Note: This page assumes you have reviewed enough of the Children of the Code resources to have an understanding of what reading is, why so many struggle to learn to read, and the profound consequences to individuals and to society of our continuing literacy crisis.
Orchestrating Reading – Pronunciation Cues – Online Learning Support Net – The Magic Ladder
| Orchestrating Reading: In order to orient your, first-person, learning, its valuable to vivify your understanding of the central challenge of learning to read: the confusing relationship between letters, sounds, and spellings. To do this you need to get into sync with learners as they are reading and experience for yourself, not conceptually or abstractly, the correspondence between the letters they are reading and hesitations and stutters you are hear in their voices. “Orchestrating Reading” is simple way to confirm for yourself how code confusion causes reading stutters and how helpful it can be to meet learners just before or as they stutter with “cues” that help them reduce the confusion. Resources: video introducing Orchestrating Reading. PDF outline. |
| PQs – Pronunciation Cues: Are a simple set of variations in the visual appearance of letters that retain unambiguous letter recognition features while also signaling which of a letter’s possible sounds it actually sounds like (or doesn’t). PQs correspond to the the fundamental letter-sound confusions beginning and struggling readers experience: When does it sound like it’s Alphabet name sound? When is it silent? When does it make its common sound? If it makes other sounds, which other sounds? When does it sound alone and when does it make other sounds with other letters? Which other letters?
PQs can be printed on paper or screens or animated on smart devices using OLSN. Note: PQs are not essential to OLSN and PQ coding can be modified to work with other systems. Resources for learning about PQs: Animated Tour, the ABCs of PQs, PQ Styles, Logic of PQs, PQs AtoZ, PQs Key Resources for learning to use PQs: (note when PQs are used with OLSN, these resources are not needed): PQ Games, Letter Blocks, LetterScope, WordScope. If time is limited and a deeper understanding is your goal, be sure to review “Logic Of PQs“. |
Which A? |
Basic PQs? |
The ER Sound |
Patterns |
OLSN – The Online Learning Support Network: The common assumption implicit in every previous method of instruction is that brains must be pretrained to “run this code” – to automatically recognize, interpret, and perform complex mental operations based on the instructions and information encoded and contained in our archaic info-tech (English orthography). The “Science of Reading” has been warped around the assumption that readers must learn how words work in order to learn to read them. The future science of reading will be based on researching how to make words work to help people learn to read them.
OLSN provides learners on-demand, instantaneously responsive, word-by-word, word recognition and word understanding support. It can easily be added to any website or page, it’s available as a Chrome/Edge Extension that works on most webpages, and it is built into the Magic Ladder, Children of the Code, Learning Stewards, and other websites. Resources: About OLSN, Installing the Chrome/Edge Extension, Embedding OLSN. OLSN is the beginnings of an era in which every word in the online universe will become its own help button. A button able to help anyone, regardless of reading skill, primary language, vocabulary, or background knowledge, learn to recognize (read) and understand the word. Soon (OLSN 2) will be able to interface AI to support any kind of “meaning need” that anyone could have in anyway way relevant to where they are in what they are reading. |
In addition to the Online Learning Support Net (OLSN) layer, the Magic Ladder is also an instructional system – a kind of” training wheels for learning to read”. Its a more neurologically efficient way to learn to read and improve reading that compensates for weaknesses in decoding skills, vocabulary, knowledge background and even differences in native language. Learners get better at decoding, grow their vocabularies, and build up more knowledge, (and can learn English) by learning to use OLSN in the context of pedagogical experiences designed to leverage OLSN:
The Magic Ladder has a suite of tools that can be used by parents, tutors, teachers and school and public librarians, and has a number of “learning series” for various difficulty and grade levels. There are also a variety of “eBooks” that range from fairy tales to timeless classics. |
Alphabet Name Sound – 95% of kids come to Kindergarten already knowing the ABCs. The exposure has Hebbian effects. The mental reflexes of 95% of kindergarten children have been wired to recognize a letter and hear its name. Most currently try to train over this association with phonic sounds rather than acknowledging or, optimally, leveraging the reflex.