Rippy Bits: A Word-Building Activity

Two of the most conflated terms among structured literacy practitioners are orthographic mapping and phoneme-grapheme mapping. Social media abounds with requests from teachers for more “orthographic mapping activities.”

Orthographic mapping, a term coined by researcher Linnea Ehri (2014), is not an activity. Rather, it is a process the brain must go through to bond the symbol(s) we use in our alphabetic writing system to the pronunciation(s) and meaning(s) they represent.

This bonding or consolidation of word knowledge gets stored in the visual word form area of the brain (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003) and can then be retrieved and applied to a novel string of letters for rapid word analysis and instantaneous recognition. It happens over time as you develop a sensitivity to the sound structure of words, gain exposure to letter-sound knowledge, and begin to analyze how symbols come together in print to represent language.

Phoneme-grapheme mapping (Grace, 2022) is one strategy to facilitate this cognitive process. During this strategy, students analyze the following internal details of a word:

• How many sounds are in a word? 

• What are the sounds?

• Which letter or letter combination represents those sounds?

• How do sounds and letters come together to form a real word? 

Students record the analysis in a 3-5 square grid. Having students think about a word, tap out its sound structure, and contemplate the combination of graphemes (letter or letter-combination representing a sound) is exactly the type of practice the brain needs to kickstart the process of orthographic mapping.  To enhance the quality of the word’s representation in memory (Perfetti & Hart, 2002), be sure to include meaning(s) and customary usage.  This will enable students to readily retrieve relevant information about the word whether they come across it in print when reading, while listening or speaking, and when attempting to produce the word in their own writing.

Rippy Bits, our multimodal variation of phoneme-grapheme mapping, is designed to facilitate the above analysis while also producing materials for review and generative wordplay.  This activity can be done either with a whole group or a small group, and the students can eventually take their Rippy Bits home or to a center for extra independent practice.

Rippy Bits Activity

1: Prepare Materials

Each student will need a few strips of construction paper, a Ziplock bag, a writing utensil, and one piece of paper or notebook to record words.

2: Create or Select a Word List

Preferably select according to your phonics scope/sequence and the decodable you are preparing them to practice. Be sure the words all include the pattern you are teaching.

Example:

Blends Review: fast, last, must, snack, small, stack, spin, spill, step, speck.

3: Say the word.

Have your students repeat each word to check that what they hear matches what they say.

Example:

Say FAST. Students repeat: FAST.

4: Tap the sounds in the word.

Pay attention to articulation. If your students are misperceiving or mispronouncing any sounds, take time to model articulatory gestures (mouth movements) and have the students practice mirroring your model using mirrors.

Scaffolding Tips

Ask: Is this a consonant or vowel sound? If consonant, what is blocking the airflow (lips, teeth, tongue)? Does the airflow continue or stop? Is your voice box on or off? What is your mouth doing?

Example:

/f/ /a/ /s/ /t/

5. Rip your bits.

Have each student grab one construction paper strip. For each sound in your chosen word, guide the students through ripping a piece of construction paper from the strip.

Example: 

What’s the first sound in fast? /f/. (RIP!) 

What’s the second sound in fast? /ă/. (RIP!) 

What’s the third sound in fast? /s/. (RIP!)

What’s the fourth sound in fast? /t/. (RIP!) 

Once finished, your students will have several small rips of paper.

If your students need extra practice with segmenting and blending the sounds, use rippy-bits as a manipulative to push and say each sound and then blend the sounds together before adding the graphemes.

6. Guide your students to write each grapheme in the word on a separate Rippy Bit.

Example:

1. What’s the first sound in fast? /f/. What symbol(s) do we use to represent /f/? F. 

2. What’s the second sound in fast? /ă/. What symbol(s) do we use to represent /a/? A. 

3. What’s the third sound in fast? /s/. What symbol(s) do we use to represent /s/? S.

4. What’s the fourth sound in fast? /t/. What symbol(s) do we use to represent /t/? T.

5. Push and say the sounds in fast: /f/ /a/ /s/ /t/.

6. Blend the sounds together to say the word: fast.
   

7: Pile the bits to make room of the next word.

Students simply store their Rippy-Bits in a small Ziplock bag. 

After they are introduced to their word list and store their Rippy Bits, those materials can be reused for review and for generative wordplay. When they’re ready to practice, they can remove their rippy-bits from the bag to build words. Have them record words they build in a notebook and practice decoding with a parent, sibling, partner, or with you!

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Rippy Bits is available as a free download. Please visit our free resources page to grab your copy and access other free resources!

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References

1. Ehri, L.. C. (2014).  Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning.  Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5-21.

2. McCandliss, B. D., Cohen, L., & Dehaene, S. (2003).  The visual word form area: Expertise for reading in the fusiform gyrus.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 293-299. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00134-7

3. Grace, K. E. (2022).  Phonics and spelling through phoneme-grapheme mapping. Really Great Reading.

4. Perfetti, C. A., & Hart, L. (2002).  The lexical quality hypothesis.  In L. Verhoven, C. Elbro, & P. Reitsma (Eds.) Precursors of Functional Literacy (Published as Vol. 11 of the series Studies in Written Language and Literacy). John Benjamins.