What's Changed? Skill Builder - AU version 1.3

The "What’s Changed?" skill builder has been thoughtfully developed to enhance students’ phonemic awareness, which is essential for reading proficiency. Phonemic awareness involves recognizing and manipulating the individual sounds within words, a skill that can be cultivated through structured practice.

This program emphasizes the development of phonemic awareness specifically regarding vowel sounds and consonant blends. Through engaging exercises, students listen to pairs of non-words and identify the changes between them.

Students practice foundational phonemic skills by engaging in activities that involve:

• Identifying the sound that changed (e.g., from ‘zat’ to ‘zad’).
• Substituting a new letter for the changed sound (e.g., ‘feld’ to ‘fald’).
• Specifying the letter corresponding to a sound that was added or omitted (e.g., ‘strek’ to ‘stek’).
• Switching two letters for sounds that have transposed (e.g., ‘blist’ to ‘blits’).

Students who struggle with phonemic awareness often exhibit similar errors when reading, making this practice particularly valuable.

In addition, "What’s Changed?" fosters segmentation and blending skills—crucial abilities for decoding words by segmenting them into their constituent sounds and then synthesizing those sounds to read whole words confidently.

This program is suitable for learners of all ages, especially those who are emerging readers or facing challenges in reading acquisition. It also serves as a beneficial resource for English language learners aiming to refine their auditory discrimination and pronunciation skills. Progress can be tracked by parents or educators, enabling them to identify areas needing further development based on specific skill results.

The curriculum includes three distinct categories, each comprising four levels of increasing complexity. The games progress from simple VC patterns (e.g., ‘ob’) to more challenging CCVCC structures (e.g., ‘brisp’). The Standard English category emphasizes foundational letter-sound correspondences for common phonemes (for instance, the /k/ sound of 'c' in 'cat').

The Readable English category expands on this foundation by introducing non-standard letter sounds (such as the varied pronunciations of 'c' as found in 'cell', 'ocean', and 'cello'). Unique glyphs represent these alternate sounds, allowing all the variations of English phonetics to be denoted clearly (e.g., distinct representations for the different sounds of 'o' in 'cove', 'love', and 'move').

The Colour category employs colors exclusively to illustrate the sounds, encouraging users to focus specifically on auditory discrimination rather than letter-sound associations.

Readable English: Read It | Speak It | Know It.