I want to share something with you today that is big – huge – yet still under-acknowledged in the education community.

And my hope is that after reading this, you’ll not only have a serious lightbulb moment…

But you’ll also learn how to improve both your teaching methods and your students' learning experience.

If you teach reading in any capacity, Reading Simplified's Sort It – is a proven fast-acting fix for struggling readers –

 – And a surefire way to simplify teaching those tricky spellings for long vowel sounds like /oa/, /ee/, or /ay/.

First, before diving in, I’d like to provide some context and ask you to picture this teaching scenario with me for a moment.

Let’s say, you were teaching the planets to young children who don't know about any of the planets.

And let’s say you start by teaching them on Monday a whole bunch of facts about Jupiter…

  • You read great books about Jupiter, and
  • you show a picture of the planet.
  • Maybe on Tuesday and Wednesday, you continue to teach more about Jupiter;
  • do a few activities;
  • and even show a video.

And then on Thursday or Friday, or maybe the next week, you start the process all over again, only this time, you talk about Mars.

But you don't connect the learning about Mars to Jupiter – you just teach about Mars. And at no time yet have you shown an image of all the planets in our solar system together.

Would this be how you would want to teach your students for the first time about the solar system? 

Why not? What's wrong with this teaching plan?

Yep – you’re not building a connection. You're not showing how each planets relate to one another.

Without establishing these relationships, children may struggle to grasp the BIG PICTURE – the idea that planets are part of a system.

And because of that, of course, we teach the solar system as a unit. 

In the video below, you’ll hear me lay out my argument for a different organizational system to our phonics instruction that begins with this premise and asks:

Why should we start with the big picture – with what children already know?

Watch this short video to see how organizing phonics information by the big picture is your fast fix to reading success! (Get ready for some belief shifting…)

Or, if you’re pressed for time, you can read ahead for the key takeaways. 

Start With The Big Picture and What Students Know

The brain remembers better when you give it information in an organized way that also allows students to compare the information with what they know. 

But if you silo the information – isolate it – it becomes harder to understand, and harder to remember as we add new information to learn. 

The way we typically teach phonics in schools–where we just drip out one letter sound at a time–is not efficient or effective, and it makes it harder to learn the phonics information. 

What would happen instead if we were to organize our phonics information differently?

What if we taught the /oa/ sound and its various spellings together in some sort of system?

Think about the benefits of organizing this phonics information like a filing system for the brain. (Brains love files.)

If we said,

“Hey, kids! We're going to learn the /oa/ sound today, and we're going to learn to read several words with the /oa/ sound. Sometimes it might be this spelling, sometimes it might be this spelling….”

We organize this complex information so that students build a mental filing system.

“All these pieces are connected to /oa/.”

filing system of colored paper

It's connected, yes. 

It prepares them that their will not be just one spelling for that sound.

AND it begins with what the child already knows. 

They can hear /oa/ in the word “snow.”

You might need to draw their attention to it, but they can hear that sound. 

And that's what we do in Reading Simplified with phonemic awareness instruction – through an activity called Switch It. 

We use Switch It before we get to Sort It, the activity I’m sharing today.

But by the time our students in Reading Simplified instruction progress to Sort It, they can hear the /oa/ in “snow.” They can hear the /oa/ in “boat.”

So, let's draw their attention to what they're saying and then anchor that to the symbols in an organized way.

Louisa Moats, in this quote, says:

A graphic with a key quote from Louisa Moats “Teaching Decoding” and cover image of her book Speech to Print

She goes on,

“Such programs disregard the fact that speech evolved at least 30,000 years before writing. Alphabetic writing was invented to represent speech. Speech was not learned from reading. Following the logic of history, we should teach awareness to the sound system or phonology and anchor letters to it.”

Go ahead and let that soak in. 

Doesn’t it make –

So. 

Much.

Sense?

So the idea is to draw a student's attention using prompts like,

What sounds do you hear in “boat?” That's right, /b/ /oa/ /t/. Which of these is going to help us spell the /oa/ in “boat?”

In doing so, we will give them the big picture first–just like we would show the kids the solar system. Then we dive into what they know–maybe the Earth.

Fewer organized file folders and happy girl

Organize Information by Sound

This is the next step, to organize information for students by sound. 

You hear the sounds of “snow,” ” boat,” and “go.” Let me show you the symbols that go along with it.

We are telling students that we are organizing information based on what they know, which will be orderly.

And as a teacher, I’m going from speech to print, or from sounds to symbols, and 

Another secret here is that I will draw the students’ attention again to the sounds in words.

So when they write a word that they've just read, they're going to say the sounds as they do it.

This is the Write and Say approach, and I’ll share more on this later.

That connection helps them understand how our code works.

And it builds. 

Then, the print information builds on top of the sound information the mind already has – the child's worldview.

The child already understands the meaning of the word “show.”

At this point in Reading Simplified development, by the time students get to the activity I’m talking about today, they are also able to hear the sound. 

We have helped them to already build phoneme awareness; they now have the brain connections for that. We simply build on to it by showing them the print that goes with the sound they already hear and tying them together.

That's actually how we know the brain learns to read. It builds off of speech to tie in letter sounds and words.

The brain already knows how speech and meaning connect, and there are all sorts of neural connections between these things.

So what we're doing is bringing print into the fold and connecting all of those things.

Here’s how we do it in the Reading Simplified system.

Introduce Complex Information with this Simple Activity

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of Sort It – Reading Simplified’s fast-acting fix for organizing complex sound symbol information.

When kids can blend three sound words with short vowels, we can usually still get to the level of teaching advanced phonics information.

We're going to give students a Sort It page.

You could do this on blank paper or a whiteboard, too. 

Be sure they understand they're working with a specific (target) sound.

Sort It activity sheet for long o sound

Let's learn the /oa/ sound today.

You want them to read the words in the box using our blend as you read strategy and then decide where each word goes.

Where is the spelling of “o” in “ show”?

And once they decide which column it goes in, then they write it and say the sound as they write.

So that's writing and saying – connecting, phonemes and graphemes. 

That's all there is to Sort It.

Kids find it fun, and they can level up because of the scaffold. 

They can do this activity before you might think they would be capable of it because they've been scaffolded by knowing all these words have the /oa/ sound.

Sort It list displayed with 10 words showing various spellings of the /oa/ sound in bold print.

In Reading Simplified materials, the spellings are bolded so that you and your students can see the difference between the “ow” and the “sh” in “show.” 

Then, students reinforce the sounds while they write.

Two Characteristics that Make Sort It Powerful: Key Sentences & Write and Say

Key Sentences

One key aspect of our Fast-Acting Fix: Key Sentences

This is the Sort It key sentence that goes with the /oa/ sound.

Go home to show the boat to Joe.

The key sentence mnemonic for the /oa/ sound above an image of a fisherman on a boat with the sun and clouds behind.

That is a mnemonic that we can use all week to hook this information to the child's brain and the teacher's brain.

There are more spellings than what’s represented in the sentence, but these are the most important ones early on. 

You can use the key sentences as a tool in your classroom (as shown in the image below) to refer to regularly and help students lock in those different spellings.

Source with chart paper and sticky notes highlighting several key sentences from Reading Simplified

This is how the code works.

Our written language is a code for sounds. So you introduce it to your students exactly as that:

You know, the sounds. Let me show you the code – the written code.

Could your students do this in kindergarten?

Kindergarten students holding dryerase marker and completing Sort It on dry-erase board.

Kindergarteners can achieve this by developing foundational skills such as:

  • Recognizing sounds and words.
  • Understanding short vowels.
  • Identifying consonants and consonant diagraphs.

With Reading Simplified, students acquire these skills through our engaging activities, Switch It and Read It, and, of course, frequent reading is also a key component.

Fingers pointing to letter tiles in Switch It and student writing “sim” “ple” for Read It.

Write and Say

As I mentioned before, here at Reading Simplified, Write and Say is another important approach.

In fact, It's more than important – it's crucial.

3 children working on a Sort It packet together. One is writing and saying the sounds as she writes

We don't want students saying S-H-O-W, using the letter names.

That's not how the code works. The code works by sounds. 

The sounds that you already hear in the words are the key to unlocking how that print can be recalled.

Remember, once the kids can blend about 3 sounds, then they can move on to Sort It.

You can start quite early. 

The good news about the reason one would want to start it early is that there are a lot of words that have this Advanced Phonics information. 

So when kids do Sort It, they're not just learning phonics.

Look at all the other things students are learning, practicing, and doing…

  • concept of a word,
  • phoneme segmentation when they write,
  • phoneme blending when they read the word, 
  • alphabetic principle,
  • left to right tracking, and
  • advanced code letter-sound knowledge. 

And finally, you reinforce our most important decoding strategy – Blend As You Read.

Image of Sort It page is centered with many subskills of learning that this one activity integrates around the perimeter.

We put all this complex information together from the beginning.

And that is the power of Sort It!

But don’t take my word for it…

Teacher says Sort It is a brilliant activity, empowers learners of all ages, and it’s fast

Your turn!

Will you give Sort It a try and tell us how it goes? Let us in the comments below.