Use these making predictions activities and lesson plan ideas to help your students develop stronger reading comprehension. When you’re sitting and reading a book aloud to your students, how do you know they’re engaged and listening? How can you tell students are listening to learn and comprehend? One easy way is to find out if […]
If you hang around here often, you know that I love read alouds! Not only do you get to connect with your students and model reading with fluency, you can introduce and reinforce important concepts across all subjects. This includes math! I love using math read alouds to help introduce tricky topics to my students. […]
An important component of reading comprehension is the ability to synthesize or draw from multiple sources to gain new information. If you teach reading strategies, chances are you’ve heard this term before, but what exactly does it mean for our young readers? And how can you help students learn this skill? Learning how to teach […]
One morning, I had a conversation with my four year old that reminded me about why morphology is important. It went a little something like this… Daughter: “Mom, Mrs. Miller is the kinder teacher I’ve ever met.” Me: After thinking for a minute. “Are you saying Mrs. Miller is the most kind teacher you have […]
With all of the science of reading research coming to the surface over the last few years, there have been so many words floating around. I’ve been getting lots of emails from teachers asking about the “ph” words: phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and phonics. I don’t blame them – there is so much to relearn […]
October is always such a fun time in the classroom! It starts to feel like fall (for the Texans at least), and there are so many fun fall-themed activities I loved to bring out for my students. One great way to bring in the season and holidays is with read alouds. October read alouds can […]
We’ve all learned so much now that the science of reading research has come to light in the past few years. We’ve learned that our young readers need explicit and frequent phonics instruction. We also learned that our approach to reading small groups needs changes like how we prompt our readers and how we assess […]
Many of you who have been around for a while know our family is an adoptive family. When we first brought my daughter home, we saw firsthand how little she had been read to at the age of three. She had no interest in books. The more we read to her and the more she […]
My friend, Lauren, shared this story with me about her daughter. “When my daughter was four, she loved to sing the alphabet. It was fun to jump in with her and sing that very familiar song. She knew the order of the alphabet and some of the sounds each letter makes, but if she got […]
I first heard of the book Shifting the Balance as more and more chatter in the teacher world was coming to light about the science of reading research. I have had extensive training in the balanced literacy model, and I love it! Additionally, I have seen firsthand how it can be effective and how it […]
Field trips were always the highlight of my students’ year! They make such a big impact on each student’s school experience and are so memorable. While we get to enjoy exposing our little learners to some new experiences, field trips don’t come with hassle and headaches. Did everyone turn in their permission slips and money? […]
Sound walls are one of the big changes that elementary teachers are making to their classrooms. This change is happening for very good reasons that are backed up by research, too. (If you want to read more about this change, you can check out this blog post all about word walls vs. sound walls.) One […]
When you think of the back-to-school season, you probably think of decorating your classroom, labeling everything with students’ names, participating in professional development, contacting parents, and prepping for Meet the Teacher Night. There is so much to do! To help make this school year a bit easier, I put together a list of my favorite […]
August means back-to-school season, which means it’s time to hunt for the perfect back-to-school read-alouds. At the beginning of the school year, I always loved to pull out my favorite read alouds and find some new, fresh ones that my students would enjoy. Back-to-school read alouds provide opportunities to build a classroom community, soothe fears […]
Elevate your teaching practices on how to teach high-frequency words with the science of reading in mind. During my first few years of teaching, I remember preparing flashcards each Monday with that week’s high-frequency words on them. We introduced them on Mondays and practiced them the rest of the week. We would spell the words […]
I wish I could say I loved my phonics block in the classroom. I never had a solid phonics scope and sequence so I always felt like I was floundering around. What I did love was seeing my students engage with phonics activities as we worked together and did the best we could. We did […]
Learn all about why a phonics scope and sequence is critical to teaching and grab a free one to use in your reading small groups. My district gave us blueprints at the beginning of each school year for each subject area. It showed us the units we would teach and what the objectives and outcomes […]
Learn what the differences are between a sound wall and a word wall to help boost your readers with stronger phonics and spelling skills. A teacher friend shared this story with me and it’s too good not to reshare as we are diving into why we need word walls. She recalled a specific instance when […]
