Cycle 6

Remember that a student’s finger should stop for two seconds on the dot beneath each continuous sound, which the student should read slowly.  Their finger should not stop on the arrow symbol under each stop sound.  Instead, their finger should slide past the arrow symbol, and, at the moment it passes over that symbol, the student should say the sound quickly.

At the end of the task, don’t forget to have the student reread any sounds that required correction.

This will be the first time in a Slow Game task that you do not say the word together with students before they try to say the word on their own.  If they struggle, say it with them as an intervention.

The words in this task consist of two continuous phonemes.

In the early stages of the curriculum, we will segment ar as two sounds: /ŏ/ followed by /r/, so the word are should be segmented as /ŏŏŏrrr/.  (As mentioned earlier, we do the same thing with or, treating it as two sounds in these early stages: /ō/ and /r/.)  Don’t let the phonetic spelling of the word are confuse you.  It is /ŏŏŏrrr/, which rhymes with car and far, not /ōōōrrr/.

On the other hand, we segment er, ir, and ur as a single sound: /ər/. So, you should segment the word were in this task into two sounds: /w/ and /ər/. We spelled this phonetically as /wwwərrr/. Even though there are three different characters representing those sounds in the phonetic spelling, you should still treat it as two sounds total.