Page 13 - TRWW Book One

The 5-Step Method

Step One: Drill on the Phonics Charts in the back of the book. Initially this step should be
repeated over and over until students gain a working knowledge of the beginning

consonantal building blocks of the language. These charts may be used as drills or
exercises for individual students or for a whole class. Students will fine them

fun to learn, taking turns reciting various columns.

Step Two: Drill on the second section of this book containing one hundred odd pages of root
words, called families. These pages should be picked more or less at random and

drilled in the same fashion as the Phonics Charts. For example, the teacher could
pick the charts corresponding to stories 1, 4, and 20 – all of which, as mentioned,

have a predominant short a sound. Then the teacher might have her students go
over a few families having a long a sound, corresponding to stories 33-59, and then

randomly go through the other eighteen phonetic groupings. It would be ideal to
go over all 361 families together in class, but it is not essential to do so because

the similar consonant and consonant blends are seen over and over again in one
family after another. Doing four or five exercises per day for a week is typically

all that is necessary to build phonetic skill and enable students to catch on to how
words are formed. Most words are formed simply by adding one of forty-three

consonant or consonant blends to one of the 361 various families or roots. The
balance of these charts that are not read in class could be assigned as homework,

aided by a parent, and with or without the corresponding text-to-speech Adobe
PDF file.

Step 3: After deciding to begin with Story 1, or perhaps a different story, the children
should first drill on that particular corresponding family. Not only should they be
able to pronounce all of the words of the family, but they should learn the meaning

of each word, especially those words used in the chosen story. By knowing the
highlighted brown family words, students should be able to make intelligent

guesses at the meaning of the other words, the predominant black words. To make
decoding easy, many of the multi-syllabic words are separated by raised dots. At

first, it is probably best for the class to read the story aloud together. And then
after the story is read, it should be discussed to check students’ understanding of

it. Next, the story should be read again several more times, either together or

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