Tonight we opened the magnetic board that has been sitting in the little kit we store all of our reading things in. My daughter has been grabbing this kit most days after school, even when we don’t have time to work on reading together.  She uses it to play school and practice writing her letters on the mini-whiteboard because it’s just oh-so-fun. I love it when she does this. These magnetic boards are a staple in structured literacy programs. They allow the individual phonemes to become sort of 3-D for a while. This seems to really support the dyslexic mind in making the connection between the sounds they form with their mouths, the sounds they hear with their ears, and the symbols they see on a page. That’s a lot to keep track of! This is why the magnetic tiles partnered with the letter keywords  and coinciding pictures on hand to reference whenever needed can be beautiful supports to this process.

My daughter sat up a little straighter when she saw the magnetic board come out because I’ve been telling her that when she seemed ready for it, we will start to use it. She knew she was ready for it.

I had worked a long day and was wondering what I was going to be able to find in the fridge for dinner, so I knew I  only had 10-15 minutes of energy to put towards this. But I was excited to see if she could transfer what we had been working on with sticky notes to the magnetic tiles.

I started with the word rob. I used the first sentence I could think of as a quick example of what the word rob meant. If you haven’t heard of Isabel Beck and her work around vocabulary instruction, I highly recommend you check it out. In a nutshell, vocabulary needs to be taught intentionally and thoroughly, by choosing to focus on words that are highly prevalent in both oral language and written language, as well as giving students multiple exposures to internalizing the meaning and practicing the use of those high-traffic words. For a more thorough breakdown of strategies for rolling out this kind of intentional vocabulary building in your home, check out Redwood Literacy’s blog post about 7 tips for helping expand your child’s vocabulary. I took this quick opportunity to make sure my daughter knew the meaning of the word rob and then moved on to break it up into its individual sounds, using my fingers to support me.

/r/-/o/-/b/ I said aloud, tapping out the sounds on my fingers. I started with pressing my thumb and pointer finger together for /r/, then moving to my middle finger for /o/, and ring finger for /b/. 

How many sounds in the word rob?

That’s right! Three.

Let’s start with the first sound. What letter makes the sound /r/?

Can you find it on our brand new magnetic board?

At first, she wasn’t sure where to look. I showed her how to scan the rows of magnetic letters with her fingers, to look for the right symbol to match the sound she was saying out loud. It took several tries, but she finally found the r and picked it up, placing it at the bottom of the board.

/r/, she said out loud.

We proceeded through several words, mostly with me showing her how to do it. She got a few letters on her own though, and I could see it slowly clicking in her beautiful brain! She was grasping how to match the sounds she was saying and hearing to the symbols she saw drawn on these exciting magnetic tiles.

After we had worked through maybe 8 words, breaking them into individual sounds before trying to build them with tiles on the board, we put the tiles back into alphabetical order together.

It felt like a big step. From guessing the sounds in words to tapping those sounds out on our fingers, to writing them on sticky notes, and now to finding them on tiles and building words.

I am so proud of her.