Tutoring reading is wonderful because you can concentrate on the needs of one child at a time. But it’s important to figure out what to focus on in each brief lesson. I say “brief” because some young readers can only concentrate for half an hour at a time. And even an hour seems short, if the parent wants only one lesson a week. (Sadly, once-a-week tutoring arrangements are becoming increasingly common, as children are engaged in more and more activities.) Yes, tutoring time is precious, so it’s important to be clear about what your focus is for each lesson. (more…)
Meet Liza. Liza was “reading” a book. The text said: I see a puppy. Liza read: “Look at the little dog.” She could match the meaning of the text to the illustrations because she heard the language pattern during the book introduction, but she was not yet ready to match her voice to the text, or to monitor her attempts phonetically. Thus, she made semantic errors (errors that match meaning). Liza was a Pre-Alphabetic reader. Young children go through different stages as they learn to read. When we figure out the stage a student is on, we can adjust...
Some educators argue that teaching children to memorize sight words encourages guessing. But is there a place for teaching sight words? I believe there is. What are sight words, anyway? The term is often confused with high frequency words and irregular or nonphonetic words. These categories overlap, for sure, but sight words are simply words that can be immediately recognized as wholes, without being decoded. There are several reasons why I teach sight words to beginning readers. (more…)
Many teachers cringe when they hear the word testing, mainly because so much of it is mandated at the national, state, and district level. Weeks of classroom time have been stolen to both prepare for and administer high stakes standardized (norm-referenced)[i] tests with little or no benefit to our students. And, for some of us, our jobs have depended on our students doing well on these time-consuming tests. Talk about stress! (more…)
It’s been a while since I posted here, mainly because I’ve been in Puppy Land! Yes, I know: excuses, excuses. But don’t worry! Between working on potty training and basic tricks, I’ve still been thinking about teaching reading. (more…)
It’s that time of year again! At the middle of the year, the honeymoon is over for reading teachers. We have to face the fact that, no matter how carefully we have chosen books and planned our lessons, there are going to be some students in our guided reading groups who aren’t progressing as they should. And, contrary to what you might think, these children aren’t always in our lowest reading groups. But don’t feel bad. (more…)
Boo! I love teaching guided reading at Halloween time—especially to emergent readers! I’d like to share some of my teaching points and materials with you. Most kindergartners and 1st graders like to be a little bit scared, but, even more than that, they love to scare adults! This is why they are eager to learn to read and write boo, and much of my teaching this time of the year centers around the word. Boo! (more…)
Guided reading time is so precious! Don’t you agree? As a classroom teacher, it was one of the few times I got to observe my students up close. Even as a reading specialist I was hyper protective of my guided reading sessions. (Just ask the classroom teachers I worked with…I probably drove them crazy! Ha-ha!) During my years of teaching guided reading, I’ve come up with a number of techniques and materials to make the best of that special instructional time. I’ll share a few of those with you. (more…)
Teaching time is precious… …especially guided reading time, when we can differentiate our instruction and observe our kindergarten, 1st, or 2nd grade students more closely than we can in the whole class setting. That’s why I used to get frustrated at the beginning of the year, both as a reading specialist and a classroom teacher. There is so much else to do—collecting papers from home, teaching classroom routines, touring the building, and after all that, finding time to give individual testing. Yes, I used to believe that I had to give running records and other diagnostic tests to all my students...
Don’t you love that look of surprise in a student’s eyes, when he realizes that he’s not struggling with reading anymore? I do! That’s one of the reasons I teach fluency early on when working with young readers. The other reason is that fluent reading produces a wonderful domino effect. You don’t have to wait for fluency to evolve on its own, after a child has mastered decoding in 3rd or 4th grade. Fluency can—and should—be taught, and earlier than you might think! (more…)
My Handprints leveled books received a wonderful commendation from a colleague last week. This man is an early literacy professional par excellence, with many years’ experience teaching not only children, but teachers, as well. After I told him that I am self-publishing now, through Teachers Pay Teachers, he remarked that the Handprints books were highly successful with young readers, and then he told me why. (more…)
Do you know a reluctant reader? If so, whether you are a parent or a teacher, I hope you will find some suggestions below to help. As a reading specialist and classroom teacher, I’ve had the opportunity of working with many reluctant readers, and they have taught me a lot! Reluctant comes from a Latin word meaning “to struggle against.” These children struggle against reading because reading is a struggle for them. In order to teach these students, I had to come up with a variety of solutions (okay, tricks) to get them to read. (more…)
Spring is here…Yea! Welcome to a repeat edition of Book Box. Here again is a themed list of leveled books, this time about spring. Two of my favorite authors are Kris Bonnell and Michele Dufresne. We authors of leveled readers learn from each other–and from the kids, of course! Thank you, Kris and Michele, for your wonderful books. Happy Spring, everybody!
Can you believe that it’s already September and back-to-school time? Welcome to the fall edition of Book Box. You may recall that, every season, I like to post books by my favorite leveled reader authors. Click here to read the list. I hope your students will enjoy reading these books–and that you will appreciate how helpful they are for nurturing young readers!
Many of us learned how to make notations to code a student’s oral reading: check marks, dashes, A for Appeal, T for Told, R for Repeat, and so on. I’m going to assume that you already know the basics of how to code a running record. Along the way, I have picked up other abbreviations and notations that help me describe a student’s reading either during assessment or simply during a reading lesson. (more…)
