Unit 1: Introduction
Length: 30 minutes
Unit 1 provides an overview of the Cracking the ABC Code Multisensory Spelling programs, how to select an appropriate level program and preparing the required resources.
Unit 2: Multisensory Spelling Strategy
Length: 45 minutes
Unit 2 provides step-by-step instructions for using the Cracking the ABC Code spelling strategy. It explains the rationale behind each component and includes a demonstration of the strategy being used with a student.
Unit 3: Assessing & Correcting Spelling
Length: 90 minutes
Unit 3 provides explains how to assess how well the student has learned to spell the focus words, applying this knowledge outwards to other words with a similar spelling patterns, adding prefixes and suffixes to the focus words and strategies for correcting students’ spelling errors in a way that enables them to learn from their mistakes. It includes information on phonological awareness based errors, phonic knowledge based errors, spelling and phonic rule based errors, syntax and morphological based errors, semantic and etymological based errors and the importance of metacognition and memory strategies for learning words with unusual graphemes, silent letters or rule breakers.
Unit 4: 300 High Frequency Words
Length: 90 minutes
Unit 4 provides strategies for effectively teaching students the 300 most frequency occurring words. Although many of these words can be encoded with a basic phonic knowledge, there are quite a few words which require advanced skills. The current research shows the importance of helping students identify the phonemes (sounds) in each word and making links between each phoneme and the grapheme (letter or letter combinations) representing that phoneme and this is an important part of the process. However, in addition strategies from the memory research are also incorporated into helping students learn words containing more complicated graphemes.
Unit 5: Spelling Rules
Length: 90 minutes
Unit 5: Around 85% of words are governed by either phonic or spelling rules. Unit 5 discusses how to teach the spelling rules and provides information on key teaching points for the more commonly used rules.