The words behind the method
Reading research has its own vocabulary. Here are the terms you will meet most often, what they mean in plain words, and what each one looks like in Rumpus Reading.
Jump to: Sounds and letters · Learning to read words · Reading words instantly · How teaching works · How learning sticks
Sounds and letters
- Phoneme
- The smallest sound in a spoken word. "Cat" has three: /k/ /a/ /t/. Letters are how we write phonemes down.
- In Rumpus Reading: most lessons teach one new sound and the letter or letters that spell it; a few teach a small group of related spellings together, such as "ai" and "ay."
- Grapheme
- A letter or group of letters that spells one sound. In "ship," "sh" is one grapheme for one sound.
- In Rumpus Reading: letter teams like "sh" and "ee" are taught as single units, the same way your child will read them.
- Digraph
- Two letters that spell one sound, like "sh," "ch," or "th." A digraph is one kind of grapheme.
- In Rumpus Reading: the two letters are joined by a line on screen at first, so your child reads them as one sound, and that help fades along the word chain.
- Letter-sound correspondence
- The link between a grapheme and its sound, such as "m" says /m/. Reading is built on hundreds of these links.
- In Rumpus Reading: every one of these links is tracked separately, so the app knows which are solid and which are still wobbly.
- Phonemic awareness
- Hearing and working with the individual sounds in spoken words, such as hearing that "map" starts with /m/.
- In Rumpus Reading: sound work always happens with the letters in view, because research shows it works best tied to print.
Learning to read words
- Phonics
- Teaching how letters and sounds connect, so a child can sound out words.
- Systematic phonics
- Phonics taught in a planned order, simple to complex, with each step building on the last. Other approaches leave the code to be picked up along the way.
- In Rumpus Reading: the whole curriculum is systematic phonics, one letter-sound at a time.
- Scope and sequence
- The full list of what gets taught (scope) and the order it is taught in (sequence).
- In Rumpus Reading: we follow a published sequence that keeps look-alike and sound-alike letters well apart.
- Short vowel
- The vowel sounds in "cat," "bed," "sit," "hot," and "cup." They come before long vowels because they appear in the simplest words.
- In Rumpus Reading: the first lesson teaches short "a," and the other short vowels arrive early in the sequence.
- Letter name and letter sound
- The name of "m" is "em," and its sound is /m/. Reading words uses the sound; "em-ay-tee" does not blend into "mat."
- In Rumpus Reading: each lesson teaches the sound. Letter names come up along the way and are not drilled.
- Decoding
- Turning written letters into sounds and blending them into a word. Sounding out "s-u-n" to read "sun" is decoding.
- CVC word
- A short word built consonant, vowel, consonant, like "sat" or "mop." These are usually the first words a child sounds out.
- In Rumpus Reading: your child starts reading words like these by the fourth lesson.
- Blending
- Joining individual sounds into a word. Hearing /s/ /u/ /n/ and saying "sun."
- In Rumpus Reading: blending is taught as one connected stretch of sound ("sssuuunnn"), which helped beginners more in research than chopping sounds apart.
- Segmenting
- The reverse of blending: breaking a spoken word into its sounds. "Sun" becomes /s/ /u/ /n/.
- In Rumpus Reading: breaking words into sounds happens inside each lesson, with the letters in view.
- Word chain
- A run of words that each change one sound from the last: sat, sit, sip, ship. It makes the child look at every letter.
- In Rumpus Reading: once lessons include a word chain, each chain sets the new sound beside an older one, in pairs like sock and shock, and the help fades along the chain.
Reading words instantly
- Sight word
- Any word a reader recognizes instantly, without sounding it out. For a skilled reader, almost every word is a sight word. The "sight word" lists sent home from school are high-frequency words, and many of them can be sounded out.
- Orthographic mapping
- How a word becomes a sight word. The child connects each letter or letter team in the word to its sound, and after a few successful reads the word is stored in memory for instant recall. Memorizing the shape of a word does not do this.
- In Rumpus Reading: we teach decoding so that words become sight words through their sounds.
- Heart word
- A common word with a part that does not follow the rules a child has learned yet, like the "ai" in "said," which says /e/. The regular parts are sounded out and the odd part is learned "by heart."
- In Rumpus Reading: heart words are taught through the parts that do follow the rules, with the odd part pointed out.
- Self-teaching hypothesis
- David Share's idea that each time a child successfully sounds out a new word, they teach themselves that word. A few successful reads are often enough. A guess does not count.
- In Rumpus Reading: story days are where this happens: every story is written so your child can sound out the words themselves.
- Decodable text
- A book or story written only with letter-sounds the reader has been taught, so every word can be sounded out. Most picture books are not decodable for a beginner.
- In Rumpus Reading: every story is written only from the sounds your child knows, plus a few heart words they have learned, and checked automatically before your child sees it.
How teaching works
- Science of reading
- The large body of research on how children learn to read. One of its central findings is that reading must be taught, starting with the code that links letters to sounds.
- Direct instruction
- A way of teaching where the adult shows a skill clearly, practices it with the child, then lets the child try, in small steps that keep the child right most of the time. Written with capitals, Direct Instruction is the name of Siegfried Engelmann's programs.
- In Rumpus Reading: every new sound follows the same rhythm: you show it, you say it together, then your child says it alone.
- I do, we do, you do
- A common name for that three-step rhythm: the adult models, adult and child do it together, then the child does it alone.
- Scaffolding and fading
- Support given while a skill is new (scaffolding), then removed step by step as the child gets stronger (fading). Help that stays after it is needed starts to get in the way.
- In Rumpus Reading: each lesson models a word first, then reduces the visual help across the words that follow.
- Cognitive load
- How much a learner has to hold in mind at once. Young children can hold less than adults, and everything extra on a screen competes with the lesson.
- In Rumpus Reading: each lesson screen holds the new sound plus only what your child already reads automatically.
- Project Follow Through
- A federal study from 1968 to 1977 that compared 22 approaches to teaching young children from low-income families, across more than 350,000 students. Engelmann's Direct Instruction had the best results in basic skills, in reasoning, and in children's confidence. Critics said the results varied too much by school to name a winner, and the findings were never widely acted on. Season 2 of Sold a Story tells the story.
- In Rumpus Reading: one strong line of evidence among several for the way each lesson is built.
- Faultless communication
- Engelmann and Carnine's term for a lesson so clearly designed that a learner can draw only one conclusion from it. Teaching "red" with a red apple and a green apple, and saying "this apple is not red," rules out the other things the child might have thought "red" meant.
- In Rumpus Reading: word chains set the new sound next to an old one, in pairs like sock and shock, so there is only one difference to notice.
- Misrule
- A wrong rule a learner reasonably forms from the examples they were given. A child shown only fractions smaller than one learns that a fraction is always less than one; a child taught "b" and "d" in the same week learns that the two are interchangeable.
- In Rumpus Reading: the sequence keeps look-alike and sound-alike letters weeks apart, and a story never asks for a word your child has not been taught the sounds for.
- Curse of the expert
- Once you know something, it is hard to remember what it was like not to know it. A parent who reads fluently cannot easily see why "m-a-t" is hard, which is why good lessons are designed in advance by people who have watched many beginners.
- In Rumpus Reading: the script says what to say and in what order, so you do not have to work out a beginner's view in the moment.
- Beginners and experts
- Research on how people learn finds that beginners and experts need different instruction. An expert can discover and connect; a beginner has nothing yet to connect, and does best when shown directly. Everyone is a beginner at something new, whatever their background.
- In Rumpus Reading: each sound is shown, said together, and then tried alone, and the help fades only as your child gets stronger.
- Biologically secondary knowledge
- Skills humans are not built to pick up on their own. Talking and walking come naturally; reading, writing, and arithmetic are recent inventions and have to be taught. This is the research answer to the claim that children learn to read naturally.
- In Rumpus Reading: the code is taught directly, one sound at a time, from the first lesson.
- Whole language
- An approach, dominant in American schools from the 1980s, that held that children learn to read the way they learn to talk, by being surrounded by books and meaning, with the letter-sound code picked up along the way. The research does not support it. Season 1 of Sold a Story traces its spread.
- In Rumpus Reading: we leave it out on purpose. Picture books stay in your home for everything they do well; the code is taught.
- Balanced literacy
- The compromise that followed whole language: some phonics, often brief and unsequenced, alongside leveled books and guessing strategies. Many schools still use the name.
- In Rumpus Reading: all of the phonics, in a planned order, and none of the guessing.
- Three-cueing
- A widely used approach that teaches children to guess words from pictures, context, or the first letter. Research does not support it, and it builds habits that get in the way of decoding.
- In Rumpus Reading: we leave it out on purpose.
How learning sticks
- Mastery learning
- Moving to the next skill only once the current one is solid, so gaps do not pile up underneath.
- In Rumpus Reading: the app recommends a new sound only when your child is not already juggling too many unsettled ones, and a sound that did not stick is taught again.
- Spacing effect
- Practice spread out over days is remembered much longer than the same practice crammed into one sitting.
- In Rumpus Reading: every sound your child learns gets its own review schedule.
- Spaced repetition
- A review schedule built on the spacing effect: each item comes back right before it would be forgotten, with the gaps growing as it gets stronger.
- In Rumpus Reading: the app uses a modern spaced-repetition scheduler, starting from cautious settings for young children.
- Retrieval practice
- Pulling something out of memory, instead of looking at it again. It strengthens memory more than rereading. Young children need support to succeed at it.
- In Rumpus Reading: every read is an act of recall, supported so your child succeeds. Within each lesson the help fades across the word chain until your child reads the word cold.
- Fluency
- Reading accurately, at a natural pace, with expression. It grows once most words are read automatically.
- In Rumpus Reading: the stories on story days build the accurate, quick word reading that fluency rests on. You judge each read; the app does not listen to or time your child.
- Automaticity
- Knowing something so well it is fast, accurate, and takes no effort, like reading "the" without thinking. Automatic letter-sounds free up attention for meaning.
- In Rumpus Reading: the app estimates from your child's reviews when each sound is secure, and new sounds are shown beside letters your child already knows that well.