

Last, I just needed create all the components of my sound wall. It became so clear to me that sound walls are a powerful tool to help students learn to read and write! Next, I focused on how I would use a sound wall in my classroom and made a plan for introducing it to my students. A sound wall is a tool that allows for this valuable, explicit phonics instruction.
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Students need direct and explicit instruction on how to read, write, and spell. This is because our brains are hardwired for oral language, but not for reading and writing. Kids learn to talk well before they learn to read or write. They allow for explicit instruction of phonemes.Putting the word knee under K is confusing to them! A sound wall categorizes words by their sounds which makes much more sense to the learner! But that doesn’t make sense to someone who is just learning to spell! A student looking for the word phone will not naturally look to P. A traditional A-Z word wall categorizes words by their first letter. Sound walls approach things from the student’s point of view.This is why explicitly teaching phonemes is necessary before you teach sound-letter correspondence. Sound walls are based on the science of reading! Research finds that readers make the connection between print patterns and phonological information that is already stored in the brain in order to then make meaning of the word they’re reading ( Moats, 2010).The more I read and learned about sound walls, the more they made sense to me! Here are a few of the main benefits I see to using a sound wall in the classroom: Why I Tore Down My Word Wall and Put Up a Sound Wall Take a look at this post for more information about how sound walls are organized. But UNLIKE a traditional A-Z word wall (where words are grouped by their beginning letter), words on a sound wall are grouped by their sounds.Īnother difference is that consonants and vowels are organized separately and in different ways.Ī consonant sound wall is organized by the manner of articulation (how the sound is being formed) and the place of articulation (wherein the mouth a sound is occurring). Like a word wall, a sound wall is a place for students to reference when they are spelling and reading words. What is a Sound Wall?Ī sound wall is a way to organize and display the different sounds (or phonemes) we hear in speech. I tore down my word wall and replaced it with a sound wall. I followed this practice and had a word wall for years and years and years. You introduce a few new words, practice the new words for a week or so, and then slap those puppies up on the word wall! The expectation is that your students will reference them for the remainder of the school year In theory, word walls sound very effective.
