Cycle 12

This task introduces words that begin with a stop phoneme.

When the onset (the initial sound) in a rhyming task is a stop sound (as it is here with t), it is especially important not to pause between the onset and the rest of the word.

Since you can’t say the stop sound slowly, and you can’t pause after it, you must say it together with the sound that follows: /tăn/.

It will always sound like one blended (fast) word in this task.  There are not separate slow and fast versions here.

This is one of the ways that you will help students learn to read words that begin with stop sounds, which is a difficult skill for emerging readers to master.

Correcting the student:

• If the student pauses between /t/ and able, say: “Don’t pause between /t/ and able.  Listen: /tābʊl/.  Let’s say it together…  Now by yourself…”
• If the student skips /t/ and just says able, touch under the t, and say: “Say this sound first, and then say able, like this: /tābʊl/.  Let’s touch and say it together…  Your turn…”
• If the student only says /t/ and doesn’t add able, say: “Now say able. Listen: /tābʊl/. Let’s say it together… Now by yourself…”

This task returns to the Word Finding exercises in which instructors ask students to point out particular words from a passage they have read.  Remember that these exercises require a basic form of encoding because the student will need to hear the sounds of the word they are looking for, recall the symbols associated with those sounds, and then identify those symbols on the screen.

This task also returns to the routine of the instructor modeling how to read story text fluently.  Make sure to do so with prosody and expression, and make sure that you model touching beneath the text even when you read it the fast way.

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