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
Using Thematic Word Walls for Writing in Kindergarten and First Grade
If you teach kindergarten or first grade, you know what it's like to be asked how to spell a word over and over. . . and over again. You likely have some sort of word wall or sound wall on display in your classroom. We often use these "walls" to help students learn sounds or spelling, but they can also be a great tool for helping with vocabulary and writing. And they can eliminate the need for students to ask you how to spell a word they'll be writing often. A thematic word wall is a list of words that share a common theme or topic. You can make them for subject areas, seasonal topics, or common themes students write about. Benefits for Beginning Writers These come in so handy for emergent writers, helping them become more independent during your writing block. Thematic word walls help beginning writers in many ways: Brainstorming- This helped cut down the time a student spent thinking of a writing idea and ... read more
Sentence- Writing Activities For Kindergarten and First Grade
When we teach reading, we don't expect our students to pick up a book and read, without explicitly teaching them everything from print concepts to decoding and comprehension strategies. So why don't we do this with writing instruction? In many classrooms, students are expected to just write sentences- or even stories- with very minimal instruction on what a sentence even is! The idea is that grammar, sentence structure, and revision will be taught in the context of their stories. Yes, I know that teaching grammar and revision in context is important. But, I also know that kids need A LOT of practice with writing sentences, or else their stories don't make sense. Or, they need so much revision that it's overwhelming! Before kids can write stories, they need to learn how to write a sentence. Before writing sentences, they need to know what a sentence even is. So, we did a lot of sentence-writing ... read more
How to Teach Students to Sound out a Word
Stretching the sounds and blending them, aka sounding it out, is a go-to strategy for helping students decode. It’s the oldest reading strategy in the book, but perhaps still the most important. If you’re familiar with my reading strategy resources, you’ll know I use fun characters and interactive PowerPoints to teach decoding strategies and follow up with meaningful activities for practice. I’ll show you step-by-step how to teach students to sound out a word. Even if you don’t use my Stretchy Snake resource, I’ll give you ideas to help teach this essential decoding skill. Steps for HOW TO TEACH STUDENTS TO SOUND OUT A WORD Step 1: Engage and Relate! Kids love animals, so engage them with a twisty paper snake! You can make a very simple one by cutting a paper in a swirl-like motion, like the picture below. I have the little snake heads in my resource for you to use, or you can draw your own. Stretch out the ... read more
13 Picture Books for Teaching Phonological Awareness and Phonics
Using read-alouds to practice phonological awareness activities is a great way to motivate your little learners while exposing them to lots of important skills. Here are some great picture books for teaching phonological awareness and phonics. I also added ideas for activities to do with most books! *You can click on any title to purchase the books via Amazon. These are affiliate links, which means I earn a small percentage if you purchase through these links, at no extra cost to you. I always only recommend resources I love! Of course, you can also check your library for these titles instead of buying and sometimes you can find read-alouds on Youtube! Did you Take the B From my -OOK? by Beck and Mark Stanton Adorable! The author loves the letter B but when he sneezes, the Bs disappear from all the words! SO the book is left with -utterfly and other words missing the letter B, until the end where the kids call for the ... read more
6 Important Things about Phonemic Awareness
Phonological (and phonemic) awareness is an essential part of reading. If kids don't have strong P.A. skills, their reading will likely suffer. Here are 6 important things to know about phonemic awareness! 1. Phonemic awareness is not the same as phonics. While phonics includes the letter representations for sounds, phonological awareness is an auditory awareness of sounds and the ability to hear and manipulate them. Phonemic awareness is an awareness at the individual-sound level. In simple terms, if you're using letters, whether in print or using letter names, it's phonics. If you're doing auditory activities that don't include letter names, it's phonemic awareness. PHONICS activity examples: Looking at letters and making their soundsIdentifying a letter that makes a soundBuilding new words by switching letters PHONEMIC AWARENESS activity examples: Isolating the first sound in a wordBlending sounds to ... read more
How to Make an Easy Yearlong Writing Portfolio
The beginning of the year is so crazy busy and exciting, that we often don't have time to plan ahead, let alone think about memory books! Then, when we start to make memory books at the end of the year, it can get a little difficult. . . Students are asked to remember things that happened throughout the year and it can be like pulling teeth to get them to write about their memories. I mean, I have a hard time remembering what I went to Target for! There's no way I would remember what happened months ago in detail. So, what happens? Students just write a sentence or two to get the pages done and it's not their best writing at all. You know what I'm talking about. We've all seen this kind of writing: It was field day. I had fun. It is so frustrating when you know a student can write so much better! Everything you taught them about writing, thrown out the window. Ugh! Anyway, I have a better solution. Make a yearlong ... read more
Scaffold Writing with Wordless Books to Help Beginning Writers
Too many times, I've had students who have a really hard time coming up with a story idea, or writing a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end. Using wordless books for writing is a great scaffold for students who have these struggles! My teaching assistant and I started meeting in small groups to make little booklets that already had pictures in them and kids wrote the text. This really helped so many kids, who were struggling with writing or spending way too much time on their pictures. We started with pattern books to make it simple for kids to write repetitive sentences. These are books that have the same words at the beginning of each page: "I see----", "I like----", "It is ---". Having a few words they could write helped build their confidence and they took more risks with spelling the missing words. (There is a blank version for them to write the entire sentence in addition to the pictured one below). After ... read more
Invented Spelling: Good or Bad?
One of my favorite things about teaching kindergarten and first grade is reading students' writing. Sometimes it takes pretty good detective work to decipher it, but you can get so much insight from their invented spelling. Plus, it's super cute! Obviously, when children are first learning to write, they won't spell every word correctly. So, they need encouragement to try their best and room for inventive spelling. At what point does it cause concern? Some people say invented spelling should never be allowed or modeled (WHAT?). I highly disagree with this opinion, but I do think there are times when kids should be corrected and guided to use accurate spelling. What is invented spelling? First, to clarify, conventional spelling is the correct spelling of a word. All of the words in this sentence are spelled conventionally. Invented spelling (or inventive spelling- tomato, tomahto) is phonetic spelling, based on what ... read more
Phonological Awareness Activities and Games to Engage Your Students
"C-a-t. . . . MAP!" Ever have students who do that? Even when students know letter sounds, they may still have trouble reading because they don't blend the sounds correctly. The likely cause is a lack of phonological or phonemic awareness. Phonological, Phonemic: What's the Difference? First things first, phonological awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in spoken words. While phonological awareness can include syllables or parts of words (ex: onset and rime), phonemic awareness deals with individual phonemes, or sounds. For example, blending or segmenting the sounds in the word CAT is a phonemic awareness activity. Identifying the number of syllables in the word CAT is not. They are both phonological awareness activities, but phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness that deals with phonemes, or individual sounds. So, in a nutshell: phonological = individual ... read more
GUIDED READING WARM-UPS: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Last week, I sent a survey out about my Guided Reading Warm-ups and am so thankful for all of your responses! There was a LOT of positive feedback (thank you!), as well as suggestions, and a whole lot of questions. I wanted to answer as many questions as I can, as well as let you know the exciting updates I have planned for this resource over the summer! I had too many questions to include here, but I condensed the most frequently asked ones below. If you still have a question, please feel free to ask in the comments or email me at [email protected] and I'll be glad to chat! First of All, What is It? If you're new to these, this is a comprehensive kit of resources to help you with your small reading groups. It's designed to quickly review important skills before students read their books (or as stand-alone skills practice in whole-group or small-group settings), and includes resources for you to use during and after ... read more