early literacy – Ann Staman Hollingworth

Teaching the Consolidated-Alphabetic Reader: Reading in Chunks

Jan 17, 2021

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...

Teaching the Full-Alphabetic Reader: Cipher Reading

Nov 30, 2020

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...

Teaching the Partial-Alphabetic Reader: Phonetic Cue Reading

Dec 30, 2019

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...

The best tests don’t stress. They assess.

Jul 23, 2017

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…)

Teaching Tip: Vocabulary Development in the Content Areas

Sep 16, 2016

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…)

Fluency: The Domino Effect

Jun 12, 2016

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…)