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...
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...
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…)
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…)
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...
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!
Have you ever heard of metafiction? I hadn’t until I read Sylvia Pantaleo’s article,“The metafictive nature of postmodern picture books” in The Reading Teacher. [i] Now I’m a metafictive picture book convert and want to share my enthusiasm with you! I know. The term sounds serious, but it’s not. Metafiction is fun. In fact, some metafictive picture books are the silliest books I have ever read, and others are just flat out creative! Kids love them, and you will, too–but first a little background information. (more…)
