The Literacy Cycle
Giving Your Students a Fresh Relationship with Print

Are your six-to-sixteen-year-old delayed, dyslexic or simply disinterested readers and writers not making as much progress as you’d like? Is their spelling confusing, reading effortful and are their sentences choppy? What your students need most is a fresh, more meaningful and engaging relationship with print. The Literacy Cycle is designed to build this relationship while simplifying instruction.

The Literacy Cycle develops reading, spelling and sentence writing as a single, sensible and interconnected ability. In a single Literacy Cycle lesson (graphic) students progress through six stages, advancing from single syllable word spelling and decoding, to constructing words with multiple morphemes, the building blocks of all words. They then combine two and three words together to create phrases, the building blocks of sentences. Finally, they arrange phrases in different types of sentences.

At this point, a Literacy Cycle lesson is only half complete. Students practice breaking sentences into phrases, phrases into words, and words into morphemes. After dividing multi-syllable (really poly-morphemic) words into individual morphemes, they analyze the spelling patterns.

By the end of the first hour-long lesson, students are reading and spelling multi-syllabic words in complex sentences. They have learned how the components of literacy work together in an integrated manner. Spellings flow into words, that seamlessly combine into phrases and sentences.

The spelling and morpheme stages of The Literacy Cycle establish a deeper relationship with words, linking their pronunciation, spelling and meaning. This relationship is grounded in morphemes. Every word in all the world’s languages is either a morpheme by itself, like water, little or teach, or composed of a core morpheme, called a base, plus prefixes and suffixes, like con+struct+ion and quest+ion+ing. Spelling becomes grounded in meaning.

The next two stages of the Literacy Cycle build a deep relationship with sentences, universally composed of meaningful words and phrases. Students start by building two and three word phrases, and then combine phrases into complex sentences. Sentence construction and comprehension follow naturally.

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The Spelling Stage shifts the relationship with words from the least interesting and meaningful aspects of language—letters, sounds and syllables—into a sensible meaning-building process. The primary job of spelling is to convey meaning, by consistently linking spelling patterns, called graphemes, to morphemes. Only morphemes connect spellings to pronunciations and meaning, the three patterns needed to store sight words in memory.
The Morpheme Stage further shifts the relationship with print, showing students how all words are composed of morphemes. This understanding changes how they learn to spell, decode and new vocabulary words. Longer words are seen as combinations of simple morphemes, like con+struct+ion and per+fect+ion. Words no longer exist in isolation, but have clear relationships with other words. Almost all common word are members of morphological word families with related spellings, history and meanings, as with heal - healthy, sign - designate - signature, quest - question - request, two - twin - twenty, as well as one, once and only.
The Phrase Stage presents students with another universal aspect of language. Phrases are simply meaningful word combinations that contain either a noun or a verb, but not both. Phrases form a powerful bridge between word level skills and sentence construction and comprehension. In each Sparking the Reading Shift lesson, students first build two-word phrases composed of natural pairs, such as ice cream and making friends. Then, they build three-word noun phrases, like the kind teacher, verb phrases like talking very quietly, and prepositional phrases like in the park. They are now ready for the ultimate stage.
The Sentence Stage puts words and phrases into functional and meaningful relationships, which amplifies their meaning. No longer just an academic task, sentence writing now flows from a deeper understand of words and phrase, bringing words to life. No longer is sentence writing a confusing task to avoid. Instead, students learn how it gives their thoughts and feelings a voice.

Completing the Literacy Cycle

At this point, the Literacy Cycle, and a Sparking the Reading Shift lesson, are only half complete. Students form deeper relationships with print when they are able to deconstruct sentences back into phrases. Students' understanding of how literacy words is further deepened when they can manipulate the phrases in sentences to create richer sentences.

A powerful reading comprehension activity is paraphrase, where students rewrite phrases in sentences with challenging vocabulary words into simpler language that they understand.

The same deconstruction and manipulation process occurs at the morpheme stage. Students pick an unfamiliar poly-morphemic word and investigate its base. Then they switch up the affixes to create morphological word families.

Paraphrasing and building morphological word families enhance reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge and make reading unfamiliar words much easier.

I'm Bruce Howlett, a special education teacher, and the host of the For the Love of Literacy Podcast Spotify Apple Podcasts where we explore methods that create more meaningful relationships with print. I'm also a former biology researcher who struggled with reading, spelling and writing into my forties. Then, I taught science at a residential school for teens with emotional and learning challenges. I soon realized that their struggles with literacy paralleled mine. I also saw that the school's varied literacy methods were only marginally effective. I decided to apply my research background to explore recent research and innovative methods to end my students' literacy struggles—as well as mine.

I spent the next two decades in this pursuit. While I found partial answers, from phonemic awareness to speech-to-print, my students and I continued to struggle to read, spell and write for enjoyment. Four years ago, I threw out all the lessons I had created over the decades and started fresh, creating activities based solely on recent research and emerging methods. I was aided by scores of like-minded educators and researchers, many of whom have been guests on the podcast, who deepened my understanding of the connections between spelling, morphology and sentences.

With their help, I created a set of activities that enabled my students' to embrace literacy instruction as an engaging, enriching and meaningful experience. I compiled the activities into Sparking the Reading Shift, with a 12-lesson enrichment version for students reading at or below grade level, as well as a 16-lesson intervention for students experiencing prolonged literacy difficulties.

'd like to show you how simple Literacy Cycle activities are to create, using the Sparking the Reading Shift lesson plan.

The Literacy Cycle Lesson Plan

As the graphic shows, A Literacy Cycle lesson advances students' reading, spelling and writing in a step-by-step and integrated manner. Each activity is only slightly more difficult, building on the skills learned in the previous steps.
single syllable words - single morpheme words
multiple morpheme words - two word phrases
three word phrases - multi-phrase sentences.

Each lesson in the sixteen lesson Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Intervention ($28) and well as in the twelve lesson Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-Literacy Enrichment ($18) follows this step-by-step progression.

Both versions require no prep and consolidate decoding, spelling, vocabulary, fluency and sentence reading and writing into each lesson. This saves hours of prep and instructional time each week, time that is better used for more enriching and interesting activities.

Spelling - The First and Final Stage

The Literacy Cycle starts and ends at its base—spelling. The first activity is a word chain - serial substitution activity where the students is asked to change one phoneme in a word to create a new word with a different pronunciation and meaning.

The teacher says, "Tell me the word you get it you change the /t/ in spit to an /n/" The student says each sound while writing the corresponding letters. They he reads and writes the word.

This activity provides practice with two of the most challenging aspects of decoding, consonant clusters, like tr and dr, as well as medial vowel shifts. Using this method, students with limited decoding and spelling abilities successful master these patterns after a few lessons. They also learn shifting of one letter and sound in a word creates a new morpheme.

There are two addition sound-spelling-meaning activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

“Reading words and spelling words are two sides of a coin.” Linnea Ehri

The Morpheme Stage

Morphological activities not only ground words in meaning, but also build a solid foundation for spelling, vocabulary and sight word growth. These activities focus primarily on the base word, rather than the affixes, as it carries the meaning and is spelled in a consistent manner.

Morphological Word Sums

Students learn how all multi-syllabic / poly-morphemic words in English are created in English. Students are giving a list of word sums with a common base. They say the word and spell the affixes. Then they write the word and read it. Students who have long struggled with literacy are soon reading and spelling complex words. Morphological learning is generative; students easily transfer this ability to untaught words.

The Morphological Matrix, below, affords students the ability to create a morphological word family by combining easy-to-read morphemes. Students first read the affixes and the base, then they try to find words that they know. They draw lines to make the word reacting. They then write the word sum, re+ act + ing , and then write the whole word as they spell it. If the student gets stuck, the teacher asks, "What is re plus act plus ive?"

There are five morphological activities in Sparking the Reading Shift.

There is an almost perfect correlation between the growth of morphological knowledge and vocabulary knowledge.

– Wagner et al. (2007)

The Two and Three Word Phrase Stage

The next small steps have students combine words into phrases, first with two word natural pairs, and then with three word phrases.

In the phrase building activities, students actively join words. This requires active attention and linguistic skills. In both activities, the teacher just tells the students to find phrases that make sense, draw lines between them, and then write and read the phrase.

If the student can't initially read the words, the teacher reads them. Then the student reads the words while searching for phrases.

The Combining Phrase Stage

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In Building Sentences with Phrases Challenge students read two sets of three-phrase sentences where the phrases are scrambled. After the read the sentences in grammatical order, they write the completed sentences. Finally, they read the sentences, again. After reading, spelling and writing the words in sentences almost all students have committed the words to sight word memory.

There are five phrase activities in each Sparking the Reading Shift lesson.

Phrases, Prosody and Fluency

Phrases are important to fluency, as well. Prosody, reading phrases in sentences with appropriate tempo and emphasis, enhances fluency and comprehension.

This activity combines repeated reading with prosody practice. Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift ends with a stepped word or phrase reading activity, often called sentence pyramids.

The student slowly reads a line, pausing at each slash mark, which helps build prosodic reading. Students repeat each line until they sound smooth, not like a robot. Speed is not the goal. Smooth, expressive reading is. I haven't met a dyslexic or delayed student who couldn't read these passages fluently during our first session together.

Phrase reading with prosody consistently raises reading comprehension by a grade-level or more. It is as effective and more efficient than repeatedly reading a whole chapter.

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This activity is included in each lesson of Sparking the Reading Shift. It is also used as rehearsal practice in Sparking the Fluency Shift, a collection of 36 short stories arranged by levels of text complexity. Each story is preceded by two pages of prereading rehearsal practice to build fluency and comprehension the more difficult words and sentences.

Sentences - The Top of the Literacy Cycle

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You have taken your delayed, dyslexic and disinterested students from figuring out single syllable words, to reading and spelling poly-morphemic words while writing sentences with multiple phrases--in a single lesson.

The sentence stage not only boosts sentence writing but teaches students the structure of sentences. This is essential for writing as well as comprehension.

The Sentence Matrix Challenge gives students a structure that enables them to successfully write complex sentences of their own making. Students simple pick the combinations of phrases that they want to read and write. This promotes the critical feeling of self-efficacy, the belief in your ability to succeed, which drives motivation.

Put it in Your Own Words Challenge builds sentence awareness and comprehension through paraphrasing. Working on one phrase at a time, students rewrite it, using simpler words. Teachers help with vocabulary, as needed. I've never met a student who resisted writing in this manner.

As with all stages, there are two sentence building activities in each lesson. This mix interwoven approach means that each lesson includes twelve brief and varied activities that keep attention and motivation high.

Sparking the Reading Shift

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Each lesson in Sparking the Reading Shift contains 12 activities that span the sentence, phrase, morpheme and word levels of language. As you have seen, students are constantly reading, spelling and writing in an undivided manner.

The activities contain words proficient readers and writer frequently use. To produce the activities, I simple asked myself, "what type of words and sentence structures do I want my special education students to read, spell and write?" This created a higher expectation that my students routinely met.

The activities are presented as word games, or challenges, Each page is a ready-to-use word and sentence activity, with brief instruction. A thirty-minute session once or twice a week is enough to quickly produce noticeable growth. This is a consumable workbook, as students are continually reading, spelling words and writing phrases and sentences in the book.

Sparking the Reading Shift is used for RTI, or as supplemental instruction. It is compatible with the full range of literacy approaches. There is no prep involved and is designed for new teachers and homeschooling parents to use without training.

Sparking the Reading Shift comes in two versions: Language-literacy Intervention ($28) contains16 one-hour lessons. This version is for students who have required extensive instruction from special education, classroom or reading teachers.

Sparking the Reading Shift: Language-literacy Enrichment ($18) contains 120 page,12 hour lessons in a consumable workbook format. This version contains the same word, morphological, phrase and sentence activities as in Language-literacy Intervention but in a briefer, accelerated format. For disfluent, disinterested & underperforming readers, including students reading at grade-level.

If you are unsure of which version to use, then start with Language-literacy Enrichment.

Email me with questions. Bruce@ReadingShift.com.

Sparking the Fluency Shift

I was dissatisfied with the progress my students were making reading decodables and leveled books. I also wanted to bring the advantages of the Literacy Cycle to reading practice. So, I created Sparking the Fluency Shift, a collection of 36 one-page stories, each of increasing complexity and length.

The stories start at a basic first grade (~6 y/o) to a solid sixth grade level. I wanted to give my students the opportunity to read above grade level, as all their proficient peers do.

There are up to eight stories per grade level. Each story is slightly, but noticeably more difficult than the previous story, which provides much needed motivation. With such small steps between each story, readers often progress to a more difficult story every few weeks.

Each story is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice, prereading fluency and comprehension boosting exercises that complement the stages in the Literacy Cycle. The more difficult spellings, poly-morphemic words and vocabulary, and complex phrases and sentences from each story are extracted and put into reading activities that are similar to those in Sparking the Fluency Shift.

Each story is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice activities. By practicing the hard parts to fluency beforehand, students go on to read the story with greater fluency, accuracy and comprehension—and with the need for far fewer corrections.

In his new book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives, Timothy Shanahan shows that the greatest growth in comprehension and reading engagement comes from text that contain challenging words, sentences and vocabulary. Sparking the Fluency Shift provides exactly these challenges. Shanahan promotes rehearsal practice, which he shows raises comprehension scores by a grade level or more over a cold reading of the same material.

Rehearsal practice is at the heart of each story in Sparking the Fluency Shift ($20). Each of the thirty-six, 150-to-400-word stories is preceded by two pages of rehearsal practice covering the challenging words and sentences.

The topics and the content for the stories were chosen by my very judgmental preteen and teenage students. The topics range from making friends and resolving conflicts, to fantasy stories about time travel.

For a free, three-story sample from Sparking the Fluency Shift complete with

rehearsal practice activities at the 1st, 3rd and 5th grade levels, click here

Both Sparking the Reading Shift and Sparking the Fluency Shift are available in PDF format for immediate download or in print, by mail (scroll right below).