These Sight Word Fluency Pyramid Task Cards are a perfect way for your students to practice reading and build fluency! There are 39 task cards in all all. They include all 39 Pre-Primer Dolch Sight Words. Each card is numbered and the focus sight word is highlighted in red throughout the card. I u...
Every morning, at the start of our Morning Meeting, we recite our five classroom rules. The rules I use are similar to Whole Brain Teaching's, but with a twist. I use the set from The Polka Dot Patch. You can read all of the specifics on the rules and gestures HERE. Something fun that we do every Friday is reciting the rules in a different voice. It helps keep up the interest and engagement, plus, we all need a laugh Friday morning :) I have seen different fluency practice ideas a lot on Pinterest and I think these would be a wonderful resource for rule-reciting. Sometimes the Meeting Leader has an idea themselves- one girl decided to recite the rules as if we all had a mouth full of food!- but other times, the student may need some inspiration. Find these at I Love 2 Teach! All I am doing is printing these on cardstock, laminating them, and putting a binder ring though a hole in the top corner. I will keep these near our Morning Meeting Bucket and talking ball for our Meeting Leader to use if he/she needs them. Do you have these fluency cards in your class? Try incorporating them into your rule recitation- it's a great way to wrap up the week!
Break up the mid-winter slump and bring a Fluency Boot Camp into your classroom! What is a Fluency Boot Camp? No... you will not be shipping your students off (sorry), nor will students have to march around the room (your choice), but I can guarantee that your students' brains will be sweating as they participate in the classroom fluency camp you create! Just like any boot camp, students will build confidence through practice and drills. You can organize it for just one day, or you can set it up to last a full-week or month! Keep in mind, after just
Does your reader sometimes sound like he’s just saying a string of words? Is it sometimes choppy? This can happen to all kinds of young readers, especially struggling readers. Instead of focusing on reading fluency and phrasing, struggling readers are often just trying to make sure they can say all the words correctly. Last week, The Measured ... Read More about Reading Fluency and Phrasing {Using Scooping Phrases}
What exactly does it mean to read fluently?
Hi, I'm Magy. I love reading and writing, and I love to teach reading and writing. Currently, I'm a K-8 Reading Specialist, but I've also taught in High
It's important to help our students build their morphological awareness, but how can we do this? By using controlled text!
Hi everyone, My little learners have been working SO hard on their reading these past few months and I am VERY excited to show what what they have been up to!
Looking for fluency activities? I just updated my fluency freebie. I added some short passages. If you need longer passages, I recommend visiting Reading A to Z. This is a great site with leveled passages. There are even some free books that you can download. Click HERE to get your freebie.
Freckle helps K-12 teachers differentiate instruction and reach every student at their own level across Math, ELA, Social Studies and Science.
The English language is a tricky one. There are so many rules for kids to learn, that only require them to
Make learning word roots fun with these word roots activities and printables. It will surely increase your kids' reading comprehension and vocabulary.
Prefix, suffix, and root lesson using morphology notebooks Are you teaching prefixes, suffixes, and roots? I strive for a literacy-rich classroom. Developing morphological-rich awareness is a basic building block for reading comprehension, spelling, and even fluency. If a student can pronounce and know what a “tyrannosaurus rex,” they are more than capable of interpreting a […]
A visual illustration of the hierarchy of skills required in children’s reading skills
Today I wanted to stop by and share some strategies for teaching vowel teams and diphthongs in our classroom! It’s always challenging to teach spelling patterns that aren’t easily decodable! […]
What does "when pigs fly" mean if pigs can't really fly? Kids use context clues to learn the meanings of common idioms on this third grade reading worksheet.
Reading Character Wheel Freebie
SQ3R has been around for several years, it has proven effective in my classroom for several years so it is a strategy I teach every year. I have added a few extra details to how I use it in my classr
CLOSE Reading Expository Worksheet At the end of this article, I provide a Close Reading Expository Worksheet for you to freely download and use with the next close reading of an expository article, document, selection from a textbook, etc. You will see a few revisions to what many publishers are selling as the close reading
This worksheet is for Elementary school students at Beginner level who learn reading and their vocabulary is not too big. The worksheet is good for developing Reading and Writing skills.There are 8 exercises with short "e and o " sounds. - ESL worksheets
Close reading is one good reading strategy; however, it does have limitations and ignores important reading research. There are other reading strategies.
Not all great resources come with a hefty price! Evan-Moor offers free downloadable printables for science, STEM, math, reading, language, and social studies curriculums. Try out these award-winning resources for the classroom and home with these free sample activities. You will need to provide...
Make reading exciting for your students with these fun phoneme segmentation activities for kindergarten! They are a fun way to support these essential literacy skills so you can set your students up for reading success. Thanks to new research about how we really learn how to read, we now know that it's more important than ever to fully develop our students' phonemic awareness skills before we expect them to read the written word! Students learn best when they start with something concrete and gradually move to the abstract. This new research about synthetic phonics tells us that our students’ reading abilities are directly linked to how well they can identify and manipulate the sounds in words. This makes sense. Speaking is a physical act; all of us understand it intuitively. Reading, however, is an abstract skill that requires consistent and explicit instruction. Our kindergarten kiddos need us to start with what they know - spoken language - so they can learn to read more efficiently and to ensure all our students are set up for literacy success. What is phoneme segmentation? Although it's easy to lump this skill in with the whole bubble of phonemic awareness skills, segmentation is about breaking a word into individual sounds. It's an intermediate phonemic awareness skill preceded by phoneme isolation and phoneme blending. They all fit within the umbrella of phonological awareness skills. Learn more about these different terms in Phonics vs Phonemic Awareness. Levels of Phonemic Awareness Phoneme isolation Phoneme blending Phoneme segmentation Phoneme addition Phoneme deletion Phoneme substitution At this stage, your students should be able to hear a word and break it into sounds. The word frog should become /f/ /r/ /o/ /g/. The word cat should become /c/ /a/ /t/. This can be taught in many different ways, and it's an essential skill to practise throughout kindergarten. How do you make phoneme segmentation fun & engaging for kindergarten students with a short attention span? I highly recommend getting hands-on! Use manipulatives and include a variety of physical movements, like drawing, playing, clapping, and more, to help make this learning as engaging as possible. To them, it will feel like play, but they’ll be laying the foundation for their future phonics skills and reading abilities every single day! 7 Phoneme Segmentation Activities for Kindergarten There are countless ways to practise identifying and segmenting phonemes! You can turn almost any material into a tool, depending on how you use it. You don't need to buy all of the tools right away, and you can often get by using materials you already have on hand! Be creative and focus on the skill, not the stuff. 1. Listening to Sounds in Words This is the easiest and most simplistic phonemic awareness activity. Your kids need only their ears (and maybe some fingers) to identify and segment the individual phonemes in different words. It will take time for your kindergarten students to get used to this concept at the beginning of the school year, but if you keep modelling and practising, they'll get it! Start by modelling this practice yourself. Break apart words verbally. Starting with your thumb, lift a finger for each phoneme you hear. Examples Dog: /d/ /o/ /g/ House: /h/ /ow/ /s/ Chin: /ch/ /i/ /n/ 2. Sound Boxes Also known as Elkonin boxes, sound boxes are a phenomenal way to support your students to identify the individual sounds in words. This practice supports orthographic mapping, which helps your students encode these spelling patterns to their long-term memory more efficiently than traditional memorisation. These are best to use when your students have had a chance to isolate and blend sounds together, but you can also use them from day one of your instruction. Essentially, students listen for the different sounds in a given word to get used to breaking them up. When they're ready to start writing, add the letter or groups of letters representing that sound in each box. For example, digraphs would go in one box since they represent one unique sound. This visual approach really makes this abstract concept easier to understand. It's such an effective skill that I recommend using it with your whole group, small groups, or independent practice every single day. Any time you introduce a new word from your word list, run it through a sound box first! You could also use these googly eyes to make it even more fun! There are a bunch of great sound box activities and templates on my site to get you started: Animal Word Mapping Mats CVC Orthographic Mapping Activities Free Printable Word Mapping Templates 3. Interactive Digital Slides Since we have so many little things to track every single day, I highly recommend incorporating custom digital slides! I created them to be interactive to keep interest high, evidence-based to make them powerful and effective, and convenient so you won't have to worry about hunting down missing materials again. I have a variety of slides to support different phonemic awareness skills, including: Phonological awareness slides: These are perfect for the beginning of the school year! Practise counting the words in sentences, identifying the beginning and ending sound in words, and more. In the 'count the sound' slides, the sound buttons are animated to flash as you say each sound. Heart words interactive slides: Instead of teaching sight words the old-fashioned way, teach them using the best evidence-based practices to help your students learn them faster than ever. As part of The Hive, you'll also have access to my plethora of sound boxes and phonics activities! The Hive is an intuitively designed and nimble digital teacher planner, but it’s also so much more. It includes literally hundreds of custom-built apps, downloads, printables, and more, so you can set up your entire day in just one program. You'll be able to incorporate these phonemic awareness activities into your daily lessons and routines with no extra prep at all! Join The Hive today and check it out! 4. Rhyming Games One of the best ways to teach young children phoneme segmentation is by playing rhyming games! Kids love listening for rhyming words, and there are so many great rhyming books for kindergarten to reinforce this skill. Most rhyming focuses on the vowel sound, which can be tricky to identify as they often sound similar. Start by identifying word families (-all: ball, call, fall, etc) and then incorporate these rhyming words activities. Once they're ready, challenge them to listen for rhymes in longer passages, like with these poetry games. 5. Missing Sound Task Cards One fun, accessible way to practice this skill is to incorporate picture cards with missing sounds. Students will need to say the name of the item on the card to identify the lost sound. Note- this is a more advanced way to practise segmenting, as it also incorporates phonics skills. For example, if there is a picture of a pig and the letters __ig, students will need to think or say the word
Help your students become more confident readers with this fun and interactive passage, perfect for Christmas! Students will build stamina and fluency while finding text evidence, making inferences, and learning about Christmas in Finland.
If someone loses their glasses, are they as blind as a bee or a bat? This fill-in-the-blank worksheet introduces your child to popular similes.
Problem: I would love to study poetry with my class but I'm not sure how to go about it. Solution: Read on! Here is a way to structure a week-long study of poetry: Preparation -
Much of English derives from other languages. Let's take a brief look at the history of the English language. Plus, download FREE vocabulary resources.
