If student is struggling in phonics learning, there are steps to take to help them. First assess all students’ skill level and find out what they know. Instruction should start from there. Sometimes teachers make the mistake of trying to start all over with teaching phonics instruction and this denies the student the skills they have already learned. Secondly, group …show more content…
To help with spelling and creating words, the word-building approach uses rimes and patterns by grouping words together that have the same vowel sounds; short a and short e for example. In teaching the word building approach, students must learn the sounds of vowels in all areas of the word, beginning and middle. The steps to administrating a word building lesson is to first start by applying phonics so the students know the sound of the letter and letter patterns in the words being learned. Start by giving a list of words that all begin with the same vowel sound. Have the students read them out loud. Have them recognize that the vowel sound is the same for all of the words in the list. One word should be the model word so that if a similar word appears the student can use the model word to sound out the unfamiliar word. The model word could be displayed on a chart or on the chalk board for easy reference. Next practice is very important. A story containing the several words with the vowel being taught could be read so there is repetition and it becomes familiar. Then introduce vowel patterns. In word building, once the students recognize sounds they can begin building words by adding letters, this is called adding onsets. For example, after learning the sound of an students an add letters to the beginning of the word to make new words like pan, fan, can, etc. This should be expanded then by introducing short e patterns like en, ell, etc. Follow up word-building by evaluating the students by seeing if the students can decode words with the same short patters of words they have not seen before. According to the author (Gunning 2013) “students shouldn’t progress to the next level until they have mastered the current level, pg.