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A roomful of teachers is staring at a page of alien symbols—triangles topped by circles, ovals sprouting tiny spikes, the odd stray vowel. Their challenge: Read it. With a few nudges, the message clicks into place: Breaking the alphabetic code is critical in learning to read.
The point of the workshop “Building Strong Foundations: Beginning Reading Instruction,” held at the AFT TEACH conference on Saturday—was simple: Reading is not simple at all. In the beginning, it can be an overwhelming tangle of symbols that don’t make any sense.
“Imagine how our little guys feel,” said facilitator and Toledo (Ohio) Federation of Teachers member Maria Bailey. “How do we comfort them? How do we get them to the point where they can read automatically? That’s what we want with breaking the alphabetic code. How do we get them there?
“If we don’t build a strong foundation, the entire house will fall,” Bailey said. She demonstrated with a list of words that struggling sixth-graders had attempted to read aloud, the words in one column and their guesses in another: Obvious became obbodious. Interrupted became interpreted. Stunned became standard.
“They are really just looking at those first few letters and swinging for the fences, and they’re swinging hard,” one participant said. “They’re so worried about being embarrassed.”
Teaching reading is actually rocket science
Just recognizing a word requires several skills, said facilitator Ashlie Dempsey, also a Toledo Federation of Teachers member, including phonological and phonemic awareness and print awareness. Reading comprehension is also multifaceted, drawing on knowledge of vocabulary, the topic of the text and grammar. Twist word recognition and comprehension together and you get reading. And that highlights why decoding skills must become automatic: Students need their minds free to think about the meanings of the words and how they go together. That’s almost impossible if they find it challenging to sound out the words.
Facilitators shared several strategies for teaching phonological awareness—from rhyme and alliteration to phonemic segmentation and blending—that help students identify individual sounds in words and then learn to put them together, all in service of building a strong reading foundation.
Activities that build the foundation
Participants found themselves clapping or placing their hands under their chins to count out syllables and singing songs to demonstrate rhyme. At one point, Dempsey held a picture card with a map to her forehead while others picked cards with rhyming images from their tables—images of people mid-snap or clap. The visuals, Dempsey said, may help students who need a hook for sound patterns.
They also brainstormed every word they could think of that started with an assigned letter and wrote tongue twisters, which can keep kids focused on the sounds that letters represent. For example:
- “Fish fins for fun fishy funky food.”
- “Baby brother bounced big brother’s basketball.”
Motivation matters
Another key component: stamina. One participant noted that decoding the nonsense symbols felt as exhausting as a gym workout. That’s how it feels to kids who are learning, Bailey pointed out—and stamina grows when kids read what they like. Graphic novels and comics are perfectly legitimate if they motivate reluctant readers to dive in and get the practice they need to become fluent decoders.
The takeaway
The message landed: Learning to read is tough; it starts with sounds and symbols and works its way up to comprehension. Teachers can smooth that path with careful, informed instruction—explicitly teaching the code, building sound skills daily and keeping motivation high.
[Melanie Boyer]