Seeing the wonder in the eyes of a child as they discover what you want them to know before you tell them is soul filling.
A third grade class at Holland Elementary energetically tapped their Consonant Teams Chart today for me (which they’d only been doing for about a week). As we started talking about the special column reserved for the H-Brothers (ch, ph, sh, th, wh) one of the students said, “We’ve been wondering why there are two sounds for TH.” Our lesson today was the FLoSS Rule but how could we not stop and discover the answer to this boys query.
Now TH makes two sounds and the chart has two pictures that cue those sounds – bath and them. If you put your hand of your throat you will feel that /th/ in bath is quiet. Your throat doesn’t vibrate. But, in them, the /th/ sounds makes your throat vibrate. It tickles your hand. We played with that, putting our hands on our throats, feeling for the vibrations, and listening for the sound. Excitedly one boy called out with eyes wide, “The /th/ sound in bath is the TH sound!!” It was as if he was a great explorer discovering uncharted territory. Nobody had directly taught him the bit of knowledge he just unearthed.
Of course, a hallmark of the Spelling to Read Classroom program created by Brain Friendly Reading is direct, explicit instruction. I was going to tell the students what the two sounds were. We were going to tap that square on their chart multiple times. But, before we did that, we listened. We felt it in our mouths and on our tongues. And, they looked carefully at my mouth to see how to put their tongues between their teeth. They noticed that my mouth didn’t change between the two sounds. The only thing that changed was the vibrating in my throat. They practiced going back and forth between the two sounds themselves. All of that experiential learning solidifies their knowing of the two sounds of TH. While some discovered it before being told, others got it only after all the practice and tapping. And, many will need to practice making the shape with their mouth several times, tapping the chart dozens of times, and finding the sound in words when arm tapping and writing over and over before they “know” it – before it is stored in long-term memory.
Repetition is the key. Repetition with variety is the secret sauce. Watching a child discover something previously unknown is dessert for the teacher.
