Elkonin boxes are a powerful visual tool grounded in Science of Reading for building phonemic awareness, phonics skills, and early decoding abilities. By segmenting sounds (phonemes) into boxes, students develop a stronger understanding of sound-symbol relationships. I have blogged about…
Fluency isn’t just for big kids! When we think of fluency, we often picture older students reading smoothly and expressively. But fluency starts much earlier than that. Even our youngest learners can develop fluency skills that will set them up…
Syllable Types are easier than you know and more important than you realize. As we guide our young learners through the wonderful world of reading, it’s essential to understand the foundational skills that support their literacy journey. One of the…
Manipulatives are crucial when students are combining hands-on skills physical manipulation and internal automatic skills. I love manipulatives and highly recommend using them at every point in time. These 3 manipulatives should be at the forefront of your early classroom.…
Do you need an intervention for students struggling with spelling words confidently? This is it. Stoplight writing is something students can hang on to. Teaching emergent readers to write can be far more complicated than you think. Writing words involves,…
Word Ladders are such a great way to see what your students can really do with manipulating letters in words. I first used Tim Rasinski's Daily Word Ladders. This was the warm up for my word work and students were…
When students are reading and exhibit structure errors, errors with tense, natural language or syntax, they need small group lessons related to these errors. Structure Errors Structure errors are all about the structure of the sentence and understanding the English…
Visual errors are errors regarding what the student sees. Sounds, symbols, print conventions, and analogies are part of regarded as visual cues. Visual Errors This is the second in the series. As I stated before, I believe in analyzing your…
Meaning errors are all about making sense. Grammatical Patterns and language structures are about meaning Meaning Error For a quick review, students who make meaning errors are using meaning to help guide their reading. Meaning errors are only looking at…
Making Connections is an interesting reading comprehension strategy. It seems so straight forward and it seems to be easy to explain. It is also over-used in comprehension discussions with students on the knowledge level. In spite of these things, making…
1 to 1 match is probably one of the most important tasks a new reader can achieve. Making the connection between voice and print will help them move forward in independence and comprehension. As much as this skill seems to…
Spelling can be far more complicated than you think. Writing words involves, at a minimum, knowing letter names, knowing letter sounds, understanding letter/sound associations, knowing letter formations AND being able to hold the pencil and make the letters. WOW. That…