Structured Literacy – English Reading and Spelling for Spanish Speakers

Fisher Hill’s literacy workbooks use a structured literacy approach.  All the books are based on Orton-Gillingham practices.  Most of Fisher Hill’s workbooks are for Spanish-speaking teens and adults to learn to read and write in English.

Kathy Fisher is the owner of Fisher Hill and the author of the workbooks. She taught reading for 17 years.  She is a member of the International Dyslexia Association and has two boys who had difficulty learning to read.  One son graduated with a Ph.D. in Chemistry and the other son dropped out of high school, passed the high school proficiency test, and worked at Twitter before he was twenty years old making more money than his mother who had a master’s degree in Education.  Needless to say, the boys school experiences at times were not a joyful affair especially with the younger one who finally dropped out of school when he was sixteen.

School can be extremely difficult for children who have a hard time learning to read.  As a teacher, I loved teaching reading because I knew what to do.  I joined IDA when my boys had difficulty learning to read. This reading difficulty came as a shock to me because I had read to them since they were babies. They had gone to Mommy and Me classes, story time at the library, and they had plenty of books at home.  IDA taught me how to teach reading.  They taught me about Orton-Gillingham.  I knew what to do.  I did not depend on the school’s textbooks to teach reading.

The workbooks I’ve written use a very structured, systematic, explicit approach to teach the English speech sounds to read and spell.  The series called English Reading and Spelling for the Spanish Speaker uses phonics, phonemic awareness and other phonological skills to teach reading and spelling. This series has six workbooks.  Each workbook has twenty lessons.

Each lesson begins with a word list that includes words with the targeted sound for that lesson. Many of these words can also be used as vocabulary words.

The next page in the lesson works with high frequency words. These words are often misspelled so they are presented and practiced repeatedly throughout the book.

The third page in the lesson is a fill in the blank page so students can practice using the words from the word list from the first page of the lesson and the high frequency words from the second page of the lesson. There are pictures from the first page of the lesson at the end of some of the fill in the blank sentences since many sentences could have more than one answer. Students use the pictures at the end of the sentence to know which word from the word list to use.

The fourth page of the lesson practices spelling, grammar, vocabulary or writing.

The fifth page of the lesson is a word search, crossword puzzle or jumble

The last page of the lesson is an answer key.

How to use the workbooks:

When I was teaching reading and spelling, I spent two days on each new sound. I would begin the lesson by flashing sound spelling cards with the consonants and a card with the new sound. I would then dictate five words from the word list, five words from previous word lists (from the book) and two or three high frequency words. The students would write the words on their whiteboards and then read and spell the words back to me. The dialogue I used was:

Teacher: “Write the word cat.” (Students write the word.) “What word did you write?”

Students: cat

Teacher: “How do you spell cat?”

Students: “c-a-t”

I did this for each word and then I would dictate two sentences.  These sentences can come from page 2 of each lesson. This type of multisensory practices helps students to learn and remember the sounds.

Visit us online at www.Fisher-Hill.com to view all of our workbooks.  If you have any questions about our workbooks or how to navigate our  website you can email us at [email protected] or call us at 1-888-407-1187.