If you teach kindergarten through 2nd grade, you know that guided reading is an essential component of literacy instruction. The way I’ve conducted guided reading has changed over the years and some people aren’t fond of the term guided reading, but small-group reading instruction is essential in order to differentiate and meet your students’ needs in reading. Planning for guided reading used to be very time-consuming. I found myself trying to find resources from different places in order to fill the gaps my students had. And sometimes I'd plan a lesson, then notice something else my kids needed while reading, so I'd want to teach that skill but didn't have a resource on hand to help. So I created guided reading warm-ups to help get my kids’ brains ready for reading, remind them of important phonics skills and reading strategies, and have everything I needed for any necessary skills that popped up during small-group ... read more
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Stretching Words Out: Emergent Writing Strategy
It can be daunting for emergent writers to stretch out words, especially long words. Many of my kindergarten students are very artistic and can add details to their pictures, but when I ask them to add words, they sometimes hesitate or tell me they don't know how to, even if they do have some letter-sound knowledge. Writing Warm-Ups To get kids to see that they are able to write some words, I started doing writing "warm-ups" at the beginning of our independent writing sessions, and it has already helped many of my students become more risk-takers with spelling. First, kids need to understand what saying a word slowly is. If you tell a student to stretch out a word, they may not understand what you mean. However, if you remind them of Dory in Finding Nemo and show them a clip of her "speaking whale," they'll be sure to quickly learn how to say a word slowly (and they'll likely not want to stop)! Here's an adorable clip: Dory ... read more
Fun Ways to End the School Year with a Bang
Between organizing, packing, cleaning, summer vacation excitement, and class management, the end of the year can be a little overwhelming. But despite everything you have to do, you still want to enjoy your students and make it memorable! I'm sharing some fun ways to end the school year and make great memories with your students! Balloon Pop On the last day of school, we had "Memory Day" and I filled a bunch of balloons (one for each student plus a few extras) with slips of paper. The slips had questions about the year, for example, What was your favorite book/ field trip/ event this year? I also had some fun ones, like Sing your favorite song, Do a silly dance, and Tell us a joke. When kids came in on the last day, it made them so excited to see the colorful balloons taped to our wall and they couldn't wait to pop them! I saved one balloon in a corner and popped it last. What did its slip say? GROUP HUG! Memory ... read more
Tips for Making a Unique End-of-Year Memory Book
There's not much I remember from my first-grade class and end-of-year memory books weren't really a thing back then, but I SO wish I did have one to look through now that I'm older! Nowadays, there are all kinds of wonderful end-of-year memory books and most teachers I know have their students complete one each year. If there is ever a year to appreciate and celebrate getting through, this is it! Whether you create your own or use a pre-made paper or digital one, here are some ideas to make a unique end-of-year memory book your kids and their families will cherish! 4 Ideas for Unique End-of-Year Memory Books 1. Include a Mix of Pictures Most memory books allow space for kids to draw themselves, which is great because their pictures are just so adorable. I also love to add some real photos taken of them in school since parents likely don't have any of them in the classroom. In my end-of-year memory book, I have a ... read more
Phonics-Based Sight Word Activities
For years, kids have been taught to memorize high-frequency sight words because they don't follow phonics rules. I'm guilty of having done this, but changed my practices and learned how to really make sight words stick, using phonics. Now that we know that kids need to learn words by orthographically mapping them out (learn the sound/letter relationships to store them into memory), incorporating phonics-based sight word activities will boost your students' sight word knowledge! Here are my favorite phonics-based sight word activities that make sight word practice fun for your kids! 5 Phonics-Based Sight Word Activities to Make Them Stick "Grapheme" it Out! Write words on graph paper, placing one sound in each box. Model first tapping out the word to hear one sound at a time, then writing the letter/s (grapheme) that make that sound. Word Sort Sort words that have similarities. This is a great activity to ... read more
How to Teach Making Inferences: Comprehension Strategy
There are few lessons I love to introduce more than making inferences! Kids love to be detectives so when I come out from behind my desk in my trench coat and detective hat, holding my oversized magnifying lens, and hum the Mission Impossible song as I furtively sneak up to the board, it's always a big hit! It's ok that my hat is really a plastic safari hat. And that my "trench coat" is really just a rain jacket. It works, and they get so excited to become inference detectives! Making inferences is a skill we use constantly and it's so important for reading comprehension! This is why we need to teach making inferences in an explicit way, giving opportunities for lots of practice, breaking it down into easy steps, and gradually becoming more complex. Here are my best tips for how to teach making inferences to students in kindergarten, first, and second grade. How to Teach Making Inferences Kids need to learn that ... read more
How to Teach the Chunky Monkey Reading Strategy
By now, I think all educators can agree that phonics instruction is key in teaching kids to read. Decoding strategies should be phonics-based to ensure kids focus on the print first, rather than pictures or context clues. This will help them later on when pictures disappear with more advanced text. I’ve written about decoding strategies before and want to share one of my favorite ones with you- chunking words with the Chunky Monkey reading strategy. Sounding a word out letter by letter is a helpful decoding strategy and an important stage in reading. Read here how I help kids with step-by-step decoding. The next step is recognizing chunks and using them to help with decoding words. Reading chunks can not only help kids decode a word faster than sounding out letter by letter, but it can help them decode more accurately (ex: recognizing digraphs, vowel teams, silent e words). WHAT IS A CHUNK? A chunk is any part of a ... read more
15 Easy Activities to Increase Fluency
Did you see the movie Zootopia? Well, there's a famous scene at the DMV where a sloth takes fooooooreeeeever to help the main character, who is in a huge rush! Even the sloth's laugh is super slow and the whole scene is really very funny. While it's hilarious in a cartoon movie, when it happens in person, it's anything but! Over the years, I've had students who read too fast and make careless errors, read too slow and forget what they were reading, or read at a good pace but in a monotone voice. All of these problems have to do with fluency. Fluency is the ability to read text at an appropriate speed, with accuracy and expression. When kids don't have fluency, not only do they sound choppy, but their comprehension also suffers. Luckily, I have some fluency practice activities to help your kids increase their fluency and comprehension! 1. Model Robot Reading This usually gets them giggling. Speak like a robot ... read more
Spelling Strategies for Beginning Writers
"Teacher, how do you spell (insert any word here)?" If you teach kindergarten or first grade, it's a question you likely hear all. the. time! I know we wish we could clone ourselves during writing time so we could sit with each student and help them with their spelling, BUT of course we can't. If we really could clone ourselves, though, I'd probably opt for other tasks: cleaning, cooking, laundry... but I digress. Since we can't sit with everyone at once, we need to teach them to become independent with spelling strategies. The earlier you teach your students spelling strategies, the more. . . independent they will be when writing! Below are some strategies that are helpful for early writers. I can't say enough how important it is to model each one several times, as well as refer to an anchor chart to find the strategy that would help. Read the end of the post for tips on creating an anchor chart to help your students become ... read more
Activities to Teach Self-Monitoring Reading Comprehension
In my previous post, I discussed using pictures as a comprehension strategy using Eagle Eye. As I mentioned, the more advanced kids become at reading, the fewer pictures their books will have. So, it's important to teach other self-monitoring reading comprehension strategies. I'll share some easy lesson activities you can do to model and teach kids how to make sure they are reading accurately while understanding the text! READ & DRAW In this exercise, you will ask students to read a sentence or paragraph, depending on their ability, then draw a picture to show comprehension. Ideally, you want a text that is very descriptive to give them enough to draw without giving it all away, in order to avoid them drawing from knowledge. For example, this one is a bit easy and they don't have to read the entire text to make a pretty accurate drawing: I was at the beach. I saw sand and the ocean. They likely know what a beach ... read more
Using Eagle Eye as a Comprehension Strategy
Can you believe he was picking his nose?? Not what you thought? Pictures are a huge help to beginning readers when monitoring comprehension! Even when decoding accurately, factors such as figures of speech and background experience can affect a student's comprehension. Some kids can decode an encyclopedia (do they even have those anymore??), but if they aren't monitoring their reading, they could be completely missing the point! So, it's important to teach students how to self-monitor their reading. One important strategy to teach beginning readers is to check their reading with the picture. EAGLE EYE COMPREHENSION Strategy- Look at the Picture I used to use Eagle Eye as a decoding strategy and would ask kids to look at the picture to make a word prediction. After reading the science behind how kids learn to read and realizing the importance of keeping phonics first and ... read more