Learning to read doesn’t just happen one day. It is a series of steps that occur over time in a, more or less, sequential order. For example, children learn to segment two words that occur together, such as baseball into \base\ \ball\ before they learn how to segment syllables into sounds: united becomes \k\ \a\ \t\ \n\ \i\ \p\. Essentially, there is an order to the development of phonemic awareness and if it is not followed, children with a disability in reading are left behind as they do not move forward in these developmental stages. As their peers progress through the different stages, they are left to guessing by looking at the first and last letter of the word and guessing or just giving up altogether.
One idea suggested by Patricia J. Eleden-Smith in her article How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities for Collaborative Classrooms in November 1997 is for the classroom teacher who makes use of whole word techniques to work with a special educator who makes use of phonics to match their curriculums up and present the topic together. They would choose the topic, most likely a literature book, but it could also be about gardening or an event that took place, pick out a few words that match the development level of the students and spend 15 to 20 minutes talking about the spelling rules. This technique of collaborative teaching would assist all the students in their both spelling rules and language use.