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: A class favorite! The kids had a blast creating their noun town! One of my all-time favorite first grade activities!So much fun my kids ask to play it during constructive...
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. How about your child’s teacher? First stop is your child’s classroom or reading teacher. It can be very convenient if they tutor right there at school. Also, their familiarity with your child’s reading strengths and weaknesses make them an optimal choice for tutoring. Or take tutor recommendations from the teacher. If your child’s teacher is unavailable for tutoring, the next best choice might be someone...
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,...
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...
NOTE: The Handprints publisher was bought out by a larger publisher who decided to drop the series. I am told that the editors are seeking another publisher for the Handprints series. I hate to brag, but I am extremely proud of my series Handprints, the 120 leveled books I wrote for children at the early stages of learning to read. Creating these books, also called leveled readers, was a complicated process, and I wanted them to be different in several ways from other available books of the same type. Leveled Readers Some people think that “leveled” means “simple,” but leveled...
If you haven’t already, check out Teaching Comprehension, Part 1: Learning to Focus on Meaning. Once youngsters have learned to focus on meaning as they read, the next step I take in developing their reading comprehension is to teach them about different types of texts and how they are organized. As I grew up, the meaning of long texts always seemed elusive. Understanding a chapter or article was like trying to catch a bunch of slippery eels that were wriggling through my fingers. I realize now that I was focusing on the individual words, and not the larger text. So...
I don’t know about you, but I can sometimes forget about teaching comprehension! There’s so much to teach beginning readers that it’s easy to put meaning on the back burner. It probably doesn’t help that I have a history of poor reading comprehension myself. Growing up, I had no idea how to focus on meaning as I read, but instead concentrated on identifying word…after word…after word… One time my first grade teacher asked me to read a page to the class. I proudly stood up and read every word correctly, word…after word…after word… Then she asked me to explain what...
What a time for early literacy tutors! Because of the last two years of COVID and the so-called learning gap, tutors are in great demand right now. Isn’t it wonderful to know that we can help? But, due to the changes in our students’ lives during the pandemic, we might want to tweak our approach to teaching beginning readers. (more…)
What a time for early literacy tutors! Because of the last two years of COVID and the so-called learning gap, both in-person and online tutors are in great demand right now. Many studies have shown a loss of achievement in reading as a result of the pandemic, especially for at-risk populations. I’m not here to argue about the reasons that many students are behind academically or the extent of the learning gap. Instead, I want to focus on how you can help as a tutor of beginning readers. In many ways, these suggestions are just what I would recommend for...
I love teaching children about morphemes, because the payoff is so great! Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of a language (e.g., -s, re-, spect, fly). After spending decades focusing on phonemic and phonological awareness, educators are now realizing how important it is to teach morphological awareness as well. Morphological awareness—the ability to use the smallest meaningful word parts to determine a word’s meaning—helps young readers by improving their: word recognitionspellingfluencyvocabularycomprehension We can start teaching morphemes in kindergarten, or even pre-K, and our knowledge of word chunks can expand into adulthood. Word Recognition and Spelling The earliest morphemes a child...
Do you have a student who is struggling with learning to read? I don’t know about you, but every year when I was teaching, I seemed to have one student who worried me far more than the others because he wasn’t progressing in reading. (And it usually was a boy…) Often these children are reluctant readers, as well. They have encountered failure so much that they give up trying. When you read those words, I bet you are immediately thinking of one of your own students, past or present. (more…)
Today I want to talk about teaching letters and letter sounds to beginning readers. A strong alphabet foundation is beneficial, no matter what teaching method you are using.
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...
