Talk About Word Meanings During Phonics

Effective phonics teaching always includes talking about a word’s meaning right alongside learning about its letters and sounds, so that children know what the letters and sounds represent.

Why is this important? When we teach decoding, it is easy to focus solely on the letters and sounds to read words. But part of our explicit teaching should include word meaning. Without meaning, the word sloth is just the sounds /s/, /l/, /ŏ/, and /th/. Children need to learn it is a small, slow mammal that lives in trees. Integrating vocabulary throughout phonics instruction is especially important for English learners.

Without meaning, the word sloth is just the sounds /s/, /l/, /ŏ/, and /th/. Children need to learn it is a small, slow mammal that lives in trees.

As you watch, think about these questions:

• How does Ms. Knowles help her students learn the meaning of the example word hatch?
• How is this lesson similar or different from your approach during phonics lessons?

How to Talk About  Word Meaning

When you teach a new phonics pattern, you’ll be introducing lots of new words with that pattern. Here are two ways you can briefly share their meanings with your students:

1. Model Words with Sentences
2. Play the Riddle Game

1. Model Words with Sentences 

Model the use of two or three words from the lesson in sentences. 

Here is an example with the word match. Match is a perfect word to practice with because it has multiple meanings. 

After students read the word match, say, 

Your socks do not match today. One is blue and the other is yellow!

I will strike a match to start the campfire.

Match. Read the word?

And then students again read the word match.

Plan to model sentences for two or three new or multiple meaning words during the lesson. 

2. Play the Riddle Game

With this strategy, you’ll use simple, puzzle-like questions that prompt students to think about word meaning in order to figure out the correct answer.

Here’s how it works. Your students should have a list of words from their phonics lesson in front of them … on slips of paper or notecards. If you’re teaching the ‘ai’ vowel team, your list might include tail, rain, aim, paid, and waist. You would say,

Here's an example with tail.

Say,

I'm thinking of a word that is a dog's body part. It moves whenever the dog is happy. What is it? 

Students will know the word but need to read it to find it among all the words on their desk. Then they'll hold it up. 

TAIL!

Do this for several of the words. Make sure the students say the word as they read it. (You can double the instruction process by asking students to write the words themselves from dictation, which will provide good spelling practice.)

The object of the Riddle Game is not for the students to guess the right word but to locate the answer among the group of words and read it! We want them to associate the visual of the word with its meaning..

On the next page you'll dig deeper into learning how to talk about word meaning by applying one of the above strategies to a phonics lesson plan.