OnTrack Reading

After surveying the Extended Ayres list in the 5th Edition of The Writing Road to Reading, I developed an order of presentation of the phonograms that resulted in 56 initial phonograms needing to be taught before beginning dictation of the words from the Ayres list, compared to Spalding’s original 54 phonograms. Here is a PDF file that with the complete listing of phonograms that would need to be taught.

Download the Revised List of Phonograms

This page of the Guide instructs you on how to present the new, or changed, phonograms. I’m assuming that you will read Spalding’s instructions and follow her advice closely, making only those modifications suggested here. Otherwise, you should use her method exactly as she states in The Writing Road to Reading.

New or Changed Sounds for Existing Phonograms

The downloaded list, Teaching the Revised List of 84 Phonograms, has all of the new phonograms listed in bold print. In addition, changes to Spalding’s original 70 phonograms are bolded. These changes are easy to make. All you do is tell your child that, for example, the phonogram er is /er/err/, instead of telling him that it is /er/.

Similarly, where a sound has changed, such as the phonogram ui becoming the /oo/ sound, just call it /oo/ now.

Introducing New Phonograms

The new phonograms are all listed in bold type down the first column. Just present each in the same way Spalding instructs you to present any phonogram.

Ending Phonograms and Markers

Spalding presented pairs or phonograms standing for the same sound one after the other, so that oi follows oy and au follows aw, for example. She then instructs you to tell the student when a phonogram is “never used at the end of a word.”

However, because over half of the newly-introduced phonograms almost always represent ending sounds, it makes more sense to instead tell a child when a phonogram is almost always used at the end of a word, or chunk within a word. Thus, tell your child that the phonogram aw is usually used as an ending phonogram. Then, when introducing the new phonograms such as le, se and ce, also refer to these as “ending phonograms.” It is still all right to mention that a phonogram like au is never used at the end of a word, but the new emphasis should be on which ones usually occur at the end of a word, or chunk within a word as with “saw-ing” for example.

As for markers, this is a concept utilized in the OnTrack Reading multisyllable curriculum. If you decide to incorporate the multisyllable method described starting at Multisyllable Decoding-1 then just tell your child that the phonograms x, ck, dge and tch are markers when you teach them initially. Later you will explain what is meant by the word marker when you encounter words using those phonograms while dictating the Ayres list.

Introducing the Split Vowel Concept

The word time is the first word encountered in the Ayres list where using the OnTrack Reading curriculum approach, the vowel spelling is the phonogram ie, but it is explained to your child as a split vowel, and referred to as “i-e” or “i-dash-e” in words. When introducing this concept, just tell your child that the man who designed the first widely-used dictionary liked to see e’s at the end of words. You can point out all of the ending digraphs he’s already learned to make this point. In addition, you might consider having your child write the word “tie” and underline the phonogram ie just before he adds “time” to his notebook.

Then, just point out that when the phonogram ie is used in a word with another sound ending the word, the phonogram ie is split into o-e and the last sound is “tucked in” between the i and the e (right where the dash is.)

Also, add that the resulting i-e phonogram always is the sound /ie/, and as words with a-e, e-e, o-e and u-e occur in the Ayres list, again note that these always sound like the letter name of the first letter. Words like come and have are coded differently. They are not coded as o-e or a-e words.

Extending the List of Phonograms Beyond 84

One advantage, and it’s a huge one, of dropping the five rules of final e concept from the Spalding Method is that it drastically simplifies the process of marking words up in the notebook. Numbers are now used only for designating a second, third or fourth sound of a phonogram. Similarly, double-underlining is used only to indicate an unusual spelling in a word like two or busy, where the w and u are underlined respectively, with nothing written under the w in two, and i written under the u in busy to represent it’s unusual pronunciation.

With this much cleaner marking system, it becomes trivial to add new phonograms to the marking scheme. When walk, talk and chalk are encountered together in the Ayres list, just underline the lk in each and refer to it as a spelling of the /c/ sound that only occurs in a few words. When your child later encounters the word yolk in a story, this information will enable him to make sense of the word.

My rule of thumb regarding whether or not to treat a spelling as a phonogram (by underlining it as such) or as an unusual spelling of a sound (by double-underlining it) is whether or not I’ve encountered it at least three times in root words. Thus, mb becomes a phonogram (thumb, numb, crumb, lamb and several more) whereas the w’s in sword and answer gets double-underlined until I find another root word with sw representing the /s/ sound. And even then it had better be a fairly common word.

The PDF file on this page lists an additional fourteen phonograms which are to be “discovered” during dictation, as opposed to taught in advance of dictation, bringing the total to 98. That list is not necessarily complete, so the total number of accepted phonograms under this revised methodology is probably slightly over 100. The teaching load, however, remains nearly the same as under the original Spalding Method.

The next page of this Guide will cover integrating the multisyllable method in the OnTrack Reading Phonics Curriculum with the Spalding Method. I highly recommend that you take that step also, as the children I work with really take naturally to the method I’ve used for the past several years. You can see their confidence grow as they finally realize that multisyllable words can actually be figured out by looking at all of the sounds while going left to right through the word in an organized manner.

Next: Multisyllable Treatment, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page.