3. How to Teach Glued Sounds for Reading and Spelling

In this section we will walk you through steps for teaching ‘-am’, ‘-an’, ‘-all’ and the '-ng' and '-nk' patterns to your students.

• 3.1 Prepare for Instruction — Word lists and teaching strategy demonstrations
• 3.2 Explicitly Teach the Skill — Example lessons on how to teach glued sounds

At Reading Universe we use an evidence-based approach popularly known as structured literacy. Structured literacy is a way of organizing and delivering reading instruction to ensure students get all the skills they need in an efficient timeframe — and without any gaps. With this approach, teachers use explicit and direct instruction. Read more about structured literacy here.

We recommend a daily phonics lesson routine that looks something like this:

Your lesson will start with a quick phonemic awareness activity, what we call a Listening Game. For glued sounds, you could ask your students to blend sounds to say a word. Here's an example you might try. Say,

The sounds are /h/, /all/. What is the word? [hall]

In the Warm Up you'll use flash cards to review the sounds your students already know. For example, you will want to review short vowel sounds as well as any consonants that might be used during dictation. Watch these demos to see how we recommend introducing the glued sounds flash cards.

New/Review is where you will introduce glued sounds.

During Dictation, students will practice spelling words with the glued sounds that they just learned. 

All of this leads up to the last portion of the lesson, in which students practice putting all the skills together for Reading with Fluency.