Remember Liza? If you read that previous Liza post, you met that preschooler when she was at the earliest stage of learning to read—the Pre-Alphabetic stage. She knew a few letters but no letter sounds, so reading was primarily a visual matching task for her. If she remembered any words, it was usually through partial visual cues, such as associating the word look with two eyes in the middle. Now we will see how Liza moved on to the next stage. As she began to learn a few letter sounds she progressed into the Partial-Alphabetic phase. Although not able to...
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…)
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…)
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…)
When Many Roads to Reading popped into my head as a name for my website, I knew I had hit the jackpot, for the title encompasses many aspects of reading I care passionately about: the stages of learning to read; different ways we can teach reading; reading styles and dyslexic subtypes; various types of beginning reading texts. (more…)
