A mini-lesson in decoding "vce" words
What's good and not-so-good about this illustration of a decoding activity?
A daily lesson in an instructional program for early decoding1 would probably last anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, and during such lessons savvy teachers would emphasize different activities (Foorman et al., 2006; Schwartz, 2024). Of course, the relative emphases would change over the course of a school year. Early lessons would likely focus on phonemic awareness and letter-sound relationships. Later lessons would focus on reading words in sequence (i.e., sentences; Carnine et al. 2022).
Following lessons focused on learning fundamentals such as letter-sound relationships, teachers (and curricula) should emphasize sequential blending, simple sounding out, and so forth. Lessons not much later in the school year2 might have miniature activities in which the teachers helped children focus on words with conditional spelling patterns such as the vowel-consonant-e pattern.
The following video shows me (yep, it’s I, John; no joke3) teaching a bit about the cvc and cvce spelling patterns in early decoding. The following ~4-minute video shows a mini-lesson on cvc and cve words.
