Let's take a look at one skill that we need for reading: chunking.
Chunking is when you take a word and sound it out in chunks. Let's take an easy one: "bet". That is chunked into the letters "b", "e", and "t,", which make the sounds "buh", "eh", and "tuh".
Let's look at a harder one: "boat". Now, the reader needs to know that there are still just three sounds ("buh", “oh” and "tuh"), and that the letters "oa" come as a chunk. They should NOT be read separately. They are NOT just short-O and short-A sounded out separately.*
If you don’t know that OA can only be read as a chunk, you are likely to read it as two separate short vowels. If you work with early readers, you likely see this a lot!
There can also be consonant chunks, like "SH". You cannot break "SH" into separate parts S and H - that doesn't produce anything like the sound SH. When you read words with SH in them, like "ship", you need to read it as "sh", "ih", "puh" - 3 chunks of sounds, not 4.
Chunking is especially important for the following sound-letter patterns: vowel teams (AI, OA, OU, etc.); r-controlled vowels (AR, ER, IR, OR, UR, OUR, etc.); & consonant digraphs (SH, CH, TH, PH, etc.). Soon I’ll make blog posts for each, with examples and materials of how to help early readers chunk them.
Chunking can be bigger, too, and is part of how early readers learn word families and larger words. For instance, the letters “pre” can be read as one chunk. But if you’re not sure how it sounds, you it’s not the smallest chunk possible - you can segment it down into the 3 sounds in it, represented by each letter. In this post, I’m focusing on the absolute smallest chunks possible to sound out a word.
So how can we take the learning goal of chunking and make materials that support it?
Here are three easy tricks that I do for chunks:
1) make the chunk a single visual unit. Do not split it up with color, space, or anything else.
Bad : OA is two visual units.
Good : OA is a single visual unit.
See how your eyes think of "oa" as one unit? The visual supports your learning goal of chunking!
Don’t do this. Now your eye is focusing on O as separate from A.
2) Make the chunk a single physical unit. It should move together. It should not be possible to split up. This will help learner automatically view it as a unit, and treat it like one. When they're writing it, they'll get practice forming the letters one after the other, but we want them to see it in their mind's eye as a unit.
Bad : OA is two physical units.
Good : OA is a single physical unit.
The vowel team OA moves as a unit! It is a vowel team, and is distinct from short O, represented by O alone, and short A, represented by A alone. Instead, OA is the same color, and is chunked together so that it always moves together.
The letters "o" and "a" separated like this should only before for Short O and Short A, not the vowel team OA. O and A are different colors, which encourages readers to read them as their short vowel sounds.
3) Don't make the visuals distracting with other themes and images. If it's not connected to the learning goal, don't do it. (Unless it is SO MOTIVATING that it really keeps kids focused - but I find that there are many non-distracting ways to help learners stay engaged.)
(Example images for this one coming soon! But for now, just imagine the worst font you’ve ever seen, with lots of moving animations or intricate drawings that complicate the letters.)
TLDR:
This all comes down to: avoid things that separate out chunks, avoid things that distract from readers’ ability to chunk. Instead, we want the reader to see OA and automatically think of it as one sound chunk. So - what can we do visually to make that happen? Keep it in chunks! Move it in chunks! Don’t let the letters in OA get separated from each other. OA is not a combination of O and A. OA is a new thing and it makes the long O sound.
This applies for not just OA but also other vowel team chunks, and other types of chunks (r-controlled vowels, consonant digraphs, etc.). I will go into each one in detail in its own post. For now, you have some broad design and teaching principles for teaching chunking.
Footnotes:
*If you’re curious for technical terms: when two letters make one sound, it's called a digraph. Vowel digraphs (like OA) have a special, more kid-friendly name - vowel teams. Consonant digraphs (like SH) don’t really have a kid-friendly name, which makes me sad, because I don’t personally believe that the word “digraph” is useful for tutors or kids. That’s why I often use the word “chunk,” although it can be a little clunky. Note that consonant digraphs (like SH) are DIFFERENT from consonant blends (like ST). Consonant digraphs you cannot chunk into smaller bits - SH is all there is! (You might see early readers trying to separate this into single letter sounds - S followed by H. This will NOT result in reading the chunk SH correctly.) Consonant blends like SL have separate sounds that you say quickly, one after the other, and thus can be chunked either together as ST or sounded out separately as S followed by T, then blended into the chunk ST.