5 Reasons Puzzles are Important for your Class
“A child’s work is play” by Maria Montessori Children learn when they play and I want to tell you why puzzles are important for your student’s development. When I was a new teacher one of my mentors told me that if a student can do a puzzle they can learn to read. I gave all […]
How to Blend CVC Words to Nurture Super Readers
It breaks my heart that many teachers do not really know how to teach their students to read. It seems like it should be something that is taught in college or at least at the Masters level. But still there are many teachers that just don’t even know where to begin to help their students […]
How to Teach Phoneme Isolation
Teaching Phoneme Isolation The sounds in words are called phonemes. Students need to be able to hear the individual sounds in words in order to be able to spell and map the words. Students who muffle sounds in speaking end up skipping those sounds in spelling. The identifying of initial sound is usually one of […]
Activities for Letter Identification
Many programs include assessments to evaluate the knowledges letter names. There are many activities for Letter Identification. Some of these assessments test uppercase letters and lowercase letters separately some of these assessment test lowercase letters only since most material that we read is in lower case. From teachers college to Heggerty to a homemade assessments […]
Divide the Words into Syllables
Dividing words in syllables is hard work. Teaching students how to divide syllables is an important skill. The rules for dividing syllables are easy when taught explicitly. Dividing words into syllables helps with decoding and encoding. According to IMSE, “ syllable division utilizes direct, systematic instruction for breaking phonetic, multisyllabic, words into small manageable chunks […]
What Level Should First Graders be Reading at?
What level should my child be reading at is a question I get as a parent and as a teacher everybody wants to know where their child falls in relation to other children. What level should a kindergartener be reading at? The problem is there’s no one way to assess a child’s reading . Some […]
The Wonderous World of the Decoding of Words
The decoding of words is translating print to speech in a quick way by matching the letters to the sounds they represent. Roughly 30% of students struggle with decoding. You may not know what this means, decoding of words is sounding out words but it’s not as easy as it sounds. Decoding words meaning voicing […]
I Didn’t Know How to Teach Reading
I am not happy to admit this but its true… when I first started teaching I had no idea how to teach reading. I had great books to use but I really had no idea what I was doing. Most of the kids in that class learned to read that year despite my lack of […]