Our “Light Up The Word” is a fun and hands-on way to proactively practice mapping, segmenting and building CVC, CCVC and CVCC words. Segmentation is the process of breaking a word apart into its individual sounds. It’s the opposite of blending sounds together to form a word. However, the two often go together. Segmentation helps build phonemic awareness and is one of the first steps in the reading process.
Children learn to read by learning letter sounds before they start to blend those sounds together to form and read words. Consonant-Vowel-Consonant sound, like cat, hat, hot, tip and man are the first step for children when learning to read and decode the arrangement of words. CVC words are an integral part in any pre-reading program, as they are the first step from identify letter sounds to being able to sound out simple words. CVC words are easy to sound out and a child who knows their letter sounds will be able to use their knowledge of individual sounds and blend them together to read the whole word not just the individual sounds.
The “Light Up The Word” resource can either be used for segmenting and mapping or you can add the sound button strip and build the words with letters or slip inside a write and wipe pouch and write. There are 124 CVC picture cards included and they are colour coded by the medial short vowel which makes it easier to differentiate if you have not yet taught a vowel sound or you want to pick out the cards that only include familiar sounds.
Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Consonant and Consonant-Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVCC/CCVC) words are the natural next step in a child’s reading journey. They are very similar to CVC words except they begin or end with simple letter blends like flap or bend. CVCC and CCVC should also be a follow-on step to avoid overwhelm children with learning two separate concepts of decoding and letter blends.
CVC words are the exciting first step to help children unveil the wonder and sometimes complicated English language. Introducing CVC words to children early helps them better understand why learning all their letter sounds is so important and acts as motivation for them to continue working on phonemic awareness.
One of the most interesting elements of CVC words is that they are easily memorised by children and are therefore more effortlessly converted to long-term memory, so children can learn (and remember) the physical representation of the word and the sound at the same time, resulting in deep semantic coding. Through this essential work on reading mapping and segmentation, they will be taught to form all their letters with a pencil on lines. The better they get at decoding (reading a written word out loud) the better they should get at encoding (spelling a spoken word on paper). If they can read it, they can write it.
The ”Light Up The Word” resource makes learning and developing the journey of letter sounds to simple words fun by turning it into a tangible exercise.
My name is Sommer. I am a mum of 3. A resource creator. A Prep teacher in Queensland. A lover of play-based learning. A special needs advocate. A creative thinker. A believer that learning should be fun.. so fun that they don't know they're learning!
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