Don’t you love getting ready to tutor a new student? You look forward to getting to know this youngster as a reader, and as a person, too. It’s wonderful to anticipate using your own teaching strengths to help someone else experience the joy of literacy. Aren’t we reading teachers the luckiest people in the world? (more…)
Farrah has come to the word standing in her book. She has progressed to the point where she doesn’t have to read all 7 phonemes in the words sequentially: /s/-/t/-/a/-/n/-/d/-/i/-/ng/. She can identify the word almost immediately because she can see the bigger chunks in the word: st-and-ing > standing. Farrah can do this because she is in the Consolidated-Alphabetic stage. READING STAGES You may have read one or more of my previous posts about Linnea Ehri’s reading stages: Teaching the Pre-Alphabetic Reader: Early Sight Words Teaching the Partial-Alphabetic Reader: Phonetic Cue Reading Teaching the Full-Alphabetic Reader: Cipher Reading Dr. Ehri...
Seth is stuck on a word in a story. The word is irregular, nonphonetic. The letters in the word are not connected with their regular sounds, or at least the sounds he has learned so far at school. The word is night. He tries to decode word phonetically, because that is his go-to reading strategy. He associates the letters with the sounds he knows: /n/ – /ĭ/ – /g/ – /h/ – /t/…./nig-hit/. Seth is in the early Full-Alphabetic stage. He has learned to sound out words letter by letter, but doesn’t yet realize that there are some words that...
Keeping the students focused on school work during the weeks before winter vacation can be challenging for a teacher, under normal circumstances, but with the pandemic this year, holding their attention may require even more effort. Whether you are in the building, teaching remotely, or both, here are a few ideas to help you keep your primary grade students on task as their winter break approaches. (more…)
Given my background, I generally think I know what’s best when it comes to teaching reading. I like to make my own decisions as a tutor, based on my students’ needs and the current research. Ask my former colleagues! I wasn’t much of a team player when it came to teaching language arts. I always wanted to do it my way. Enter COVID…COVID brought me to my knees as a tutor. (more…)
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…)
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…)
Another article in The Reading Teacher has inspired me to write a blog post. This time, the one that caught my attention is about teaching vocabulary through an art project. Isn’t that a novel idea? (Last time it was a piece about metafiction. Never heard of it? Neither had I, but it’s lots of fun! Check it out!) As I read the recent article about learning art words, I thought of you—of how much teachers and parents could learn from the hard work of the teacher who co-wrote the article. (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…)
© 2015 · manyroadstoreading.com All rights reserved.