This is my first blog post and I’m making it about orthographic mapping. If you’ve read my site you know how much importance I assign to orthographic mapping. You should start preparing your child for orthographic mapping from the earliest time you can. With my last child, I started en utero! Seems to have paid off for her big time.
I have taught for years that sight word flash cards are almost always the wrong way to teach new words to children. I’ve advised parents that by decoding and sounding out words children quickly add words as sight words. All this was based on a study I had read and the experience of seeing it happen over and over with my children and students I had tutored.
Honestly, I hate sight words and think most should be illegal with severe penalties for unauthorized use.
As a result of listening to the podcast Sold a Story, I learned about orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping is what I’ve been talking about for all these years. I’m sad it took me so long to learn this but I’m excited to pass on the knowledge.
In a nutshell, if children know the sounds of all the phonograms (I teach 70 of them and the 108 sounds that go with them) and can blend them and know most of the 30 spelling rules I teach, they are able to smoothly decode most words. The act of decoding words this way leads to orthographic mapping of the words. This typically happens after decoding a word 1–4 times. So much more quickly and efficiently than repeated viewings of a whole word on a flashcard.
This fits in with my advice to parents when teaching their children to read:
- Learn the phonograms (and spelling rules)
- Blend the phonograms to decode words
- Read and read and read…
At the time of writing this I’m tutoring a 4th-grader who has, along with his mother, really bought into this. When he is reading, we are “hunting for words” to decode. I tell him it is exciting to find them because we get to decode and make his brain more reading strong. He isn’t intimidated by those difficult words as a result of this.
It is great to finally have definition around what I have believed for years. Orthographic mapping…who knew?
If you would like to learn more, here is a great link:
The Role of Orthographic Mapping in Learning to Read – Keys to Literacy
There is a great article in the Phonogram University Library as well!
