You would be hard pressed to find a teacher who hasn’t had to cater for a range of reading and spelling ability in their classroom. Why, then, do so few commercial programs provide guidance on how to extend the student performing at a level significantly above that of peers?
Extension should not be simply equated with moving more quickly through a phonics scope and sequence. In this blog, I’ll give you some practical suggestions as to how you can add depth and breadth to your existing program so that even your most gifted students experience meaningful challenges.
To paraphrase Sir Jim Rose, phonics instruction is necessary but not sufficient for a student to learn to read and spell. As a student’s phonics skills increase, the teacher can shift the emphasis of instruction to more advanced components of reading and spelling other than letter-sound correspondence. This shift will need to happen relatively early for an advanced reader / speller. Of course, that doesn’t mean that phonics instruction stops, but rather less time is devoted to it. In reading, this extra time should be devoted to strategies required to decode multisyllabic words, vocabulary development, comprehension, fluency and expression. In spelling, more emphasis will need to be given to semantic knowledge and etymology, syntax and morphology.
Don’t assume that strong readers are also strong spellers. Reading relies on recognition—you can figure out words even if you don’t know every sound. Spelling, on the other hand, is harder because it requires production—every letter must be correct. That’s why being a great reader doesn’t always mean being a great speller.
You can easily pass our reading test, but spell like this and you’d fail!
A student in need of extension can often work on the same letter-sound correspondences as peers, but with longer words made from those correspondences. With just the group of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences ‘s, m, c, t, g, p, a and o’, you can give the student words to read and spell such as ‘compost’ or ‘mascot’. To achieve this extension, letters taught in one-to-one letter-sound correspondences may be repeated in a word, however the words should not contain two letters-one sound correspondences, such as double consonants or vowel teams, until these concepts have been explicitly taught.
All sounds have been taught – go for it!
Not so fast! We haven’t learned ‘oa’ yet!Phonics Hero’s lessons allow you to toggle between core (easier words) and extend (harder words) in just one click! With 3,500 core words and 2,500 extension words, you’ve got every word you need to teach the mainstream class and extend those who need a challenge. Sign up and get your first 30 days on us!
I also highly recommend Alison Clarke’s Spelfabet lists of words, with words sorted by phoneme or grapheme. You can choose words from these lists that use only the letter-sound correspondences you have taught.
The advanced student should not have to read/spell the words peers are learning if mastery has already been demonstrated. Having to do so is unbelievably boring, time-consuming and frustrating and may result in behaviour issues.
Too easy! Bored, bored, bored!
The initial focus of synthetic phonics programs is identification of phonemes in words. Advanced learners can be taught to use other levels of phonological awareness, such as syllable awareness and phoneme manipulation, to enhance their reading and spelling accuracy.
Often, words longer than CVCC or CCVC contain more than one syllable so, early on, you will need to explicitly teach the advanced student the skill of syllabification. For spelling, I teach students to sing the word and write down what is sung, syllable by syllable e.g. ‘mas-cot’. For reading, you will need to teach the 6 syllable types, shown in the chart below.
Your guide to cracking the syllable code!Phoneme manipulation is an advanced phonological awareness skill. Students can delete, add or substitute phonemes in order to create new words. This skill can help the advanced student to do what we refer to as ‘spelling by analogy’ when the spelling of a word is not known. If I know how to spell ‘hand’ then I should be able to spell ‘strand’. I delete the /h/ and substitute the three sounds /s/, /t/ and /r/.
At the very least, use of this skill should enable the student to achieve a phonetic representation of a word. Of course, ‘planned’ is spelled differently and advanced students can be taught grammar and spelling rules that will explain the reasons for this.
If an advanced student needs to work on letter-correspondences other than the common ones currently being taught to peers, you can teach a less common representation of one of the letters or sounds. Here is one example. The letter ‘s’ as a representation of the sound /s/ is taught in the first lesson of most synthetic phonics programs. If I have an advanced student who has already mastered the first group of letter-sound correspondences, I might teach the fact that the letter ‘s’ can also represent the sound /z/ in some plurals (e.g. ‘tags’) and singular verbs (e.g. ‘sags’) because the ‘s’ follows a voiced consonant, /g/. In the next few groups of letter- sound correspondences typically taught, the ‘s’ represents /z/ after the voiced consonants /d/, /n/, /b/ and /r/. Advanced learners will benefit from knowing the difference between voiced and unvoiced sounds.
One word; many opportunities for extension.The English code represents sound and meaning, so English spelling integrates phonetic and morphemic patterns to produce meaning. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. Every word is made up of one or more morphemes – ‘free’ morphemes that make sense in isolation (such as ‘zip’) and ‘bound’ morphemes that cannot stand in isolation (usually affixes such as ‘-s’, ‘-ed’ and ‘un-‘). There are sometimes spelling rules about the combining of morphemes. Advanced readers and spellers will benefit from explicit instruction in morphemes from Lesson 1 on. We’ve already covered teaching the plural suffix ‘s’, for example.
Be sure not to introduce an affix unless the component grapheme-phoneme correspondences have been taught. The meaning of the affix should be explicitly taught so that it can be recognised in many words.
Word-building activities, joining morphemes, should be a part of the weekly routine for the advanced student. The student might also be taught the syntax changes made, e.g. ‘quick’ is an adjective, ‘quickly’ is a verb. Teaching the most common affixes will enable the advanced student to write more interesting sentences, decode more accurately and better comprehend what is read.
You can see a list of the most common affixes here.
To make meaning of the code, and to achieve accuracy quickly, students must be taught spelling rules. For example, there are spelling rules about doubling some consonants before adding ‘-ing’.
Double the consonant before -ing.Accuracy cannot be expected unless these rules are explicitly taught. You will have to teach the double consonants and /ng/ plus the spelling rules that apply to the addition of ‘-ing’ to form the present tense form of a verb. If you’re not confident that you know the spelling rules yourself, ‘The Spelling Rulebook’ published by SEN Books is my go-to resource.
Some words are temporarily tricky, others permanently irregular. If the advanced student already knows how to read and spell most of the tricky words their peers are currently being taught, you can teach other tricky words. It’s perfectly appropriate to teach the tricky words presented in Phonics Hero at the learning pace of a specific student because there is no set sequence of tricky words common to all synthetic phonics programs. If you need to identify more tricky words to teach, head to the University of Florida Literacy Institute website and click on ‘Irregular Words’ to see strategies, slides and flashcards.
If an unusual spelling reflects a word’s origins in place or time, teach your advanced student the etymology. For example, in words such as ‘love’, the /u/ sound is spelled with an ‘o’ because the letter formation for the letter ‘o’ was quicker and easier than that for the letter ‘u’ for the monks of medieval times who had to copy out texts for hours every day. If we don’t teach students why words are written as they are, they may think that spelling is randomly determined. Many students will find the etymology of words as fascinating as we do!
That was one heartbroken monk!
Advanced students will benefit from vocabulary extension because it facilitates the comprehension of the more advanced text they are capable of decoding. Even in Lesson 1 of your phonics instruction, you can ask advanced students to read and spell words that may not be complex phonically but are not typically in the vocabulary of a novice reader e.g. words such as ‘stomp’, ‘pact’ or ‘scam’. You may like to teach students to make semantic webs. For example, when teaching the class ‘bank’, you could teach advanced students these words, which still use a one-to-one correspondence:
A semantic map.Students should be asked to draw a simple image that represents the word then write a sentence using the word correctly underneath the image. This work can become part of a personalised dictionary. When students are not able to read a regular dictionary, they can ask a digital assistant like Siri for a definition.
Homonyms (Same spelling, totally different meanings!) and homophones (same sounds, different spelling and meaning) may be a source of confusion for a novice reader/speller but provide a welcome challenge for the advanced student. Teach advanced students these as they appear in the teaching sequence. Even in the first few levels of synthetic phonics programs there are homonyms for words such as ‘tap’, and ‘bat’. Sometimes the variations in meaning are linked to syntax (grammatical use) e.g.:
A homonym; same spelling, different meaning!As suggested earlier, you can teach advanced students parts of speech. Students can illustrate the different meanings of a word and write sentences using them. Homophones become more common when vowel teams are introduced e.g. ‘meat’ and ‘meet’. I like to teach students some of my memory joggers for discriminating between the two (e.g. the ‘meat’ you ‘eat’) and encourage them to develop their own mnemonics.
Some longer words will be compound words so you will need to teach students how two words can be combined to create new meaning in a compound word (semantic knowledge) e.g. you can teach ‘itself’ or ‘frogman’ within the first few lessons of phonics instruction. Make sure to select words that contain only taught GPCs.
Teacher Tip: Word building with morphemes will significantly develop vocabulary!
The Phonics Hero No-Prep Phonics Lessons offer several features for extending students.
In a blending activity, the teacher or student can choose to read ‘Extend’ words. These may be multisyllabic words, compound words, or words containing affixes.
An advanced reader will need limited reading support so sound buttons can be removed.
In sentence reading, the bolding of tricky words can be removed so that children have to recognise which is a tricky word.
Likewise, in segmenting and spelling activities, ‘Extend’ words can also be selected and support removed.
In sentence writing, the teacher or student can select ‘Independent’ so that the student hears the full sentence and is not provided with any supports (such as dashes to indicate the number of words in the sentence).
You might like to see these extension features in action in this 2-minute video’ Differentiating Your Phonics Lesson’:
The Phonics Hero games can be easily used to extend students. The assessment resources allow the teacher to determine exactly what each student has or has not mastered and place the student according to knowledge and skill level. There is no need for an advanced student to start at the level of peers.
You can value-add to any synthetic phonics program, extending students with activities like these:
The Phonics Lessons also have word sorts.
Extension is so important to meeting the learning needs of able children and is robustly proven in research to lead to higher achievement and better wellbeing. These students typically learn at a quicker pace than peers but need more than just an increased pace of instruction – they need increased breadth and depth of the instruction and learning material. With one or more of these strategies in your teaching toolbox, you’ll be better equipped to provide advanced learners with the necessary challenge to grow their reading and spelling knowledge.
