Hearing and recording sounds

 One of the key skills for writing is the ability to hear each of the sounds within a word and record them to write it. 

As adults you might hear yourself sounding out a word like 'supermarket' when writing it down. We are tapping into our phonemic knowledge and accessing spelling patterns that we might know that give us the sounds we need.

As children are learning to write they use alphabet cards to support this process. We use the prompt of 'What can you hear?' followed by 'Now which letter makes that sound?' to help learners go through the process of sounding out words.

A word like cat has three individual sounds. As you make each sound you record the corresponding letter. In the example above a learner has listened for the 4 sounds in the word pink and recorded each sound in a box. The boxes can help support the writer to be sure of how many sounds they need. 

Here we can see some great attempts at the words mucked and about. In the word mucked they have recorded the dominant sounds they can hear and when they have learned the spelling pattern for using an -ed at the end of a word they will successfully be able to spell the word without support. 

The ou sound comes up later in the structured literacy programme yet we can give learners a heads up what they might expect in future learning and praise the effort for trying a tricky sound.

This is just one of the skills we use for writing. It takes lots of practice and the next time you need to spell out a word, ask your learner to help or model how you do it with them. Seeing adults as learners to will blow their minds!