by Sue Klapec
There is a significant difference between word walls and sound walls. Both are excellent educational tools with their own set of benefits. When I first began teaching, almost 20 years ago, it was an expectation that a space in my classroom would be dedicated to use as a word wall. The space had to be rather large since I would need to display all 26 letters of the alphabet and leave room for the high-frequency or vocabulary words to go beneath each letter. I would add words to our word wall throughout the school year at the beginning of each new unit. I spent a great deal of my time laminating and cutting out the 100+ words used throughout the school year. I would repeat this process with every grade level change or curriculum change if I needed to add in different words. If I’m being honest… during my first ten years as a classroom teacher, I don’t know that my students ever really utilized my word wall the way I had intended, and perhaps that’s my fault for not teaching them how to use it effectively.
I do know that when I switched from teaching upper elementary students to primary and intervention students, I found a lot of issues with having my “word wall” as a focal point in my classroom. Now, it’s important to note that word walls are excellent for helping students expand their vocabulary. It’s useful to display high-frequency words and content-specific words we were learning about in science and socialist studies. Word walls can serve as a visual reference for students to refer to when working on reading and writing tasks. You don’t necessarily have to sort word walls alphabetically – but rather you can group words into word families or categories, and help students understand the relationships between words and their meanings. While these are all great reasons to have a word wall, it didn’t help my students in the K-2 setting, especially for my students struggling with reading.
About 10 years ago, I switched to using “sound walls” in my classroom. Sound walls are different from word walls in that they focus on phonemic awareness, letter-sound correspondence, spelling support, and phonics patterns. Sound walls are organized by taking the smallest units of sound in a language (phonemes) and their corresponding letter or letter combinations (graphemes). Keyword sound pictures are often paired with the letter or letter combinations to help students remember the sound of that letter combination. For example, under the “ar” vowel team sound you might see a graphic of a car or a star. Beneath a “ch” digraph card you might see a picture of cheese or an arrow pointing to a person’s chin. When students are writing or spelling, they can refer to our sound wall to see what possible letter or letter combinations they could use when trying to sound out and write a word. This has given my first graders the confidence to just start writing, without stressing over whether they know how to spell a new word exactly. I also love it when a sound wall includes a picture of what position your mouth will be in when making that sound. Think about the shape your mouth makes when you say the long e sound as opposed to the short o sound. This can provide scaffolding for your emergent readers in your classroom. So if classroom wall space is limited, and I have to choose, I will forever choose to hang a Sound Wall vs. a Word Wall. It has been such a game-changer for my beginning readers and those needing reading intervention.
Today, my classroom features a sound wall with picture clues for reading, spelling, and writing support, which my students utilize daily. But for my more confident readers and writers, I couldn't quite abandon the use of a "word wall". However, instead of dedicating another space in my classroom, I made individual “Writing Word Walls” for my students and sorted our high-frequency and vocabulary words by units of instruction specific to our current reading curriculum. I also included categories of frequently used words. Some of my categories include family words (mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother, etc .), color words, number words, and local community words (our town, school name, classmate names, state, etc.). The word lists are laminated and stapled inside a file folder that they can set up on their desk when working on their writing tasks.
What are your thoughts on word walls vs. sound walls? If you are a teacher, I’m curious to know which one you use, or if you use both! If you utilize a sound wall, do your students in need of reading intervention benefit from it? If your child struggles with high-frequency words or spelling, download my free Sound Wall resource for some extra at-home support. If you are interested in private, reading intervention for your child, don’t hesitate to contact me and set up a free consultation today!
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