highly recommend printing it off and using it with dot dabbers or bingo markers, you can use it on a tablet or laptop.
To get the FREE Bravo! Punch Pack, just fill out the form below, and it will be immediately delivered to your email address!
