How to Align Bump It Up Walls with the Science of Reading
Bump It Up Walls are a powerful tool for visual learning, often used to set clear learning goals and provide visible examples of success criteria for students. When combined with the Science of Reading (SoR), these walls can be adjusted to better support structured literacy approaches, ensuring that phonics, decoding, and comprehension skills are emphasized alongside writing and reading.
Here’s how small adjustments can make the two approaches work hand-in-hand:
1. Phonics Integration
The Science of Reading emphasizes systematic, explicit phonics instruction. By aligning Bump It Up Walls with these principles, teachers can use the walls to showcase key phonics rules, blending techniques, or decoding strategies. For instance, alongside visual exemplars of writing tasks, add sections that emphasize grapheme-phoneme correspondences or tricky spelling patterns, providing constant reinforcement of phonics knowledge.
Adjustment Tip: Include sound charts or visual phonics prompts on your Bump It Up Wall. For early readers, incorporate examples of correctly applied phonics skills within writing samples to illustrate how phonics knowledge transfers into writing.
2. Scaffolded Reading Examples
The Science of Reading recommends scaffolded reading instruction, starting from decoding simple texts to more complex comprehension tasks. On Bump It Up Walls, teachers can include various levels of reading examples, from decodable readers to texts requiring more advanced comprehension skills. This scaffolding shows students the progression from basic phonics-based reading to deeper understanding, aligning with the SoR’s structured approach.
Adjustment Tip: Add clear reading progressions to your walls. Use “before” and “after” reading samples, focusing on how mastery of phonics rules and decoding leads to improved fluency and comprehension.
3. Feedback and Goal Setting
Both the Science of Reading and Bump It Up Walls value feedback. Teachers can align student feedback with phonics goals by incorporating specific phonics-based feedback into their success criteria on the walls. For example, goals like “Identify and apply consonant blends” or “Use vowel teams correctly” can be part of the student’s learning objectives and reflected on the Bump It Up Wall.
Adjustment Tip: Create specific, phonics-aligned success criteria that target the foundational literacy skills outlined in the Science of Reading. Regularly update the wall to reflect student progress towards these goals.
4. Formative Assessment
Bump It Up Walls support formative assessment by visually tracking student progress and achievement. When aligned with the Science of Reading, teachers can integrate formative assessments focused on phonics, decoding, and comprehension strategies, displaying how students improve these skills over time. This could include “working walls” that capture student work at different stages, showing growth in both phonics skills and reading comprehension.
Adjustment Tip: Use the wall as a formative assessment tool by showcasing examples of reading assessments or phonics quizzes. Update the wall to reflect each step students take toward mastering essential reading skills.
5. Building Automaticity
The Science of Reading focuses on developing fluency through the automatic recall of phonics and vocabulary. Bump It Up Walls can be used to reinforce this by including frequent practice examples, encouraging students to revisit key phonics rules and vocabulary words displayed on the wall.
Adjustment Tip: Incorporate fluency goals into your wall, such as speed reading benchmarks or phonics drills. Display samples showing how fluency and automaticity lead to stronger comprehension and more complex writing tasks.
Conclusion
The Science of Reading and Bump It Up Walls can complement one another beautifully when small adjustments are made to prioritize phonics instruction and scaffolded reading tasks. These adjustments support the explicit, systematic teaching of reading skills while leveraging the visual learning strengths of Bump It Up Walls, helping students meet literacy goals in a structured, supportive environment.
With the right modifications, you don’t have to choose one over the other—these two approaches can come together to create a powerhouse for literacy instruction!
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