Glued Sounds, Digraphs, Short Vowels, Trick words and more...

Glued Sounds, Digraphs, Short Vowels, Trick words and more...

Each day the children enter the Reading Room and practice the following sound and word drills. These drills are designed to aid your child's reading by promoting their automaticity -- or the rate of how fast they recognize the sounds of letters, letter combinations and sight words (also known as trick words).  The faster they can access the sound of a letter/letters or entire sight word will aid tremendously in their overall reading ability. It will enable them to read at a faster rate which, in turn, will help their comprehension or understanding of what they have read.

Practicing these drills daily at school and at home will aid tremendously in your child's overall reading ability.

Short Vowels

The children love to stretch the sound of the short vowels using this chart each day.  Any practice at home will help in their retention of these vowel sounds.  Use this chart to practice the short vowel sounds with your child at home:

Here are some photos of the children practicing in class:

Students in first grade and in our Reading Room are also practicing and learning about glued sounds, digraphs and trick words.  Here are the sound cards we use to practice these concepts every day.  Have your child practice these sound cards a few times a week to help them keep the rules in their mind:

Sound Cards

Here we are practicing our letter-sounds as a class:

Glued Sounds

Use these cards to help your child practice the glued sounds at home:

Say: "a-l-l, ball, all"

Say: "a-m, ham, am"

Say: "a-n, fan, an"

Digraphs:

Digraphs are two letters which make one sound.  Please practice the following with your children at home:

T-H    thumb    /th/

C-H     Chin    /ch/

S-H       Ship     /sh/

W-H       whistle      /wh/

C-K       sock      /ck/

Trick Words

Trick words are words that your child cannot tap out.  They are words which need to be memorized because they do not follow conventional rules of decoding.  The faster that you child can identify these words as trick words, the more their fluency and comprehension will improve as they will not stop to tap these words out when they see them in books or use them in their writing.  The best way to get to know these words is by sheer repetition.  So please, take 5-10 of these words a week and practice them with your child (these words were also given to you as flash cards at parent-teacher conference).  It will significantly aid in your child's reading: