Also see: Words in Color for Dyslexia
Words in Color materials and techniques are designed to help students meet and tackle the ambiguities and challenges inherent in a non-phonetic language like English head on. Beginning readers sometimes:
- Read slowly or inaccurately.
- Confuse letters and sounds, such as ‘b’ and ‘d’ which are close in shape and sound.
- Experience confusion or even difficulty making the proper association between sounds and the signs that represent them.
- Experience confusion or difficulty breaking words down into component sounds or combining or blending sounds to make words.
While most beginning readers exhibit a measure of these behaviors, in some learners, and particularly the so-called dyslexic, these problems are more persistent. In those cases, Words in Color has proven effective as an instrument for framing the right challenges to provoke the correct awarenesses and provide the right exercises for practice.
With Words in Color, students can directly perceive the differences and similarities in specific sounds and spellings. These differences and similarities can be examined from many points of view, for example: the number of sounds or the number of beats in a word, contrasts with similar words, writing the consonant sounds in the words and replacing the vowels with an underline, or vice versa, writing the vowels sounds and replacing the consonant sounds with an underline, etc. When students are permitted to examine words from many points of view, they are in a position to generate many awarenesses, practice in a variety of ways and eventually “own” the words through their learning. This is true for the gifted, learning disabled, or dyslexic alike.
Our experience is that Words in Color is well suited for framing the right types of activities to enable so-called dyslexic students to meet the challenges of learning to read head-on. Here are some examples:
- The arrangement of sounds and spellings on the Fidel Phonic Code makes it straightforward for the learner to compare and contrast sounds and spellings which may be confusing (e.g. ‘b’ and ‘d’).
- The confusion in associating sounds with spellings is also easily dealt with since all of them are visible and distinguishable in columns and color-coded.
- Exercises and activities for breaking words down into component sounds/spellings and putting them back together in the same or a different order are also easily achieved with the Fidel Phonetic Code and the color-coded word charts.
- Activities such as Visual Dictation and Oral Dictation (both outlined in Teaching With Words in Color: Lesson Guides, Techniques, Games) make it easy to practice reading words and sentences in a variety of different ways (for example: read like you are surprised, like you are happy, like you are angry, like you are saying it to your friend, etc.) This helps beginning readers to read accurately and with the fluency of natural speech.
