Ultimate Red Word Hack
I absolutely love Orton GIllingham. Since implementing it into my classroom, I have seen significant growth in my students. The students who have had it in grades previous have come to my class much stronger readers than years past. There is really only one thing about Orton Gillingham I dislike…
Red words.
Red words are so incredibly important for students. Some call them heart words, sight words, or high-frequency words. No matter what you call them, we can all agree that children need to be exposed to them and be able to decode them quickly.
In Orton Gillingham, red words are words that do not follow the usual phonetic rules, or have phonemes in them that students have not been explicitly taught yet.
Despite their importance, I sometimes felt like I would accidentally teach them incorrectly because I never ever have enough time to prep! I would be rushing through my day and when phonics time arrived I would quickly look at the red words I was teaching and in my haste, I would often mess up the orthographic mapping. I can’t tell you how many times my teaching partners and I asked one another, “what’s red about this word?”. I was always scrambling and in that state, my brain refused to work. I had to make a change.
The thought came to me suddenly. I needed a place where all of my red words would be prepped and done! No more writing them on the board at the last minute. I had already proven that my brain would make mistakes if I wasn’t completely ready to teach the word.
That’s when I decided to make a powerpoint with ALL of my words in them, with the CORRECT orthographic mapping. I opened up a powerpoint and wrote out all of my red words and researched the correct orthographic mapping for them. For a while, I used that, but then I realized I could make things better.
I then went through and added what made the unexpected sounds so unexpected. I made a point in the slide show to remind myself which phonemes and graphemes were not aligning in the word. I used that version for some time too.
Then I thought, “I can make this even better”, and I began including the definitions and etymology in the slides. One less thing for me to look up before the lesson!
The final lightbulb moment came while watching my students writing one day. No matter how many times we went over it, their letter formation was still often incorrect. I had explicitly taught the letter formation, but it wasn’t sticking. I thought, “how can I show this in a different way that might capture their attention better?” With that, I started hand-drawing an animated pencil to mimic the correct letter formation for each letter.
This project took me a long time to complete, but once it was done, I had my entire year of red words prepped and ready to go! I became more confident in my teaching of them because I knew how much thought I had put into them. Suddenly I didn’t dislike teaching red words anymore.
So there you have it. Our #1 red word hack is to put them all together in one spot, having thought through them carefully. I promise you you will be glad you did!
Or, if you want to save even more time, you can grab my powerpoint presentations below with all of the bells and whistles I discussed above. We have a stage k, stage 1, and stage 2 powerpoint that are available separately or bundled together. Each word has a teacher notes slide, orthographic mapping, expected and unexpected sounds, letter formation, definitions and examples, and etymology (stage K does not include etymology).
You can get an entire year’s worth of work done in the time it takes to download! 😉
