In essence, Agility with Sound and Wordchain work like this.
Wordchain and the letter tile activities are about phonics and phonological awareness, leaning to think in the sounds of words, how the sequence of letters relates to pronunciation.
Wordchain and the fluency sheets, sliders and puzzles teach students to recognise the repeating patterns in words. Know ect in in/s/ect and you know it in eff/ect/ive, corr/ect/ly, ne/ gl/ect/ed, ad/j/ect/ive, in/sp/ect/or, ex/p/ect/ant, con/j/ect/ure, re/j/ection and hundreds of other words. Students learn to look for those familiar patterns and then add up the components quickly. (This begins with the simplest words: d/og, l/og, f/og and progresses sequentially, starting a little beyond what a student already knows, already can do.)
The books are all for older students and are about comprehension, but with words you can read so that your attention is not soaked up by figuring out the words. How to comprehend, how to infer, is heavily scaffolded.
The writing resource is about extending comprehension further, most especially inferencing; writing about your reading in a heavily scaffolded and sequenced way, learning how to generate, evaluate and then organise thoughts and ideas into structured sentences, paragraphs and an essay.
PLD videos
I am an approved Structured Literacy PLD provider. However, I simply do not have the time to travel and have produced a series of videos instead.
I am often asked these questions. You will find the answers in these videos.
- Why do so many students seem to decode adequately but struggle with both spelling and comprehension? What is the link? How can this be addressed?
- How do you teach kids to make inferences?
- These students are so far from achieving NCEA writing standards. How can their writing competence be lifted in time? (This webinar is relevant to teachers of Year 5 – 8 students as well.)
- Direct teaching of vocabulary is essential but far from enough. What else can be done to build students’ vocabulary?
- Managing diverse needs within a senior classroom. How can the most competent be extended in a structured literacy framework? Why does this matter?
- How can students working at level 1 or 2 of the curriculum be advanced in a busy classroom?
- How can the disengaged be engaged?