Phonics They Use: Words for Reading and Writing

The long-standing, bestselling classic of strategies and hands-on activities for teaching phonics.

In the new edition of this popular book, author and scholar Patricia Cunningham seamlessly weaves together the complex and varied strategic approaches needed to help students develop reading and writing skills. With its focus on how students use phonics to read and write, not just how much phonics a student knows, Phonics They Use includes numerous developmentally appropriate activities for helping students with fluency, rhyme-based decoding, spelling, and more. Updated throughout, this new edition devotes increased attention to morphology as the key to decoding, spelling, and building meaning for big words; includes a new set of lessons, Compound Combos, designed to help teachers introduce morphology to students; introduces a list of 50 key words, the Nifty Thrifty Fifty, which contain a common example for all the common prefixes, suffixes, and spelling changes; includes a new chapter presenting a series of lessons on how to gradually teach these 50 words and how manipulating the parts of these 50 words can help decode, spell, and unlock the meaning of over 300 other words; and presents a new chapter on phonics and spelling interventions for older struggling readers.

Patricia M. Cunningham is a Professor of Education at Wake Forest University. She has over 30 years of experience, taught in various elementary grades and remedial reading, and was a curriculum coordinator and director of reading. Pat is the author or coauthor of What Really Matters in Vocabulary, What Really Matters in Writing, Classrooms That Work, Schools That Work, Phonics They Use, and the Making Words series. Her major professional goal is promoting literacy for all children. Pat currently engages in staff development across the United States.