The Skills:
Decoding, spelling and remembering words:
Matching spelling pattern to pronunciation, grapheme to phoneme, and vice versa, 1:1, to figure out and remember all words to read and spell. This requires well-developed phonological awareness, viz:
- The ability to isolate and identify phonemes in words,
- Phonics knowledge and pattern recognition,
- Efficient blending strategies.
These skills need to become instinctive, automatic, rapid, and eventually unconscious.
Self-teaching:
The skills involved in figuring out and remembering new words, new spelling patterns, new vocabulary, new knowledge, new ideas, new grammatical structures and text features rapidly and instinctively in the process of reading.
Comprehension:
Developing the areas of knowledge, including vocabulary, and the myriad ways of thinking to extract meaning from text, most especially inferential skills.
Writing:
Developing an understanding of the structure of sentences, paragraphs and text as the basis of accurately, fluently and concisely expressing information, thoughts and ideas.
These skills are interactive, but also hierarchical and sequential. Excellent writing depends on comprehension of the subject matter, deep comprehension requires self-teaching proficiency, self-teaching relies on the skills involved in instantly and effortlessly recognising words.
These skills also apply to listening and speaking.
Agility with Sound activities to build knowledge and skills:
Word level skills:
Isolate and identify phonemes: letter tiles, main Wordchain games.
Phonics knowledge: letter tiles, Wordchain, fluency sheets, sliders.
Pattern recognition and efficient blending strategies: fluency sheets, challenge sheets, puzzles, sliders, Wordchain fluency section.
Self-teaching:
Comprehension scripts and books.
Comprehension:
Comprehension scripts, Sentence Book, comprehension and writing resource.
Writing:
Sentence Book, comprehension and writing resource.
Note that most resources build most skills to some extent. The fluency sheets reinforce phonics knowledge, the books reinforce pattern recognition. Other areas of literacy development, such as vocabulary building, back-ground knowledge and speaking skills, are developed in multiple aspects of the whole.