Without the foundational tools of word recognition, students will not be successful readers. For our littlest cardinals, that begins with a sound wall.
So, what is a sound wall? It is an interactive visual aid to support the science of reading. It is used in the classroom to display speech sounds. In the English language, we have 26 letters, but 44 individual sounds. Articulation features help students distinguish between similar sounds and similar graphemes.
A traditional word wall displays high frequency words by their first letter. Teachers direct students to the word wall to find words they want to spell. The problem with this, is a student may look for the word “know” on the word wall but not know where to look, because “know” doesn’t begin with the /k/ sound. Students learn how to talk (speech sounds) before learning how to read and write. A sound wall makes a lot more sense, because it starts with the SOUND instead of with print. They can break the word apart to decode and spell new words.
The grapheme is the representation of the phoneme and that several phonemes can be represented by several different graphemes. That is why it is important to have the different types of graphemes. Which is what makes it different than a word wall. A word wall is based on an initial sound and sound walls help students understand which spelling pattern to use.
In both examples, the students are leading the review of previously taught sounds. They say the key icon, for example “fish”, the grapheme “F” and the phoneme “/f/”. On the right, you can see Ms. Taylor has some of the sounds “locked” because those graphemes have not been introduced yet.