Agility With Sound 3 weeks in.

Where We Are At.

I have now been taking 3 groups of 4 children for a 1/2 hour Agility With Sound session  Monday - Wednesday for 3 weeks. 2 of the children started only a week ago and two children have left Pt England after they had started with me. I will now be picking up one other.

In only 3 weeks I have already seen a significant improvement in the children's ability to read at speed their fluency sheets of 3 letter words.

Here is a typical sample from the initial testing which highlights some of the difficulty the children have with hearing and recording sounds.

                                                      vat  beg  hid  mop   bud
                                                      mash   thud   chap   moth
                                                            sped  snip  flop

Pretest	WEEK 7 FLUENCY TEST
no √ in 1 min
31	51
31	65
16	48
6	52
13	29
14	49
6	29
14	18
10	46
5	45
2	59

 Also I can see significant improvement in the children being able to break words into parts, hear the sounds within the parts and find the corresponding letter tiles to build the word. Following this we randomly check the sounds of the letters turning the tiles over until they can say the sounds of each letter or ending in any order with the letters all hidden. From this they are mostly reasonably confident at writing the word on the whiteboard by themselves. These words are generally multisyllabic words, such as flustering, continent, and blistered. For a child who has really struggled to write the simplest words they encountered in their initial test such as beg, vet, mop, being able to write and remember these much more difficult words is extremely motivating and empowering.

At the moment the focus is solely on gainly fluency at these chunks and getting a better understanding at how words can be broken apart and put together. There are texts which support this learning which are introduced only once the children have made a significant jump in their fluency of the word chunks. These books are carefully written to contain predominantly words that follow the common sounds the letters  make (particularly the vowels). They are also free of illustrations for the reason that these children compensate for their lack of word/letter sound processing by over-using all the visual clues they can including illustrations, as well as the shape of a word. The aim is to rewire the patterns and pathways in their brain to be able to use the grapho-phonic side of their brain rather than predominantly the visual.

Where To From Here?
Having trialled this programme I can see how easily it could be supported in the classroom or with support workers. It is fairly straightforward and structured so is easy to learn without lots of PD. I was having a conversation with Betsy the other day and she mentioned a couple of schools that are trying to implement it with more students. One school is a small country school of 45 student and they are doing it schoolwide. Another is an intermediate where they have implemented it in a specifically chosen classroom where all the children in the class are taught using this method. Betsy was highlighting how getting the classroom teachers on board for reinforcing the programme in their group teaching of these children is significant in seeing these children progress faster.  This is an area I would like to next explore, particularly as it is uncertain as to whether we have the funding to continue me having time out of the classroom to implement it.

The other focus I have is looking at how we can avoid having so many children in need of such a programme in the first place.
It has become evident to me that right from the early literacy learning we engage our 5 year olds in, we are unwittingly supporting and strengthening them to be using the visual sides of their brains. Most of the high frequency words we get the children to learn require that they learn it as a whole, as they are words that don't follow the typical sounds associated with each letter: said, come, look, a, here, are, the, my, for, go, to. The PM readers very early on require children to learn these words and in fact have very few words that children are able to decode using their letter/sound knowledge.
Many children are able to integrate the different strategies in learning to read, such as  using meaning, syntax as well as grapho-phonic cues. However too many of our children struggle, and have an imbalance in the strategies they use, with minimal focus on the letter/sound element. This is compounded by the fact that the vowels sounds in particular, in the Polynesian languages including Maori are so different to English.

With my new entrant children I have tried this term to be more deliberate at doing making and breaking with the magnetic letters daily. This involves using a high frequency word (generally the ones that do have the common sounds) and making new words by changing or adding  a letter
e.g. at - mat, cat, sat, fat, hat, bat, rat.
I have been surprised at how quickly they can catch on to this.
Now that the children mostly have some letter sounds they know I am going to adapt Betsy's fluency sheets of 3 letter words so that we can be practising them already. Hopefully this will help in avoiding having so many children who have big gaps in that knowledge. Another element Betsy is rigid about is not using the letter names but rather always referring to the letter by the predominant sound. I have also incorporated this into what we do.
All these components of Agility With Sound  I feel complement the Gwyneth Phillips reading programme that we know has worked successfully. I am keen to see how we can make the most of this programme and see the difference we can make with its implementation.

Here is a sample of how it all rolls.