Looking over the list of student
names on my first class roster was intimidating to say the least. Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven names representing the first graders that would soon be occupying the seats in my classroom. As a new teacher without an ounce of teaching experience beyond some volunteer tutoring I had done in college, I waspreparing for a true trial by fire. The ink was still wet on my alternative teaching certificate, and I had no idea how to begin teaching six-year-olds how to read.
Fast-forward six weeks, and you’d find me and my students in our morning routine on the carpet at the front of the classroom, reviewing the letter of the day and learning the sound and the “sign” that accompanied it. We were blending new letters with letters and sounds we had learned the days before and creating new words, silly words, and words with “tricky” parts. Together, we discovered the phonics equivalent of “lightning in a bottle.”
My first graders quickly went from learning their vowel sounds (long and short) to consonants to blends to digraphs all in a matter of weeks. By the end of the year, their spelling and decoding skills were strong enough to easily compete with campus third graders (in impromptu classroom spelling contests), and the TPRI (Texas Primary Reading Inventory) showed student mastery for over 95% of my students.
Reading and phonics are such abstract concepts, especially if you are five or six! Somehow, teachers must clearly explain the difference between vowels and consonants. Long and short vowels are somehow different from uppercase and lowercase letters, and all the symbols blend together to form words. Where do you begin, especially as a novice teacher? I had students who could not decipher between letters and numbers. I admit that my challengesnever included working with kids who had been affected by the disconnection of remote instruction and the learning gap that resulted from time lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Regardless of the gaps or the challenges that always come with classroom instruction, I would still turn to the sametool I used as a rookie teacher: the signs and mental models used to teach my students phonics that were given to me by the wisest teacher I ever met—my mom, Dr. Rita Pierson. She handed me a spiral-bound manual titled Tucker Signing Strategies for Reading by Dr. Bethanie Tucker. The manual was the key to helping my students understand how to identify and blend sounds and quickly decode words of increasing difficulty. The manual showed me that I didn’t need a screen, app, program, or buckets of expensive materials to unlock the magic of reading. It tapped into the power of mental models to connect the very abstract concepts of letters and sounds to the very concrete use of simple hand signs.
Years later, I still run into parents who recall fondly the confusion of watching their first graders reading at home, early in the school year, while wildly moving their hands in the air to decode their weekly reader. Like training wheelson a bike, the tool was only used as long as it was needed. Decoding eventually happened quickly in their minds. I still lean on the signing strategies when working with struggling readers of all ages, and I cannot imagine teaching reading or phonics with a more basic and effective tool.
Tucker Signing Strategies for Reading is both a book and a workshop. The book provides 44 hand signs for coding, and it’s helpful for learning and struggling readers of all ages. The on-demand workshop contains 12 video lessons that teach Tucker Hand Signs—it’s a perfect tool to learn how to teach Tucker Hand Signs in your classroom. For more information about the workshop, please contact aha! Process at (800) 424-9484.
