Phonographix Question

Sounds like my daughter. She actually reads above grade level now, thanks to PG. A lot of children automatically get spelling improvement with mastery of the advanced code portion of PG, but my dd’s spelling remained stuck at 1st grade level. Scratch-sheet spelling and other methods I tried did not work well.I am assuming you are talking about a spelling problem, not a reading one?What has helped me is the article on spelling in the book “Multisensory Teaching of Basic Language Skills”, compiled by Judith Birsh. Try getting a copy of it through inter-library loan (costs $59 at Amazon). It’s really worth it. I have used that combined with “Words Their Way” by Bear et al to devise our own program.Basically, what is working for us is explicit teaching of orthography, starting with the simple patterns. For example, we just finished /o/ as in “got”. The most common pattern for that sound is “o”, but it is spelled with “a” in words starting with “w”. By having her sort a bunch of words such as rod, got, sock, mock, want, wash, etc. she “discovered” the pattern on her own. The spelling of “ou” as in sought is much less common, so we won’t cover that until later. The method stresses *not* introducing all possible spellings of a sound at one time, which is confusing to kids like my dd.I have had to do a lot of research on my own to come up with this approach. It works well because dd learns to spell a *lot* of words correctly at one time.Kids like my dd just don’t “pick up” orthography. She needed explicit instruction in decoding to learn to read, and now she needs explicit instruction in orthography to learn to spell.Incidentally, she is also good at art, poor at remembering math facts and social studies facts.Mary: The remedial reading teacher at our school is using the methods in
: Reading Reflex on a 6th grade student who has difficulty reading
: and especially with spelling. They breezed through the first part
: easily. They are now working on long o. The student is having
: difficulty putting the correct “long o” spelling in a
: word even when it is written out and he sees the word. He thinks
: soap is okay with sope and oats is okay otes. Do you have any
: suggestions on what could be done? I believe this student is
: dyslexic. He also has difficulty with perception of his body and
: recall of information in English, Social Studies, and Science. He
: is quite good at art projects. Any advice or ideas you could give
: would be greatly appreciated.

I got curious about the long o question (o/e versus oa, soap versus sope, oats versus otes), figuring I’ll need it later for my dd. I looked through my 3 books on orthography looking for a rule or tendency. Nothing!I wrote as many oe and oa words as I could think of in one minute, and it appears to me that o/e is used about 33% more often than oa. So I will probably teach the o/e pattern first (cope, mote, vote) with maybe a couple of “outlaw” words that don’t follow this pattern (done, some). Later I will introduce oa words (coat, moat, roam) as exceptions to this rule that just need to be memorized.English spelling is multi-layered. I suspect the “o/e” and “oa” spellings of the long o sound both came from Anglo-Saxon, and both spellings were about equally accepted. There is a pattern of using “oe” at the end of a root word (mistletoe, hoe, woe). However, that doesn’t help with deciding between oats and otes.Mary: The remedial reading teacher at our school is using the methods in
: Reading Reflex on a 6th grade student who has difficulty reading
: and especially with spelling. They breezed through the first part
: easily. They are now working on long o. The student is having
: difficulty putting the correct “long o” spelling in a
: word even when it is written out and he sees the word. He thinks
: soap is okay with sope and oats is okay otes. Do you have any
: suggestions on what could be done? I believe this student is
: dyslexic. He also has difficulty with perception of his body and
: recall of information in English, Social Studies, and Science. He
: is quite good at art projects. Any advice or ideas you could give
: would be greatly appreciated.

: I got curious about the long o question (o/e versus oa, soap versus
: sope, oats versus otes), figuring I’ll need it later for my dd. I
: looked through my 3 books on orthography looking for a rule or
: tendency. Nothing!: I wrote as many oe and oa words as I could think of in one minute,
: and it appears to me that o/e is used about 33% more often than
: oa. So I will probably teach the o/e pattern first (cope, mote,
: vote) with maybe a couple of “outlaw” words that don’t
: follow this pattern (done, some). Later I will introduce oa words
: (coat, moat, roam) as exceptions to this rule that just need to be
: memorized.: English spelling is multi-layered. I suspect the “o/e” and
: “oa” spellings of the long o sound both came from
: Anglo-Saxon, and both spellings were about equally accepted. There
: is a pattern of using “oe” at the end of a root word
: (mistletoe, hoe, woe). However, that doesn’t help with deciding
: between oats and otes.: Mary

Somewhere I have a chart of which long o spellings listed according to frequency. I think it is 1) a single o (but this spelling is found more often in words of more than one syllable as go-ing, go-pher, ho-bo), 2) o_e, 3) oa, 4) ow, 5) oe, and 6) ough. That’s the frequency concept but, on the other hand, when one looks at consistency of spelling to pronunciation, it’s different. I just checked the long o lesson in “The Spel-Lang Tree: Trunks” where students are to to look through a list of about 1400 words to find those with o, oe, oa, and o_e patterns. For the single o, it includes go, no, so (do, to, who). For oe, the words are toe, goes (shoe, does). For o_e, we find code, rode, hole, moe, pole, whole, bone, cone, phone, stone, more, sore, store, hope, rope, close, nose, rose, those, note, wrote, stove (come, some, done, gone, none, one, whose, dove, glove, love, move, prove). By far the most consistent in spelling and pronunciation is oa with load, road, toad, oak, soak, coal, goal, soap, oar, soar, coast, toast, boat, coat, goat, oats. Not included in this list is ‘broad’ which is one of the very few oa words which is not pronounced oe. Of course, ough has six different pronunciations so those are total sight words. If I were teaching for consistency, I think I’d start with oa.

PASSWORD>aamjT37qc5iCcHere’s a list of lots of long o words.You’re right, there isn’t a “rule” for it, or even a common pattern. It’s like ai vs. a-e.This is the kind of situation where I would choose some common words the kiddo has to know and teach them — and use mnemonics or whatever it takes. As Mary suggested, teaching the more common spelling first is best, and teaching it thoroughly. (This means lots, and lots, and lots of practice, *especially* if the kiddo’s been “practicing” the wrong spellings.) A vivid visual of pictures of common “OA” words wiht soap and oats and a coat floating on a boat can help with the association of hte words to the right set of letters.Fortunately, these are exactly the kinds of spelling problems that spell checking *does* catch — except for the trickly homophones (their/there).

What is orthography and what books do you have one it? Thanks, it sounds interesting.: I got curious about the long o question (o/e versus oa, soap versus
: sope, oats versus otes), figuring I’ll need it later for my dd. I
: looked through my 3 books on orthography looking for a rule or
: tendency. Nothing!: I wrote as many oe and oa words as I could think of in one minute,
: and it appears to me that o/e is used about 33% more often than
: oa. So I will probably teach the o/e pattern first (cope, mote,
: vote) with maybe a couple of “outlaw” words that don’t
: follow this pattern (done, some). Later I will introduce oa words
: (coat, moat, roam) as exceptions to this rule that just need to be
: memorized.: English spelling is multi-layered. I suspect the “o/e” and
: “oa” spellings of the long o sound both came from
: Anglo-Saxon, and both spellings were about equally accepted. There
: is a pattern of using “oe” at the end of a root word
: (mistletoe, hoe, woe). However, that doesn’t help with deciding
: between oats and otes.: Mary

: The remedial reading teacher at our school is using the methods in
: Reading Reflex on a 6th grade student who has difficulty reading
: and especially with spelling. They breezed through the first part
: easily. They are now working on long o. The student is having
: difficulty putting the correct “long o” spelling in a
: word even when it is written out and he sees the word. He thinks
: soap is okay with sope and oats is okay otes. Do you have any
: suggestions on what could be done? I believe this student is
: dyslexic. He also has difficulty with perception of his body and
: recall of information in English, Social Studies, and Science. He
: is quite good at art projects. Any advice or ideas you could give
: would be greatly appreciated.My advice would be to keep doing the Phonographix/Reading Reflex, work on physical things and memory as a separate tutoring issue (not involving spelling at all) and for three to six months or so, bite your tongue.Almost all children go through a normal progression — (1) not spelling at all, (2) spelling either randomly (not understanding there is a code) or laborious letter-by-letter copying (knowing there’s a code but not knowing how to use it), (3) overly regular phonetic spelling (learning the code and applying it *correctly*), and finally (4) more-or-less standard spelling (knowing the code *and* all its arbitrary conventions and exceptions).The child in question, after five or six years of failure, is *finally* learning the code. Yahoo! The fact that he is over-regularizing, at *this* stage, is a good sign, not a bad. It means he has internalized the code and finds it useful. Wonderful! After a while, I would suggest a few months, he will be ready to accept that there’s another mountain to climb, the arbitrary o_e vs oa decisions and the irregularities.Most kids get to this stage around late Grade 1 to Grade 2, but this kid got a late start and has a lot of retraining to do. If you hurry him, he can feel there’s just too much of a load and give up.If his class teacher and parents can also bite their tongues for a while, even better.You don’t want to go too long with non-standard spellings and let them become an ingrained habit, but you don’t want to do the “now you’ve worked hard and learned this, forget it and here’s another difficult job” approach, either. There’s a fine line and it takes a gentle push to the student at the right time.Sometimes the student will ask, when he has internalized the code well enough to become aware of fine distinctions. Then you say “There’s no reason for choosing oa or o_e; we just do it like that because years and years ago somebody wrote it that way and now we’re stuck with it.” (Hearing that adults sometimes get stuck with something stupid makes a kid feel like he has company.)Other times, you can make a positive but non-pressuring suggestion: “I read here ‘We went on a bote last week.’ You know, it’s wonderful, now I can read what you write perfectly, you’ve gotten so much better. But you know, we usually spell “boat” with an oa not o_e. It’s just one of those dumb things.”With positive models and continued work on a good program, he will progress gradually, but faster than you think; at the end of the year, when you look back, you will be amazed at the improvement.Work on his physical skills can also be a very big help; training in handwriting, classic basic shapes and strokes and so on (either cursive or calligraphy, both with a pen and liquid ink for fine motion control), not only helps handwriting and other fine coordination but will also make him more aware of spelling. And things that appear totally unrelated, like sports, can help him improve body awareness and have a lot of feedback to academics. Anything you can do to help him in any field can be worthwhile.

Sarah,I agree with Mary, below, on teaching one spelling at a time. I’m currently using Phonographix with my 5.5 yo daughter. She progressed quickly to the advanced code and did the o-e lesson nicely, but couldn’t transfer that to actual reading. She has some memory issues, so I decided to do one sound at a time, starting with the one she will see most frequently at this age, the one we learned as silent-e. PG calls this vowel-plus-e. I found that word analysis helped her, even though Phonographix says not to do it at her age. I wrote a list of 24 words with i-e and other ‘teams’ of letters that work together (ch,th,sh,ck) & asked her to underline the sound pictures that work together. Then asked her to tell me the word without the ‘e’, to reinforce that the ‘e’ works with the vowel to represent a different sound. It helps her to see the sounds for that lesson so I write them on index cards and put them up on the wall for her to refer to. She also has the vowels on one index card. Once she has this part of the advanced code down pat, I’ll try the ‘oa’. I realize that this is a variation on PG doing all of the sound pictures for one sound, but it was too much for her memory. She needed the organization of the rule that ‘adding the sound picture ‘e’ to a vowel creates a new sound’, one that is different from what we’ve been teaching in the basic code; this sets the stage to say that ‘oa is another way to write the sound o-e’(which I’ve just introduced with the vowel plus e, as per PG) and so on. She’s responded very well to this.As for your student’s spelling, eventually he’ll just have to remember that people have agreed that this is the way we spell it, but I think he needs more work with words that have like spelling before introducing variations of the same sound.Just my opinion, Denise: The remedial reading teacher at our school is using the methods in
: Reading Reflex on a 6th grade student who has difficulty reading
: and especially with spelling. They breezed through the first part
: easily. They are now working on long o. The student is having
: difficulty putting the correct “long o” spelling in a
: word even when it is written out and he sees the word. He thinks
: soap is okay with sope and oats is okay otes. Do you have any
: suggestions on what could be done? I believe this student is
: dyslexic. He also has difficulty with perception of his body and
: recall of information in English, Social Studies, and Science. He
: is quite good at art projects. Any advice or ideas you could give
: would be greatly appreciated.

EMAILNOTICES>noHurray for you, Victoria, even though you haven’t read Reading Reflex (from what I remember), your response was the exactly in line with the Phono-Graphix approach. I think too many people get in a hurry when the child has finally begun to decode to push them to spell “correctly”, that is, use the accepted spellings. As you say that comes down the road with lots of reading practice and seeing those words in print many times.: My advice would be to keep doing the Phonographix/Reading Reflex,
: work on physical things and memory as a separate tutoring issue
: (not involving spelling at all) and for three to six months or so,
: bite your tongue.: Almost all children go through a normal progression — (1) not
: spelling at all, (2) spelling either randomly (not understanding
: there is a code) or laborious letter-by-letter copying (knowing
: there’s a code but not knowing how to use it), (3) overly regular
: phonetic spelling (learning the code and applying it *correctly*),
: and finally (4) more-or-less standard spelling (knowing the code
: *and* all its arbitrary conventions and exceptions).: The child in question, after five or six years of failure, is
: *finally* learning the code. Yahoo! The fact that he is
: over-regularizing, at *this* stage, is a good sign, not a bad. It
: means he has internalized the code and finds it useful. Wonderful!
: After a while, I would suggest a few months, he will be ready to
: accept that there’s another mountain to climb, the arbitrary o_e
: vs oa decisions and the irregularities.: Most kids get to this stage around late Grade 1 to Grade 2, but this
: kid got a late start and has a lot of retraining to do. If you
: hurry him, he can feel there’s just too much of a load and give
: up.: If his class teacher and parents can also bite their tongues for a
: while, even better.: You don’t want to go too long with non-standard spellings and let
: them become an ingrained habit, but you don’t want to do the
: “now you’ve worked hard and learned this, forget it and
: here’s another difficult job” approach, either. There’s a
: fine line and it takes a gentle push to the student at the right
: time.: Sometimes the student will ask, when he has internalized the code
: well enough to become aware of fine distinctions. Then you say
: “There’s no reason for choosing oa or o_e; we just do it like
: that because years and years ago somebody wrote it that way and
: now we’re stuck with it.” (Hearing that adults sometimes get
: stuck with something stupid makes a kid feel like he has company.): Other times, you can make a positive but non-pressuring suggestion:
: “I read here ‘We went on a bote last week.’ You know, it’s
: wonderful, now I can read what you write perfectly, you’ve gotten
: so much better. But you know, we usually spell “boat”
: with an oa not o_e. It’s just one of those dumb things.”: With positive models and continued work on a good program, he will
: progress gradually, but faster than you think; at the end of the
: year, when you look back, you will be amazed at the improvement.: Work on his physical skills can also be a very big help; training in
: handwriting, classic basic shapes and strokes and so on (either
: cursive or calligraphy, both with a pen and liquid ink for fine
: motion control), not only helps handwriting and other fine
: coordination but will also make him more aware of spelling. And
: things that appear totally unrelated, like sports, can help him
: improve body awareness and have a lot of feedback to academics.
: Anything you can do to help him in any field can be worthwhile.

: What is orthography and what books do you have one it? Thanks, it
: sounds interesting.Orthography is the formal name for spelling patterns and the general system of encoding sounds into spellings.Orthography is affected by sound patterns, speech patterns, language roots (eg Greek ch = k as in chorus), structure (prefixes and suffixes and tenses etc.) and the history of language (history of English specifically) overall.Various books on phonics, spelling, linguistics and historical linguistics will discuss different aspects of orthography. Hit the library and have fun!

Dear Grace,Thanks for pointing out the outlaw. The oa in aboard and abroad and board and broad do not seem to bother fluent readers. Some beginners need to be cautioned not to rely on sound/symbol for all word pronunciations.Stevenson begins reading instruction with long vowel sounds. She stresses the peanut butter and jelly combination of oa, but I have never heard her discuss the possibility of exceptions. A gentle forewarning might be appreciated by the struggling beginner.Peace.: Somewhere I have a chart of which long o spellings listed according
: to frequency. I think it is 1) a single o (but this spelling is
: found more often in words of more than one syllable as go-ing,
: go-pher, ho-bo), 2) o_e, 3) oa, 4) ow, 5) oe, and 6) ough. That’s
: the frequency concept but, on the other hand, when one looks at
: consistency of spelling to pronunciation, it’s different. I just
: checked the long o lesson in “The Spel-Lang Tree:
: Trunks” where students are to to look through a list of about
: 1400 words to find those with o, oe, oa, and o_e patterns. For the
: single o, it includes go, no, so (do, to, who). For oe, the words
: are toe, goes (shoe, does). For o_e, we find code, rode, hole,
: moe, pole, whole, bone, cone, phone, stone, more, sore, store,
: hope, rope, close, nose, rose, those, note, wrote, stove (come,
: some, done, gone, none, one, whose, dove, glove, love, move,
: prove). By far the most consistent in spelling and pronunciation
: is oa with load, road, toad, oak, soak, coal, goal, soap, oar,
: soar, coast, toast, boat, coat, goat, oats. Not included in this
: list is ‘broad’ which is one of the very few oa words which is not
: pronounced oe. Of course, ough has six different pronunciations
: so those are total sight words. If I were teaching for
: consistency, I think I’d start with oa.

The Gillingham Manual has ratio charts for the vowels that have different spellings. They are shown on a bar graph which gives you a good visual and there are lists of examples also. (In order of how common they are: o at the end of a syllable, o-e, and oa, then oe or ow at the end of a word, ow being more common)
: The remedial reading teacher at our school is using the methods in
: Reading Reflex on a 6th grade student who has difficulty reading
: and especially with spelling. They breezed through the first part
: easily. They are now working on long o. The student is having
: difficulty putting the correct “long o” spelling in a
: word even when it is written out and he sees the word. He thinks
: soap is okay with sope and oats is okay otes. Do you have any
: suggestions on what could be done? I believe this student is
: dyslexic. He also has difficulty with perception of his body and
: recall of information in English, Social Studies, and Science. He
: is quite good at art projects. Any advice or ideas you could give
: would be greatly appreciated.

About how much is this manual, and where could I order it?Mary: The Gillingham Manual has ratio charts for the vowels that have
: different spellings. They are shown on a bar graph which gives you
: a good visual and there are lists of examples also. (In order of
: how common they are: o at the end of a syllable, o-e, and oa, then
: oe or ow at the end of a word, ow being more common)

Mary:It is available from EPS and I have posted the link. It is VERY dry reading, but has an enormous amount of excellent information.Robin