For example, the word ‘know’ on a word wall would be placed under the K.
When we listen for the phonemes in a word, we can use a sound wall to identify the different ways to spell the sounds. Helping students recognize the way their mouth feels and looks when producing sounds will help them connect speech to print. We also need to assist them in producing the individual phonemes in words. We need to explicitly teach students to hear the individual phonemes in the words they hear in language. Speaking is natural and something we can learn to do by being immersed in language. The sounds/phonemes in words are co-articulated. This is important because when we hear language, we hear words as whole units. The English language has 44 speech sounds/phonemes, 26 letters to represent those sounds/phonemes and over 200 different ways to spell those sounds! When we think about the way our learners perceive the words they hear in speech, a sound wall makes sense.Ī sound wall supports students by focusing on the articulation of sounds/phones and the various letter/letter patterns that represent the sounds/phonemes in words. A sound wall does the work of matching our articulation of speech sounds/phonemes to the letters/graphemes that represent those sounds. Not only do sound walls support students with learning high frequency words, they support students in retaining and learning to read unfamiliar words on their own. So, how do we support students learning those tricky words or high frequency words? The answer is Sound Walls. Tracy Weeden said so well, "We have to strategically abandon what's not working.” - and word walls don’t work. This may be why Word Walls are often abandoned in classrooms, taking up space, looking pretty, but not really being used. For example, a child can hear the 2 sounds in the word know (/n/ /o/) before he/she can use 4 letters to spell the word know. We hear speech sounds before we learn to match the sounds to a particular letter or letter patterns. We find the print/letter first and then we match the sound. Working with word walls is print to speech. The process does not help students learn to read new, unfamiliar words. If students do memorize a word, they are able to read and spell only that word. As teachers, we know and understand all of the different spellings of sounds, and so we place the words under the letter a word begins with because we can locate the words that way. When we think about a word wall, it is driven by the teacher’s point of view. Sometimes we add to the word wall throughout the year, teaching students to chant words by letter names and other times we just place a bunch of words on the wall at the beginning of the year and we don’t do much with the word wall at all. We sometimes frame the word, talk about “tall letters, letters that fall” and so on. We place “sight words” or “high frequency words” (and sometimes even content words) under each letter based on the first letter of each word. There is nothing to anchor the learning, and that’s not the way our language works.Ī word wall is organized alphabetically using all 26 letters of the alphabet.
Wordwall for people to write on how to#
Little did I know how wrong I was! Asking students to recall how to read and spell a word based on letter names rather than sounds was like asking them to memorize a suggested password. I truly believed my word wall and the practice students were engaging in was helping them become strong readers and writers. While my word wall was interactive and added to throughout the year, I saw many classrooms with a word wall that was more like wallpaper than a learning tool. I would explain these words were “rule breakers” - we needed to “know them by heart/sight” and not sound them out. For example, listening to the word ‘she’, we heard /sh/, not /s/ or the word ‘know’, we heard /n/ not /k/. Many times, a word would begin with a letter that didn’t make the sound we heard. Now, did that process always work? Not exactly. As we placed the new word on the word wall, we would listen for the first sound in the word, find that letter and staple the new word on the word wall. During the week we would chant the letter names, frame the words, play games and on Friday I would assess students and we would place the new words on the word wall. It played a very important role in my classroom and I truly believed I was helping students learn to read and write words.
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