The 60 Second Spelling Routine using Mapped Words®! Used across the Word Mapping Mastery® System to support self-teaching. "As much explicit instruction as needed. No more".
When learning to read and spell, it is vital that adults know how to map the words an orthographic learner needs help with, both from speech to print and from print to speech.
If shown the word ‘phonics’, most adults who can read will know that the graphemes are ‹ph› ‹o› ‹n› ‹i› ‹c› ‹s› and won’t have difficulty assigning a sound value to each grapheme.
Most adults who can read will find it relatively easy to map words that use commonly taught correspondences, such as those shown on the Speech Sound Pics (SSP) Approach Chant Strip.
But what happens when a word contains correspondences that aren’t shown or commonly taught? How do you decide which letters are the graphemes and which phonemes they represent?
This is where the Word Mapping Formula matters. It provides a consistent way to work out how the phonemes and graphemes in a word map to each other, in both directions.
The Word Mapping Formula was developed by word-mapping researcher and trainer Emma Hartnell-Baker MEd SEN.
A teacher or parent who can map words bidirectionally can instantly see not only that a word has been spelt incorrectly, but which part of the phoneme–grapheme mapping has gone wrong.
They can see whether the learner has missed a phoneme, represented a phoneme with an unexpected grapheme, confused the boundaries between graphemes, or not yet secured a particular phoneme–grapheme correspondence.
Instead of simply correcting the spelling, the adult can identify exactly what the learner needs help with and show them the relevant part of the code. This means the learner gets targeted support with the part they don’t yet know, rather than being retaught what they already understand. Over time, this helps them build the phonological–orthographic knowledge they need to map unfamiliar words increasingly independently.
This skill has always been taught as part of Speech Sound Pics® (SSP) Approach training. It is now also offered as standalone Word Mapping Training, available to anyone teaching children to read and spell, regardless of the phonics programme they use.
Register your interest in Word Mapping Formula training here