Helping Children To Read with Trainertext Visual Phonics
Does your child guess words when reading?
If you have a guesser on your hands, you probably know it. Your child takes wild stabs at words based on the first letter. Or maybe fairly decent guesses based on context clues – a sort of “fill in the blank if I don’t know the word” approach. Or they confuse similar common words, like of, and, for, from, etc.
It can be frustrating, to say the least! (For everybody.)
What’s so bad about guessing?
At its core, guessing is a way to compensate for a weak phonetic foundation. It masks a hole underneath that can only grow over time as children progress to higher levels of education.
But why do some children seem to learn to read through memorizing whole words and guessing the rest, while others (even siblings in the same family) can sound out words easily?
Well, this is the common story… meet Lizzie.
Lizzie was always a bright little girl, reaching milestones right on schedule and strong in the imagination department! She was a keen artist and visual learner in the preschool years. When she turned 5, she started to pick up those early reader books right away… even to the point of being able to quote them verbatim after only a few reads. She sailed through the first year of school.
But partway through the second, her reading ability seemed to falter. It’s like there were too many words to memorize and she couldn’t hold them all in her brain. She would interchange for/from/of or saw/was. Her eyes would dart over the page, looking for picture clues to help figure out the next word. She would easily read a long, distinctive word like “elephant”, but trip over “the”.
Her parents received the wake up call when she failed her phonics assessment at age 7. Because Lizzie had coped so long using her visual memory, she had masked her inability to decode new words. It wasn’t for lack of intelligence, or lack of trying… ..she just hadn’t been taught phonics in a way her brain wanted to learn.
Try some training wheels: trainertext visual phonics (TVP)
About 1 in 5 children are like Lizzie. Very bright… but so highly visual that they bypass phonics and go straight to memorizing whole words by sight. Unfortunately, this isn’t a sustainable strategy for English. The visual memory wasn’t designed to hold half a million words (which are, after all, just visually uninteresting squiggly black lines!)
The solution for these children is quite simple: you have to teach their brains how to decode words in a way that matches their learning style. A new kid on the education block is finally making this a pain-free process for parents and teachers. It’s called Trainertext visual phonics (TVP). And everything you need to get started is available for you free of cost – truly!
Since reading is a subconscious skill like riding a bike, rather than a conscious rules-based process like building an IKEA table, TVP uses a training wheels approach. The training wheels are its Trainertext images, a set of 45 memorable (even hilarious!) visual characters that represent each of the sounds in the English language. When floated above the letters in a word, they help a child sound out even the most irregular word. (You can print them out free here, or purchase them pre-printed here.)
The images keep the process fun and engaging with their comical bent. And the TVP methodology as a whole is packed with a games, short lesson chunks good for attention-poor schoolchildren, and real books to read from day 1. An independent randomized control trial of TVP showed that after around 120 lessons, children who had been 2 years behind we now on average at the national standard.
The genius of the visual phonics method really is simple. It takes what science tells us works best (reading by decoding phonetically) and uses the natural strengths of the child’s brain to make learning to read in that way easy.
You can now try TVP yourself using the free resources at the TVP website – Helping Children to Read. Free printables, a TVP manual, workbooks and flashcards are all available to you (did we mention it’s all free?!) to help your beginner or struggler. And if you want more information on why YOUR child is struggling, we’d recommend The 9 Main Causes of Reading Difficulty, our Amazon bestseller that can take you through a baseline assessment to help pinpoint what is going wrong for your child, and how to fix it.
** This is a guest post **
Ah this looks fun. I am a great fan of phonics and loved to teach this as an early years teacher. I think the visual phonics is a great way to teach the sounds of the alphabet and the illustrations are super cute. Angela – The Inspiration Edit.
Learning should be fun, and these certainly look like great fun, I will have to keep these in mind when my granddaughter is a lttle older x
Phonics is the best way to learn to read. It helps children break down and decode the words. This visual guide looks fun too
We know a girl like Lizzie. Super impressed that she was reading books at such a young age however she was memorising the stories and words. I’m slower at reading but thankfully sounding out the words and piecing them together is helping me learn.
I picked up reading rather quickly when I was a child but I know that my brother struggled. No doubt, my Mum would have been so grateful to have found your post at the time – bet it will be really helpful to lots of parents.
This is certainly a great way to teach children to read and the cards look fun too almost like a game making learning that much more fun.
This sounds a great way to teach reading, it makes it more of a game than learning.
This looks like a fun way to reach children phonics.
This is fascinating. I had no idea some children could end up memorising words instead of reading them. My little one is too young now, but will pin this for later. Xx
What a fantastic way to learn. phonetics we such a big part of being taught to read when I was a kid as well!
We’re not at this stage yet with Erin but I’ll remember these for when we are. I like the pictures!
I wish I had this when my kids were little. It would have made learning to read so much more fun and so much more engaging, it’s such brilliant idea!
This sounds amazing! My nephew is ahead in his reading so I’m sure he’s having to guess a lot!
This looks like a great resource for little ones learning to read – I catch my daughter guessing quite a fair bit and you’re right it’s a bad habit!!
My nephew went thru a phase of guessing as opposed to sounding the words out and it’s taken a while but he finally gets it.
This looks like a fun way to teach reading. My youngest starts school in August so will bookmark this in case he needs extra help.
I often wonder if my Leo is guessing some of the time and he definitely uses pictures to help. 5)8/ sounds like a great resource to help kids really learn their phonics xz
This looks really good as a tool to help them. I’m interested to see how my son takes to all of it when he starts school in September.
This is a great idea, anyway to help them learn and be able to withhold that information and learning properly is super important
Such a great and very informative post. Helping our kids to read is so important what more if we had this TVP. Teaching them can be easier now.
Wow! I love it. Like your first bike ride, Trainertext Visual Phonics will be your training wheels. Great.
This is an amazing post! So practical and useful for all families out there. We haven’t come to the point of reading yet, but I ma definitely save this one for the future.
This looks like a great way to learn, Sebby is struggling with his reading