If your child has a hard time reading and spelling words, orthographic mapping is a great strategy to help words go from an oral language skill to sight word knowledge.
Let's use the word "chop" as an example.
Have your child repeat the word "chop" back to you. Once they have accurately pronounced the word back, they should segment out each sound in the word.
With the word "chop", it would sound like this" "ch....o....p".
When segmenting out each sound, your child can tap each sound out with their fingers or to make it more interactive, you can use a pop-it to push down a bubble for each sound they hear. Have your child identify how many sounds they heard in the word. For "chop", they should identify 3 sounds or phonemes.
For the last step of orthographic mapping, your child will use their letter sounds knowledge to assign a grapheme (letters) to each phoneme (sounds) they hear. It is important that your child is writing the letters out themselves. You can prompt them by saying, "What letters make the /ch/ sound?". They will notice that two letters are needed to create one sound. They will continue until they have written down each sound.
After they have assigned a grapheme for each sound, they will rewrite the word as a whole.
The end goal of orthographic mapping is for your child to identify words automatically by sight. With consistent practice, orthographic mapping can be very effective!
Written by Madison Dwyer