Memorizing vs. Mapping Words thisreadingmama This Reading Mama

Today’s topic in this blog and video series is memorizing vs. mapping words.

I’m sharing this blog and video series to help you understand the similarities and differences between some terms or strategies we use in the field of literacy and apply this knowledge to your teaching. Find all the blog posts in this series by scrolling down to the image gallery at the END of this post.

The text in this blog post is the text from my video.
Watch the full video on my YouTube channel.

Memorizing Words

Memorizing words focuses on remembering whole words by rote memory. Often times, the focus is visual cues provided by the word. If you’re familiar with the “Dick and Jane” books that began in the 1930’s, they promoted memorizing words.

For example, with a word like dog, some learners may remember the word because…

it has a tail like a dog.

Teachers may show learners to look at the “shape” of the word to help them remember the word. For example, dog has a tall first letter, a short second letter, and a letter than “hangs down” for the last letter.

A word like look might be remembered because it has two eyes.

Or, again, parents and teachers might try to help learners remember the “shape” of the word.

Problems with Memorizing Words

There are several problems with memorizing whole words, and I have a post about many of them on my blog. {See The Truth about Whole Word Reading and What is Orthography?}.

Today, I’m just going to focus on just one issue.

At best, memorizing words only focuses our learners’ attention on the letters or graphemes in the words. But, it does next to nothing to help learners see how the actual letters connect to the letter sounds (or phonemes) in the words.

And when you can help learners connect the graphemes to the phonemes, you’ve got a powerful duo! This where mapping words comes in.

Grab our Seasonal Mapping Mats to help learners with phoneme-grapheme mapping in ANY season!

Mapping Words

When we map words, we are showing our learners how their knowledge of letters {graphemes} connects to their knowledge of letter sounds {phonemes}.

And from best practices of teaching, this makes total sense.

We want to build on prior knowledge, or what our learners already know, when we teach them new content or when we’re trying to build new knowledge. So, if learners know their letters and even some letter sounds, we want to build on that knowledge to help them read words.

When we ignore this connection, we are doing a massive disservice for our beginning and struggling readers. So, what should we do instead?

Enter phoneme-grapheme mapping. Phoneme-grapheme mapping is a hands-on activity that can strengthen the connection between the letters learners know (graphemes) and letter sounds (which are the phonemes).

If you’re not sure exactly how it words, I’d encourage you to read the blog post or watch the video, What’s the Difference between Phonemes and Graphemes?

If you’ve watched my previous video dedicated solely to phoneme-grapheme mapping, you’ll see that I dealt mostly with consistent phonics words that map perfectly or transparently.

Mapping Words: What about Hight Frequency Words?

While many high frequency words do map transparently because they follow phonics generalizations or rules, what do you do with words that don’t map so perfectly? Should we just resort to memorizing all these words? Not exactly.

Take, for example, a word like said.

Remember, we want to help our learners build a connection between what they already know and what they don’t yet know. We want our learners to see that they already have a connection with this word.

They know how to sound out both the s and the d in the word said. Those letters, or graphemes, make their expected sounds.

But, we have a little part of the word that is trickier. The ai in the middle doesn’t make its expected sound. We’d expect to have an e here instead since we hear the short e’s sound. We can teach learners that they only need to memorize, or learn by heart, the tricky part.

This is just one example, but it can be done with nearly every high frequency word. Even though these words sometimes “break the rules,” they almost always have letters or chunks of letters that map the way we would expect.

Instead of ignoring this, we should highlight this for our learners.

The beauty of phoneme-grapheme mapping is that is explicitly shows learners how to go through words to map the letters and the sounds. Mapping words like this models the process that we want our beginning and struggling readers to do internally as they encounter new words.

Remember what we asked in our last video about high frequency words and sight words? We asked, “How do we get high frequency words stored in long-term memory, so they become sight words or automatic? What’s the bridge?”

I’d argue it’s mapping, not memorizing words.

One of our goals with word recognition is that words, not just high frequency words, mind you, get stored in long-term memory so they can be recognized automatically for future retrieval.

Mapping words can help our beginning and struggling readers do just this!

If you’re looking for more information about mapping words, visit these free resources on my blog.

Enjoy teaching!
~Becky