Visualization for Phonics: Daydreaming of Letters

Did you know that students can benefit greatly from being taught how to visualize? Visualization for phonics is key for long-term recall of phonics concepts and irregular sight words. When students can “make a picture” of words in their heads, they’re using the part of the brain responsible for long-term storage and automatic retrieval of symbols, like letters and letter combinations.

It’s great if a student can quickly tell you what the “oi” vowel team says when you show it to them. It’s even better if they can “make a picture” of a word containing that vowel combination in their head.

Teaching Visualization Techniques

Visualization can be a tricky thing to explain to students, and it’s never 100% clear whether a student is truly visualizing or not. We often describe visualization as “making a movie in your head” to help students understand the technique.

The Seeing Stars program from Lindamood-Bell is something we use at Enrichment Therapy & Learning Center, and it inspired us to build a visual process that illustrates what we want to happen during a common phonemic awareness task.

ETLC Phonics Visualization Process

1. First, visualize the first word (real or nonsense) and finger-spell it. Finger-spelling means the student pretends their finger is a pencil and traces the letters in the air.
2. Next, tell them to erase a certain letter.
3. Then, the student replaces that letter with another letter and finger-spells the new word.
4. After that, the student says what the new word is.
5. Continue the process, making one sound or letter change at a time.

Keep It Simple

That’s it. This is a simple activity that can help improve visualization of symbols, phonics knowledge, phonemic awareness, attention, and working memory. Keep in mind that some students may first need to strengthen other phonological and phonemic awareness skills, like isolating sounds in words or deleting sounds from words, before moving into this type of task, which involves manipulating sounds directly.

We’re Here to Help

If you have questions about your child’s phonics or reading development, contact our team at ETLC. We’re happy to help.