Choosing the Right Dyslexia Intervention, Part 4: What your child should say while writing words

In part four of a series on choosing effective dyslexia interventions, Michelle reviews three approaches (meaning-first/whole literacy, which they advise avoiding, and two structured literacy approaches: letters-first/Orton-Gillingham “print to speech” and sounds-first “speech to print”). 

She emphasizes that doing a single sound-awareness lesson before moving to letters is not the same as a true sounds-first approach, which should integrate sounds throughout instruction and quickly connect sound awareness to letters.

The episode focuses on what children say while writing: letters-first programs often have children say letter names, which encourages memorizing letter strings and limits sound-letter integration, while sounds-first instruction has children say each sound as they write the matching letter to strengthen sound-letter connections and pattern recognition. 

A story about a student (“Jay”) shows how letter-name studying led to poor spelling and an inability to read studied words until the approach shifted to sounds. 

00:00 Dyslexia Intervention Overview

00:57 Three Reading Approaches

01:39 Sounds First Clarified

03:33 Series Recap to Part Four

04:35 Bouncy vs Stretchy Speech

06:16 Letters First Pitfalls

09:18 Sounds First While Writing

10:38 Jay’s Spelling Test Story

13:22 Study Smarter With Sounds

15:08 Wrap Up and Part Five Tease

Transcript

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Hi and welcome back to part four of how to choose the right intervention for your child with dyslexia without wasting your child's time or your money. There are so many recommendations that parents are given at the beginning of this dyslexia journey, and it is a little overwhelming. I remember as a parent and even as a professional trying to figure out what would be best for my child. What was the best way to teach reading and spelling and the most efficient way so that she could catch up with her peers and eventually not need reading or spelling intervention? We don't want that to be a lifelong need. What I tell families in my clinic, we want to go as quick as we can, but as slow as we need to, right? We want to get them reading and spelling as quickly as they can, but as slow as they need to to understand the concepts that we're teaching. And that means that some kids spend more time on certain areas than others, and that's okay. We talked about these three different types of interventions that are or approaches that are currently being used to teach reading and spelling. We have the meaning first approach, which are the whole literacy, balanced language type approaches that are not structured literacy, and we are going to stay far away from those. Then we've got the structured literacy approaches to reading, but not all structured literacy is the same. We have a letters first approach. Those are going to be your Orton Gillingham type ones, also called print to speech. And then we have a sounds first approach, sometimes called speech to print or linguistic phonetics. Now, sometimes people get these confused and they think, oh, I'm working on spelling and I'm saying the word first and then they're writing it, so that's speech to print. Well, yeah, that's a speech-to-print activity, but it doesn't mean you're using a speech-to-print approach to reading and spelling instruction. I've also had someone tell me that the Barton program, which is an Orton Gillingham-based program, is speech-to-print because they have a whole lesson on sound awareness before they move into letters. So they're doing speech first, then print, so it must be a speech-to-print approach. Well, again, yes and no. Like, great, you worked on sounds, but that doesn't mean you move on to letters and forget about sounds. Like the sound awareness and using sounds first should be worked in, and sounds should be addressed in every single concept and in all of these five areas, the way that we're talking about in this five-part series, in order for you to be using a sounds first approach. Also, the problem with doing that sound awareness lesson, and then moving on to letters, is the research tells us that yes, kids need sound awareness, but the days of doing sound awareness in the dark for long periods of time are over. We know that kids, yes, need sound awareness, but they need to tie that to letters as quickly as possible, and that can be done very easily to get the most bang for their buck. Because just having good sound awareness without being able to tie that skill functionally into reading and spelling is meaningless. We need that sound awareness in every single activity and concept that we teach. So let's do a just a quick review. On day one, we talked about the scope and sequence of a letters first versus sound first approach and how they vary. On part two, we talked about syllables and how learning about syllables and talking about syllables is different. On day three, we talked about the job of letters and how that is different in a letters versus sound first approach. And so we have made it to day four or part four, where we are talking about what kids say while writing. Okay? This is a huge one. And in fact, I have a whole other podcast on just this. It was actually the first one that I published, and it's I think it's the one that gets shared and downloaded the most. You can go check out episode number one if this is interesting for you, because like I said at the end of the last one, I teach this to kids and families. It's one of the first things I teach them because it is so, so important, and it's usually different than what they're learning in school. And I was talking to a friend of mine who works in a Montessori setting, and she said that she was listening to that podcast and she was on her way to help a classroom teacher who was. So if he's trying to read a word, it sounds like s uh m. And they want him to blend it together and get to sun, right? That is segmented phonation or bouncy speech. Sounds very choppy. S, uh, mm, sun. Well, most kids can handle that with very short words, like one-syllable word, sometimes with two syllable words. But again, this is really hard on their working memory. And working memory is often decreased in kids with dyslexia because they have to hold all those individual sounds in their head while they're sounding it out and then blend it back together to get to the word. So my friend that works in this Montessori setting, she said she listened to that podcast, tried what I was telling her to do on the podcast, and it immediately worked for this child, and he was able to figure out the word. And we started doing the slow and stretchy speech, and it's already helping them so much. So this is really important, and I go way more into it in that podcast episode number one. So please feel free to go back and listen to that. But how a letters first approach and a sounds first approach is different in what kids say while they're writing. So in a letters first approach, children say the name of the letters while they write. So if let's say they're writ writing the word said, they would write S-A-I-D said S-A-I-D said S A I D said. Okay. Sometimes they're writing it in a different color, sometimes they're tapping it each letter on their arm, but they're saying the names of the letters, which is encouraging them to memorize letter strings. And there's a couple problems with this. One is that if you listen to the first part of this series, we talked about triple word form theory and how kids need to be able to integrate sounds, letters, and meaning. Those three things. That's where the triple word form theory comes from. Sounds, letters, and meanings. It has some other names. If you happen to be a clinician or a teacher listening, sometimes you'll hear it called POM for phonology, orthography, and morphology, but it's the same idea: sounds, letters, and meaning. Kids need to integrate all three of those. On my other podcast, I've also talked about the different types of language, but let's think about what letters and sounds are. Okay. Letters are things that we see and write. Sounds are the things that we say and hear. Our brain needs to connect those two things to do a good job with reading and a good job with spelling. So if I am writing a letter and seeing a letter and saying a letter and hearing a letter, well, there's no room in my brain left over to think about the sounds. So that child is not thinking about the sounds when they write the word and they're saying the letter name. So that's a big problem that I have with the letters first approach. And in fact, that's a big reason why I have the head-to-hand sight word system because there is a much, much better way to teach sight words where your child can learn and you can teach your child to integrate sounds, letters, and meanings even for the sight words, those high frequency words that have lower frequency spellings. We still need to talk about sounds, letters, and meaning for those words. So they're only memorizing letter strings. And the other problem is that memorizing letter strings helps for that one word. And that's it. One word. That's all it helps for. Whereas if we are teaching kids to connect letters to sounds, well, there's probably other words that are using that sound letter connection. And if our brain is learning the sound letter connection, then we can apply that to other words instead of just memorizing a specific string of letters that only applies to that word. So I'm going to talk about how a sounds-first approach is different, and I'm going to tell a story about one of my kiddos that I had that worked with me for a long time. So a nice sounds-first approach, the child would say the sounds as they write the word. And the sound that they say would need to match the letter that they're writing for that sound. So in the word sun, as they're saying s, they would be writing the s. As they're saying uh, they would write the u. And as they say n, they would write the n. This connects sounds and letters in their brain. It connects what they see and write to what they say and hear. And this is going to build their sound letter connection and pattern recognition. And they can then apply that to other words. So they're not just learning it for that one word. So a sounds-first approach while spelling makes more sense because reading and spelling depend on connecting the sounds and letters in the brain. And saying the sounds while writing the letter builds these pathways way faster than saying the letter name. And I would argue that saying the letter name doesn't build them at all because their brain is not thinking about sounds. Okay, so I told you I'd tell you a story. I'm going to call this friend Jay. So Jay worked with me and he was such a hard worker. And he had been making a lot of progress in the scope and sequence that we were working on. But at school, he had these spelling words that were beyond the scope and sequence that we had been targeting, right? Because I'm trying to catch him up. So we had to work on, you know, concepts in the scope and sequence that were developmentally earlier than where he was in his grade level. I can't remember exactly what grade level it was. Let's say he was fourth grade. We were working on a concept at a second grade level. Okay. So he was doing so, so well reading and spelling words that had the patterns in it that we had explicitly taught. But he had these spelling tests. And he was really struggling with words on his spelling test because they were grade level words. So he came in and he's like, Oh, Miss Michelle, I just, I don't, I study so hard and I I'd get zeros. I get zeros on my spelling test, even though I've studied for them all week. And I said, Okay, tell me how you studied for them. Well, he's doing what he was told to do at school. He's writing the words twenty times each. He's saying the letter names while he's writing them. His mom is asking him to spell the words. He's trying to give her the letter names and spell them aloud. And I said, Okay, did you bring your list from last week? He said, Yeah, I've got it right here. And he pulls it out. And so I look at the list and I just turn it towards him and I said, Can you read these words for me? Take a guess as to how many words he could read. None. He couldn't read any of the words. These were words that he had a spelling test on last week. And so he had written them twenty times each. He had tried spelling them aloud. So what happened there? Why couldn't he read them? Well, here's what happened. When he was writing them over and over and over again and saying the name of the letters, he was only thinking about the letters, seeing the letters, saying the letter, hearing the letter name, saying the letter name. The first time that his brain tried to connect the letters to the sounds was when the teacher said the word aloud in class. The teacher said the word aloud in class, he heard the sounds, and he had to come up with the letter sequence. And he hadn't practiced that before. If he had, he would be able to read those words because when you read, we use the sounds. So please, please, please have your child say the sound in the word as they are writing. Every single word, every single word, you can map the letters to the sounds. You can teach your child the job of the letters. If you are not sure how to do this, I include an answer key for the 300 fry words, which are the most common high-frequency words with low frequency spellings in my head-to-hand sight word system. And what I teach you in that system can be applied to every single word. This is one of the most important things that you can do to help your child be successful. And it is different than what many, many, many, many letters first programs use. And it's contrary to what research shows. Research shows that children who say the sound while writing the letter build stronger sound letter connections and have better reading and spelling skills. And you know, Jay is not the only one where this happened. There are many kids. Like that was like a mind-blowing experience, I think, when that happened. And so I started asking all of my other parents of kids that were struggling. I'm like, well, how are they studying for this spelling test? It was always the same answer. And so I would help them like group the words based on sound patterns, if there was a sound pattern, saying the sounds, and I can't remember a client that that didn't work for. I mean, I remember several very clearly where it's like, oh my gosh, now we're getting 80s and 90s on our spelling test because we changed how we were studying for them. We were thinking about the sounds and connecting the letters. Using this sounds first approach while spelling makes so much more sense to kids and it builds stronger sound letter connections in their brain that they can apply that pattern recognition to other words. So that's it for part four of this series on how to choose the right intervention for your child with dyslexia without wasting your time and money. Please come back for part five. Part five is going to be really exciting because we're going to talk more about sight words. So I brought them up a little bit today, but we're going to talk more about sight words, and then we're going to go into some options for how you can teach your child to use a sounds first approach to reading and spelling. I look forward to having you back next week.