November 10th - No School (Veteran's Day)

November 13th - Last Day to Order School Pictures

November 17th - Cultural Fall Festival

November 20th-24th - No School (Thanksgiving Break)

December 2nd - Holiday Craft Fair 10 AM - 3 PM

You have probably heard of your child talking about marking their words or even seen work come home that included spelling words covered in strange symbols and numbers. At first glance, it most certainly seems strange. I remember observing my first literacy lesson and watching the students mark their words with and wondered why on earth they were putting dots in the middle of the words, underling some and writing numbers above others. I began my first training in the Literacy Essentials curriculum and that was where I first heard of the English alphabet referred to as a 'code.'

The alphabet consists of letters used to represent the sounds we use in the English language and it very much works like a code. There are more sounds than there are letters, therefore, there are many factors that determine what sound a letter is saying. For example, we have multi-letter phonograms, phonograms where two letters are used to make one sound such as sh or ch. However, the English language is also compromised of subskills and rules that determine the sounds that are said. The students at Hozho Academy begin learning these rules from the very beginning, and we reinforce these rules by teaching them markings to use on their spelling words. This helps them to identify the rules of the English language they are taught and is part of the Literacy Essentials multisensory approach to learning, putting these skills into their long term memory. Let's take a look at some of the rules your children learn and the corresponding markings.

The very first rule your child learns is that words are broken up into 'chunks' called syllables. A syllable consists of one vowel sound and the consonant sounds said with it (did you know that every English syllable must have a written vowel?) When marking a word, students identify each syllable with a dot in between, for example;

Com•plain

Cup•cake

Ta•ble

Li•brar•y

This breaks complicated words into workable pieces. The students work with each syllable to identify the rules and subskills being used. A few more examples include;

Multiletter phonograms; marked by underlining them, showing that together they make one sound:

C o m • p l ai n - ai = /A/ two letter /A that we do not use at the end of English words because English words do not end with I.

Vowels saying their name or their second sound are also underlined.

T a •b l e - this A is saying its name because it is what we call an open syllable. The syllable ends with a vowel and is not being closed off by a consonant.

B a k e1– this A is saying its name because it is followed by a consonant and then a silent final e.

• We underline the K being it is the consonant being 'skipped over'

• We double underline the E because it is silent and we label it with a 1 because there are 6 reasons why a word would have a silent E at the end. The first reason being that it makes the vowel say its name.

There are many more rules and subskills that your children will learn during their time at Hozho. In being able to identify and break the code, students can read more complex vocabulary, simply by breaking it into chunks and then identifying the rules they know.