Teaching phonics in accordance with Breaking the “Sound” Barrier (BSB) allows students to grasp a personal understanding of fluency related to a few key components of research, study and instruction. BSB establishes its foundations on the following goals:
- Develop a meaningful set of keywords for each phonic sound
- Develop an overall theme using the key words.
- Make the key words memorable to the students by having them draw colorful pictures of the key words.
- Reinforce the overall theme while students are drawing to further develop memory links.
- Encourage students to overlearn the key words in sections by sending them to stations around the classroom using all of their senses.
- Have students write or say the key words over and over at the stations even if they seem to remember them the first time through.
- Recognize that after students master the key words with 100% accuracy, they transfer the word sounds to individual phonics sounds.
- Send them to the same multisensory stations. Students think of the word for the phonic letter and then only say the sound.
- Continue the stations until the sounds have been overlearned with 100% accuracy.
- Teach students to spell only what they can read. Now is the time to have students spell all of the sounds that they have learned to read.
Sandra Martin earned a Bachelor of Science in Education degree from Bloomsburg University, in Bloomsburg, PA, and a Master of Education degree in learning disabilities from Shippensburg University, in Shippensburg, PA. Sandra served as an adjunct professor at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, PA, where she taught student teachers to use multisensory and universal teaching techniques to meet the needs of all learners.