No matter what grade you teach in elementary, helping students develop strong social-emotional skills is always a part of your unspoken curriculum. Helping our young students grow into confident, kind adults can be done in so many different ways. One of my favorite ways to do this is to use books to teach social skills. […]
When it comes to teaching students to learn how to read, there are so many different resources and tools for teachers. One of my favorite tools is a reading passage. You can pack so much teaching and practice into such a short amount of text with reading passages. But which kind should you use – […]
February sure has lots of fun holidays and events to celebrate – Groundhog Day, President’s Day, and Valentine’s Day. The list goes on. But do you know what we can celebrate on February 1st? World Read Aloud Day! World Read Aloud Day is a day to celebrate the power of reading aloud and sharing stories. […]
Interactive read aloud lessons were always one of my favorite times of the day. Not only do you get to gather your students together and help them develop a love for reading and expose them to a variety of books, but you get to help them strengthen their reading skills and strategies to build a […]
If you’re letting go of running records or wondering if they’re the best thing for your readers, but aren’t sure where to start, you are not alone, friend! Many of us have used running records and the MSV three-cueing system in our reading small groups. If you’re like me, I took many running records on […]
Are you looking for books for your January read alouds to help your students develop strong reading comprehension skills? If so, then you’re in luck! The good news is that the month of January easily lends itself to books with great themes. Some of them include winter, the new year, and Martin Luther King, Jr. […]
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 […]
**Amazon affiliate links are used in the post below at no cost to you. This is a small way to support the blog. 🙂 I first heard of the book Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates as more and […]
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 […]
