Sort It /oa/ Sound PDF
Children learn tricky aspects of our written code—like the many spellings for each long vowel—more quickly when information is presented in an orderly way.
Not randomly.
Not bit by bit over innumerable weeks.
In contrast to most mainstream balanced literacy and systematic phonics programs, Reading Simplified releases multiple spellings for one target sound, all at once.
Why?
- First, when we teach with a focus on sounds (instead of spellings), children can easily connect to this organization because they come to school already knowing the sounds of our language.
- Second, when we teach new phonics information all at one time with a focus on just 1 sound at a time, they absorb and file away the information more easily.
Thus, we utilize a graphic organizer such as the above Sort It activity to help our students build a mental framework, or schema, of the main spellings of a target sound, such as the sound /ee/.
Then we refer all week to a Key Sentence that includes high frequency words of the target sound. This mnemonic, or memory device, helps both teacher and students recall the primary spellings for a given sound. The Key Sentence for /ee/ is “He sees many of these each fall” and it includes the main /ee/ spellings: e, ee, y, e_e, ea.
This Sort It packet we're offering on this page includes a few Sort It pages with the high frequency words, as well as multiple decodable passages at the K-1st grade reading levels. In the Reading Simplified context, we aim to learn one sound a week so we aim for students to do as many pages in these packets in one week as possible.
The result?
Kids usually have learned the bulk of phonics knowledge they need in order to self-teach the rest of the code and the rest of the words in the English language.
Want to learn all about Sort It, related activities, and the logic behind our approach to advanced phonics? Head to this post to learn more, see video examples, and snag another packet!
Be sure to let me know how it's helping your readers.
