Pathways To Reading Segmenting Words And Practice Activities

Laura Warren
07-27-2023
Pathways to Reading

Segmenting Words and Practice Activities

A critical component of Pathways to Reading that will help students learn to read and spell is teaching the critical skill of segmenting words. This is a crucial skill for children to master to help them learn to read and write fluently. When segmenting words students are taught to break each word down into smaller parts. They first learn to segment compound words by breaking them into two separate words, next, they learn to pull a word apart by syllables, and finally, they learn to break the word into individual sounds. Students can begin to practice segmenting orally even before they are taught how to spell each sound. To segment at the phoneme level students

Students can be introduced to these activities as soon as they can segment at the phoneme level and have an understanding of letter-sound associations. When teaching students how to execute the activities they can be introduced in a large group lesson. Once students have an understanding of how to do the activities they are best executed in small groups or with individual students. This will help the teacher to teach skills to mastery by being able to work with each child at their own level and speed. To build the pathways in the brain that are necessary to solidify fluency and accuracy students should be given think-time, taught to methodically walk through the challenge, and taught to self-correct when needed. To facilitate self-correction and individual thinking, the teacher must offer scaffolded corrective feedback as necessary throughout each

The goals of this activity are for students to be able to segment words into phonemes and to be able to spell with all sounds taught. To complete the activity the teacher will need magnetic letters, sound dots, dry-erase markers, and a pointer. The teacher will introduce the term phoneme to the students and explain that they are going to work together to find the phonemes, or individual sounds in each word. Two helpers will be chosen to act as a sound leader and a speller. Other students may be reminded to think silently and give the helpers time to do their own thinking during their turn. The sound leader will start by first identifying the number of sounds in the word. The teacher will give the students a word such as “cat” and help students notice that there are three sounds in the word. After identifying that ‘cat’ has three sounds the sound leader must then pull the sounds out. The sound leader thinks about and reports the first sound heard in ‘cat’ to the speller who then finds the letter to represent the sound, and places it on a sound dot. This process continues until all sounds have been pulled out of the word and then placed on their sound dots. Next, the teacher will call on another volunteer to ‘point and say’, the student will point to each sound spelling and say the sound to make sure all sounds are represented correctly. After confirming all sounds are represented, they will be put