Reading with TLC

Lively Letters: Aligned with the Research
“Lively Letters” is a program that trains specific skill areas identified in the research as critical to the development of reading. These include letter sound associations, orthographic awareness, rapid naming of sounds, phonemic awareness, and phonetic decoding / encoding of words (sounding out words for reading and spelling).

Letter Sound Associations
The letters are directly embedded into pictures of lively characters that show what the mouth is doing when the sound is produced. An engaging story and hand cue help the student to elicit the sound quickly. The forty-four sounds of the language are introduced, in order of the level of difficulty, with the sounds presented initially in isolation so students can perceive their important features. The consonants are introduced in cognate pairs (example: the voiced or “noisy” /b/ with the voiceless or “quiet” /p/). The rest of the consonants are grouped according to shared features (example: the /m/, /n/, and /ng/ are introduced as a group). The vowels, also drawn as characters with specific mouth shape cues, have strong mnemonic stories and hand cues that make distinguishing between and remembering vowel sounds an easier task. For each of the letter sounds taught, as suggested by the research, the most regular and/or frequent sound associated with the letter is taught initially to avoid confusion.

Rapid Naming of Sounds
As the letter sounds are introduced they are drilled in isolation, and then utilized in phonemic awareness, decoding, and encoding exercises. By learning to classify the sounds according to their oral kinesthetic features, students become more aware of the distinctive features of the sounds, and are better able to perceive the individual sounds in the phonemic awareness and phonics activities. The pictures, story cues, hand cues, and the oral kinesthetic cues combine to form a powerful, self-prompting system facilitating rapid, automatic naming of the letter sounds.

Orthographic Awareness
The visual features of the letters (especially similar looking letters, such as “b” and “d”) are highlighted in the pictures and in the mnemonic stories to eliminate visual confusion. Orthographic awareness is developed as students create strong images of particular letter sequences that form digraphs (two letters producing one sound, such as “th”). The letter characters retain their personalities and intermingle in meaningful ways with other letters to form digraphs. The student is able to recall the sounds from the associated stories. (An example would be the “tongue-biting sound,” where “t” sticks his tongue out, bites it, and blows on it when he comes in front of poor “h,” who is shivering from the cold air.) The manipulative tracking activities also focus the student’s attention on the sequence of letters in words, further training orthographic awareness.

Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness skills are dramatically developed through sound blending, segmentation, and manipulation activities. Research has indicated that students develop stronger skills when programs include training of letter sounds and the use of letters in the phonemic awareness activities. For this reason, the letter sounds are taught systematically, and letter picture cards, which visually help elicit quick sound production, are used initially in the phonemic awareness activities. By using the “Lively Letters” cards in these tracking activities, students can concentrate on the actual phonemic awareness practice without straining to recall the letter sounds. Students then quickly progress to the use of plain letters in the phonemic awareness drills.

Decoding and Encoding: Merging Phonemic Awareness and Phonics
As students learn more letter sounds, they are introduced to the manipulative tracking activities that develop phonemic awareness, decoding, and encoding skills. After students have mastered the ability to blend simple words for reading and segment simple words for spelling, they progress to working with longer, more complex words. The “Lively Letters” program trains the students in the use of clinically proven strategies for effectively sounding out words with consonant blends and multisyllable words.

Although the Lively Letters program focuses heavily on the single word level, the manual and training materials present effective techniques on progressing to the sentence and text level.

After having mastered phonetic reading and spelling with the use of the “Lively Letters” materials and techniques, students progress to the Sight Words You Can See program, which trains acquisition of phonetically irregular sight words.

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