5 Activities to Support Student Growth on Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF)
Do you have students who are below the benchmark in nonsense word reading or nonsense word fluency?
This is a common place for K-2 students to get stuck. It’s the space between sounding out words and reading words automatically without sounding them out.
Getting unstuck requires that students have two things: letter sound knowledge and the ability to blend sounds to read the word.
Today, I want to share with you five instructional routines for improving these essential early literacy skills and getting your students to benchmark.
Letter sound practice
For letter sound practice, prioritize the letters students are not automatic in. Meaning, sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t. This is where we target things like b/d reversal and vowel sound confusion. Two practices I use daily for my students who struggle with NWF are the visual and auditory drill. For the visual drill, display a letter, and ask the student to say the sound. Focus on detail by bringing students’ attention to articulation. Ensure that the student is pronouncing voiced and unvoiced sounds accurately. For example, if the letter is T, and the student is saying TUH, correct the student by modeling how the sound for T is unvoiced, meaning we don’t use our vocal cords to produce the sound. For the auditory drill, you say the sound for the letter, and the students write the letter that represents that sound. For example, if you say “/s/”, the student writes the letter S. These two practices are supported by research and help to improve letter sound correspondence knowledge.
Successive Blending
Sucessive blending helps students move from sound by sound blending to whole word reading. This practice is helpful for students who say each sound in a CVC word and then when they go to blend they:
Say a completely different word
Say the sounds in a different order.
Say the previous word they sounded out.
Add in or omit a sound.
If any of the above has happened for your students, successive blending might be the way to go. Successive blending helps students connect, or blend the first two sounds in a word, which often is where the “mix up” happens. Once students hear themselves saying the first two sounds blended, adding that last sound and recoding the correct word comes naturally.
Successive blending mats build a bridge from sound by sound blending to whole word reading.
To teach successive blending, first model for students how to touch and say the first sound, then say the first two sounds together, then add on the last sound. Then, have students reread each word to build fluency.
Ex) /c/, /ca/, cat. Then, practice the strategy together, supporting students with extra modeling if need be.
This practice is perfect for your students who have a great score in correct letter sounds, but are below benchmark in whole words read.
CVC Flashcards
Often times we think that when students struggle with NWF, we should still be focusing on passage level fluency through activities like choral or echo reading. Balanced literacy has taught us that we NEED students reading whole passages AS SOON AS POSSIBLE and this is simply not true, especially for students in Kindergarten and first grade who are still struggling to blend sounds to read whole words. For these students, word level automaticity is essential, before they can tackle something like a whole passage. To do this, have students read 10-20 CVC words each day. Continue spiral reviewing so that students see the same words each day and have an opportunity to build automaticity. Remember, we don’t just want them to sound out words and say the word accurately like this (/p/ /o/ /p/ pop), we want them to look at the word and say “pop”. This is also an opportunity to remind students what a closed syllable is. When the vowel is blocked in by the last consonant in a word, the vowel sound is short. This is key, because when students are presented with nonsense words, many of them will use the long vowel sound rather than the short vowel sound. This practice is a staple for all K-1 students, whether they are automatic in letter sounds or not.
CVC slide decks support word level automaticity.
Vowel sound automaticity
Vowels are typically the thing that trips kids up the most. For this reason, no matter what, review vowel sounds daily. I use vowel tents for this practice, because it is quick and low prep. Simply take a 3 x 5 index card, fold it in half, and write the vowel on each half. Set the folded “vowel tents” in front of you and the students. With a pencil or pointer, point to a vowel and have the student say the sound (visual drill). Increase speed for automaticity. If I have a student who regularly confuses two vowel sounds, I will emphasize these sounds by going back and forth between the two quickly, to help with automaticity. Then, I do the reverse, asking students to listen to me say the sound and point to the correct letter (auditory drill). I do this with almost all of my intervention students. Vowels trip up everyone, and this activity takes less than a minute sometimes. Don’t leave it out!
CVC word level review activities
When students read CVC words automatically, it means they have orthographically mapped the words and no longer have to sound them out, because a mental representation of the word is stored in the brain. Practices like word chains, phoneme-grapheme mapping, and fluency grids, all support the goal of acquiring the alphabetic principle and being able to read CVC words automatically. Try them out with my CVC review pack if you need a print and go option to support this work.
CVC decoding and encoding activities support word level automaticity as well!
Final Thoughts
I’d love to know if you have tried any of these activities with your students. The key is, daily repetition. You don’t want to do the visual drill on Monday, and successive blending on Tuesday, and word chains on Wednesday. Do a little bit of all of these activities every single day, and watch your students soar past the nonsense word reading benchmark and onto bigger and better things like reading sentences and passages!
