Are you or your reading students suffering from the “midyear blues”? For many teachers, this midwinter halfway point in the school year is a challenging time. Some of our students have stopped putting much effort into learning to read. Perhaps they were practicing inefficient reading strategies that are no long working for them, or maybe the text level is just too frustrating, so they’ve given up. We adults may be having trouble focusing on day to day lessons, as well, with worries such as report cards, parent conferences, and high stakes tests. And, yes, we’re also fretting about those children...
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…)
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!
