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Are your students getting worked up about Halloween? Let’s face it. This can be a challenging time for teachers! All kids can think about is their costumes and the candy they will be collecting in their Halloween bags! One way to harness children’s pre-holiday excitement is by focusing their enthusiasm on engaging reading and writing activities. A perfect example is the Halloween Writing Activity, a guessing game, masking as a writing activity. (Pun intended!) Students create a descriptive paragraph about the costume they plan to wear, with one important modification. They keep their costume a secret! (Stay tuned to find […]
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Are you looking for a fun grammar activity—one that your students will beg you to do again and again? Then try my bestseller Noun Town, where students place full-color images of people, places, and things on a map, and then match printed word cards to the images. In my opinion, Noun Town is terrific, but don’t take my word for it! Check out what other teachers have said about it: Teachers have also left wonderful ideas about specific ways to use Noun Town. I’ve organized those comments into Who, What, Where, When, and How they suggest teaching with Noun Town. […]
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I bet I’m not the only educator who has had teaching nightmares in anticipation of the new school year. I’ve had many of them, including last night. And I’m retired! What’s strange is that this nightmare was about a topic I’ve dreamed about many times before: my teaching schedule. In my recurrent bad dream… You have probably figured out, if you didn’t know already, that schedules are a big deal to teachers! Teaching is exhausting. When you work with kids, you are “on” every minute, and much of your day is unpredictable. So having a “good” schedule makes a huge […]
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Phonics is in the news again–in the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, in Time Magazine. As usual, journalists are placing phonics at one end of a reading spectrum. But this time, the dichotomy is no longer between: Now the two ends of the supposed teaching spectrum are: “The three cueing system” is the term Emily Hanford used in her radio podcast, “At a Loss for Words” (apmreports.org/reading). There are several myths about “cueing,” or using reading cues. So let’s look at some facts about reading cues. Now that more research is available on the stages children go through […]
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Are you hoping your child can get a little extra help in reading this year after school? Here are some suggestions for finding someone to help your child at the end of the school day. Once you have a few names of prospective tutors, it’s time to narrow down your choices. If you don’t know a teacher already, interview them on the phone, online, or preferably in person. Many prospective tutors will offer a free meet-and-greet session, to show you where they tutor and with what materials. Make a list of your questions before the meeting. Don’t be afraid to […]
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Want to start the school year off in the best way you can for your kindergarten or first grade reading students? The magic word is ASSESSMENT! Conducting proper assessments early on saves time and allows you to teach what your students need, rather than waste time going over what they already know. Whole group assessments, in particular, are quick and easy to administer, as opposed to one-on-one evaluations, where you have to find something for the rest of the group to do while you administer them. I’m going to show you four informal whole group assessments that you can create yourself, […]
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The topic of phonics is popping up all over the place–not just with teachers and parents, not just on MY blog (!)–but in the news media and general interest magazines, as well. However, I’ve noticed a lot of misconceptions out there about teaching phonics, and I’d like to clear up a few of them. Misconception #1: There’s no such thing as too much phonics. If teaching phonics is a good thing, it might seem that more phonics is always better. But phonics can be overemphasized at the expense of other aspects of reading, such as fluency and comprehension. Furthermore, phonics […]
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Did you know that “my” previous post about phonics was written by artificial intelligence? It’s surprisingly good, but while AI can scan the web for information and put it together, it doesn’t know my opinion about phonics–at least not yet! So here it is. Do you struggle with whether or not to teach phonics? I did for a long time, but no longer. Phonics YES I was a phonics proponent even before I heard about the “phonics wars” or “science of reading.” Both my early training and my teaching experience convinced me that it was essential to teach my students […]
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I’ve been struggling for ages with trying to write a post about the pros and cons about teaching phonics. I guess it’s been hard because the topic is so controversial, and my opinion about teaching phonics is complicated. So, while taking a workshop on writing with artificial intelligence (AI), I asked chat.openai.com to write an opinion about teaching phonics. I think you’ll be interested in its (their??) answer! MY PROMPT: Write an opinion about teaching phonics. AI RESPONSE: As an AI language model, I don’t have personal opinions, but I can provide an overview of the benefits and potential drawbacks […]
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It’s March, a tough time for teachers–no vacations, looming standardized tests, and distractible students. For the kids, all it takes is one warm day, and spring fever kicks in! How can we keep our students focused on learning this time of year? One approach is to review skills you taught last fall. For many in your class, those lessons are a distant memory, and now is a good time to brush up on them. Going over strategies your students have already learned adds to their competence — and confidence. In early spring, you also still have time before the end […]
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Are you teaching a struggling reader right now — one who keeps you up at night, worrying about how to help them? As teachers, our first impulse is to focus on the child: Or we blame the parent: But we teachers don’t have control over the child or the parent! Of course you know where I’m going with this. What do we have control over? Ourselves! Our teaching! So let’s think about what we can do to help the child who is having difficulty learning to read. Now that you have a list of ways to help your struggling reader, […]
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Where should you tutor, if you still have the COVID virus alive and spreading around you? For me the answer is easy, because I’m germ-paranoid: ONLINE! I’ve written several posts about tutoring online: Online Tutoring Adventure Online Tutoring: Keep it Personal Online Tutoring: Be Humble But today I’m going to address tutoring in person (no pun intended). Maybe you know all about that, but the pandemic adds a few complications to your normal tutoring routine. Here are some suggestions: This sounds like a lot to take care of, doesn’t it? And, if you were tutoring at your student’s home, you […]
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Toward the middle of the year, many of us like to conduct reading assessments to evaluate our students’ progress. But guess what! The way our students perform on midyear assessments can also shed light on our own success as reading teachers. Are you ready to take a look at yourself? Halfway through the school year is a good time to reflect on the job we are doing in the classroom. We’ve worked with our students long enough to give us a true picture of their progress, yet we have enough time left to make a difference with our instructional adjustments, such as: […]
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Oh, my goodness! Did you know that syllable types were first standardized by Noah Webster in 1806? Let’s thank Noah because syllable types make life easier for teachers and students, alike! For children who are learning to read, studying syllable patterns helps with mastering vowel sounds, one of the most challenging parts about decoding. For us teachers, introducing syllable types is a great way to reinforce phonics instruction, no matter which approach we are using. Showing students one syllable type at a time keeps decoding instruction simple. As you know, a syllable is a word or part of a word […]
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We teachers know that, when we haven’t fully planned the day’s lessons, our students act out! Oh, yes, it’s important to be fully planned for the day, and even more so at winter holiday time. The kids know that time off is approaching, so it’s hard for them to focus on school work. An engaging writing activity is a great way to keep the kids focused before vacation. With the writing process approach, the students can complete a different part of the writing project each day, leading up to a sharing day on that last day of school. The unique […]
