3. How to Teach Schwa

In this section we are going to walk you through the steps for teaching schwa to your students:

• 3.1 Prepare for Instruction — Get ready and gather the materials you need.
• 3.2 Teaching Strategies for Schwa — Provide direct instruction for reading and spelling.
• 3.3 Explicitly Teach the Skill — See how to introduce the new information to students.

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 or direct instruction. Read more about structured literacy here.

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

When we first introduce schwa, we will change our daily routine slightly. We first focus on reading words with schwa, because it's significantly easier than spelling with schwa. Once your students have had a lot of practice reading words with schwa, they'll be better able to identify where the schwa sound is in a word, which can help with spelling.

Your lesson will start with a quick phonemic awareness activity, what we call a Listening Game. For schwa, you could practice segmenting spoken words into syllables and identifying the vowel sound in each syllable.

In the Warm Up you'll use flash cards that students need extra practice with, such as previously taught vowel sounds and syllable types.

New/Review is where you will introduce schwa and the "Call the Dog" strategy. This strategy can become your listening game for future lessons once students are familiar with it.

You won't have Dictation practice at first for schwa. Instead, you'll want to spend a lot of time reading words with schwa before we ask students to spell them. 

The bulk of your lesson will be having students practice Reading with Fluency. You'll start with lots of individual words containing schwa. After they've found success with that, you'll add phrases and sentences.