Fast-Acting Phonics Fix: The Power of Switch It
Today, I'm thrilled to share with you – the Fast-Acting Phonics Fix: Switch It.
At Reading Simplified, our mission is crystal clear: streamline instruction and accelerate students' reading achievement.
We understand the challenges educators face when some students struggle to reach expected benchmarks.
That's where our fast-acting phonics fixes come into play.
Do you have students that drop ending sounds?
Students that cannot distinguish the difference in sounds in the middle of words?
Maybe it’s mid-year and students’ phonemic awareness skills are lagging or they haven’t gained the concept of the alphabetic principle.
Maybe some students are flying, but a few aren’t quite there.
Or maybe, it’s the end of the year or summer and you know that you need to enter the classroom next year with some simple changes that will ramp up your instruction!
We specialize in turning around challenging reading situations with just a handful of activities.
We're diving into one of our most powerful tools today – Switch It!
If you try this activity, Switch It, I believe you’ll find many opportunities for student and teacher growth, and that's what we want for you!
This one activity can be implemented in so many ways – yes VARIETY!
So let’s jump in!
Switch It Builds the Foundation for Literacy Success
Switch It isn't just another classroom activity; it's a game-changer.
The great power of Switch It is that it makes our sound-spelling system plain for learners’ brains.
We call it our “#1 decoding hack” for a reason.
But that's not all – Switch It offers efficiency unparalleled by mainstream methods.
Instead of fragmented instruction spread across multiple lessons, Switch It integrates phonemic awareness, letter sounds, decoding, and more into a single, 5 to 7 minute activity.
You’ll notice from the graphic below, that Switch It is powerful even when students know only about 5-7 letter sounds and when they can partially segment consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words.
If you need an earlier fix, check out Build It, a beginner’s version of Switch It
Three Classroom Examples of This Fast-Acting Phonics Fix in Action
1. Human Switch It: Making Learning Active and Engaging
Jennifer Glueck, a seasoned educator, demonstrates Human Switch It, a whole-group activity designed to get kids moving and engaged.
And bonus, she’s working with students who are mostly Emergent Bilinguals.
Through interactive gameplay, students grasp the fundamentals of decoding while having fun.
If you can’t watch the video, let me help you imagine Jennifer’s classroom.
Jennifer is standing in front of her whiteboard facing the class.
In front of her are 3 students holding simple copy paper like the picture above with single letters written on them, large enough for the whole class to see, and holding them up in front of their bodies with two hands.
The remainder of Jennifer’s class sit on the rug. Some hold additional papers with more letters.
Jennifer moves her arm above the students' heads from left to right and says,
I have “bug.” I want to change it to “tug.”
The students jump up and down and say /t/, /t/, /t/ as Jennifer repeats the word “tug” while again sweeping her arm.
The student sitting on the rug with the “t” written on her paper stands up and moves in front of the student at the front of the class holding “b” and is prompted to ask him to switch with her.
Jennifer then stands behind each student asking the group for individual sounds,
What’s this sound (pointing down and then repeating as she slides behind each student)
What’s my word?
All students respond in unison. Jennifer then prompts students to switch “tug” to “tag.”
She proceeds to help a student “make a mistake” and find the right switch.
You can see Jennifer make some careful error correction during the procedure.
The power of a teacher helping students reach higher than they can do on their own shines through.
This approach is particularly effective for introducing new concepts to a large group of students.
Love what you see in Jennifer’s classroom?
You can hear more about how she incorporates what she’s learned from the Reading Simplified Academy with kindergartners here.
2. Small Group Switch It: Our Go-To Fast-Acting Phonics Fix
In a small group setting, first-grade students tackle Switch It to improve their decoding skills.
Witness how this activity helps readers grasp phonemic awareness, phonics, and vocabulary and more in a supportive environment – in their 2nd Switch It ever –
And how teachers can still zero in on a student’s most pressing need.
The first word students need to switch is “flash” to “flesh” and I begin much the same way as Jennifer.
One student made an error.
I reached across the table with my pencil, pointed and then moved my pencil above the word left-to-right.
You actually made “fliiish.” We want “fleeeesh.” Good fix! Tell me the sounds, each by themselves.
The student says each sound as I bounce my pencil above each grapheme.
You’ve got “flesh.” Switch it to “fled.” I fled away from the danger. “f-l-eee-d.” And cover.
Pro Tip: Covering is important in small groups. When students are working close together I often have them cover their work with their forearm while others are still making the switch.
Another child makes a mistake.
You’re so close there. You’ve got “flesh.” Switch it to “fled.” We need the /eh/ to make “fleeed.”
You’ll notice that in this small group of four, I define some of the words in the list as I go.
I took some extra time to distinguish between the meanings of similar-sounding words (flee/fly) and the tenses or different forms of words (fled, flee, fleeing) and (sped, speed, speeding) and even had students create sentences with them.
This is truly integrated instruction in all language components – multi-component literacy, at its best!
But we also got back to the task at hand quickly.
Not everyone has “sped.” He’ll get it. You had “sled.” We want “sped.” (child makes change) You’re all over it!
This model of small group instruction and one-on-one, are both standard delivery for Switch It.
Check out this blog to answer how we use assessment to determine what list to use with students.
And again, this is just a snippet of an activity – a fast-acting phonics fix – with a lot of integrated skills packed in!
3. Switch It with an Older Struggling Reader: Tailoring Complexity for this Fast-Acting Phonics Fix
Even sixth-grade students benefit from Switch It.
Watch as I work with a sixth-grade reader for the first time and how I quickly bump her up a level with Switch It.
Our first go wasn’t challenging enough for her, demonstrating the versatility and differentiation possible for this activity.
And let me reiterate the possibilities for this activity with any age!
Notably, Switch It adapts to meet the needs of advanced learners, providing scaffolding when necessary to promote growth.
You may notice that I’m again, not divorcing vocabulary learning from our foundational skill lesson as I define “gland,” and my student and I have a giggle as she breaks out in song when we make the switch to “land.”
So with this student, I’ve started with a list of combined 4 and 5-sound words.
glad—>gland—>land—>sand—>stand—>stank—>stink—>sting—>string—>spring
My prompts include:
So you’ll have to add a sound.
Now tell me each sound separately.
Check what you’ve got. Nice fix!
We’ve got a tricky one here. We’ll only change one tile but two sounds. Switch “stand” to “stank.”
But as I said, this list was too easy for my student. She wasn’t making any mistakes.
With Switch It, your goal should be to embrace mistakes as opportunities and provide the necessary support to elevate students beyond what they can achieve on their own.
To give this student a little more challenge, I moved to nonsense words and writing the sounds instead of using letter tiles.
In Reading Simplified, we don’t do much word work with nonsense words, but with more complex CCCVCC words like “strict,” it is difficult to make many connecting word chains of real words. So instead, we use nonsense just for a bit of instructional time.
With this tweak, I built the first word and asked her what word I was building while writing on the dry-erase board.
What do I have so far?
I then asked her to erase the sounds and write in the switches.
My next prompt was to say the sound she was writing as she made the switch.
On one switch she erased the correct sounds and didn’t write in the switch. She still reread the nonsense word I asked for, though. So I prompted:
Do you have “splun”?
The Switch It activity, procedures, and error correction lay great groundwork for reading multisyllable words and spelling longer words.
Go here for more information on meeting the needs of older students.
And for other scaffolding and shortcuts for Switch It, go here.
Check out what this 4th-grade tutor had to say about engagement too!
Avoid These Two Adult Errors With Switch It
Error One: Adults Tend to Camp Out in Three-Sound Words.
We host an event each year where parents and educators ratchet up their readers' achievement in just 5 days with Switch It.
Truly, anyone can do this activity with their learners.
But there is this one common adult error made when learning Switch It.
Adults tend to camp out in 3-sound words.
PLEASE, move ahead – try a 4-sound or 5-sound word if you've been doing Switch It for a bit.
Error Two: Adults Tend to Use Switch It Lists Lock Step and Want It to All Match Up
Switch It lists do not need to be used in a lock-step fashion!
Remember our mission to accelerate reading achievement.
We can push students’ phonemic sensitivity in Switch it to 4 and 5-sound words before they are reading and writing 4 and 5-sound words.
For a very short time at the beginning of instruction, Switch It can serve the purpose of developing letter knowledge while still integrating other skills.
At this early point in instruction, students may be reading 3-sound words with just a few consonants and a vowel or 2 in Switch It while using that same handful of phoneme-grapheme relationships for other word work activities like Read It and Write It.
But soon after beginning Reading Simplified instruction in a 3 component lesson plan, Switch It will diverge from the code practice students are taught.
This is one reason I have shied away from designing lesson plans that match a Switch It List to a Read It List to a Write It list and a connected text.
Diagnostic teaching is the key, and some skills accelerate faster than others!
Conclusion: Empowering Educators with a Game-Changing Tool
In the world of education, finding quick wins is essential.
Switch It offers a fast-acting phonics fix for phonemic awareness and decoding, unlocking doors to reading success for students of all levels.
Where does Switch It’s power come from? Integration!
Switch It integrates multiple skills simultaneously instead of teaching skills in isolation.
Integration not only saves instructional and planning time, but it also helps the child quickly understand how our written code works.
Students who play Switch It for just a few minutes a day rapidly build a stronger foundation for phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling, and more.
Learn more about the purpose of Switch It and gain access to a sampling of word lists at various levels, procedures, and simple error correction prompts with our Switch It packet!
By witnessing its effectiveness across multiple grade levels, you can see firsthand how Switch It fits seamlessly into your classroom, offering a streamlined approach to reading instruction.
If you’re ready to go deeper, inside the Reading Simplified Academy you’ll learn about activities like Switch It that are powerful on their own…
…But they’re even more powerful as part of a system of instruction. That’s what the Reading Simplified Academy is for.
After learning about our scope and sequences and beginning assessments, you’ll dive deeper into Switch It.
After a couple of days of testing out the activity and reflecting on it in our Teacher’s Lounge (Reading Simplified’s embedded coaching platform), you might be ready to add in another activity like our fast-acting phonics fix #2 for blending and fast-acting phonics fix #3 for various spellings of one sound.
Pretty soon we’ll have you ready to implement a full 3 component lesson plan and accelerate your students’ reading growth!