In this time of shrinking asset values, a valuable new asset has been added to our web site. And it’s free!

All of you who have used the Stevenson Language Skills Program know the story of the oa friends, and any of you interested in trying Stevenson will soon learn about it. The oa friends are the first vowel pattern that Stevenson students learn, and the way they master this pattern embodies many of the important teaching methods applied in Stevenson. The use of mnemonic clues to teach the elements of phonics, the careful analysis and synthesis of tasks, the application of direct instruction, and the variation of teaching modalities are all there. Oh yes, the idea that learning should be fun is also included.       

The online activity is divided into four sections. The first section is essentially a brief, narrated animation of the oa friends and a demonstration of how they combine with other letters to make words. There are opportunities for students to interact with the oa vowel pattern by clicking on o to make him say his sound, by clicking on his friend a to make him gently kick o, and by underlining the two friends as a pattern. However, Section 1 is mostly introductory as students learn the concept. Sections 2 through 4 involve greater interaction.

In Section 2, students perform a series of basic reading activities, and each time they perform one correctly a piece of candy is added to a bag. When they complete the section, the bag of candy fills up and ultimately explodes. This section requires pupils to match words to pictures, then pictures to words, then select the correct word from a list when one is dictated by the narrator.

Section 3 focuses on spelling. After kids successfully spell words by putting letters into the correct room of a house, they get sprayed with whipped cream - in animated form. In Section 4 the students get to play a game in which they highlight the oa words in a word matrix. When they score enough points a crazy monkey shows up and jumps around the screen briefly until the student moves on.

This computer-based activity is more than just a way to pass time. It reinforces numerous important aspects of the Stevenson lesson(s) on oa. The oa story itself is a mnemonic device that anchors the correct sound-symbol correspondence for this vowel digraph. The online activity recreates the story in an animated, interactive form that amplifies the students’ experience of the information. Various tasks in the online activity require students to focus on the vowel pattern first when reading because vowels are the trickiest part of the English code. These tasks reinforce the Stevenson Seven Special Steps. Both the visual and auditory discrimination of the vowel pattern are also strengthened during the four sections.

This new computer-based activity is not a substitute for direct instruction, but it should enhance the teacher’s effectiveness. Teachers will still need to engage students in a dialogue (as shown in the manual) to focus their attention, and teachers still need to guide students through decoding, encoding and vocabulary tasks in the lesson. However, most teachers feel there is never enough time to cover everything they want to, and the online exercises should decrease the amount of time teachers need to spend reinforcing the key elements of the oa pattern.

This is the first interactive, computer-based exercise Stevenson Learning Skills has produced. Hopefully there will be many more. The plan is to move on to the ai vowel pattern and the whole concept of peanut butter and jelly words, and after that, of course, layer cake words. However, we do not have a separate development department for computer-based instruction, and the entire process has been more time consuming than we anticipated.

We also feel the need to get feedback on what we have done before continuing. When we asked our customers in the last Food For Thought whether they preferred an online activity to a CD/ROM type of product, more people preferred the online concept. However, there were some difficulties synchronizing the sound and the animation, which showed up on some computer networks but not others. Some busy school network systems may also need a few minutes to download the oa story before the student can use it. For such reasons, we may have to produce a disk-based version as well.   We will really want to hear from you, our customers, before we can complete the next component. Therefore, we have opted to provide this current activity for free. That idea seemed particularly helpful to our customers during the current economic climate. We expect to produce several more online components and make them available for free also, while we refine the whole package.