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

3: Say the word.

4: Tap the sounds in the word.

5. Rip your bits.

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

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

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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.