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…
Flex the Sound is a decoding plan for helping students with visually similar words. As early readers encounter unfamiliar words, they need flexible decoding strategies to problem-solve tricky spellings. In English, which has many irregular spellings, kids will come across words that don’t follow the usual rules. Research shows that to read these tricky words successfully, children need to recognize when a word doesn’t sound right and adjust their pronunciation. This skill, called “set for variability,” helps them match what they decode to the correct word they know. How easy this is depends on how clearly the word’s spelling connects to its pronunciation.
Flip the Vowel is a simple yet powerful strategy that helps early readers gain independence. Teaching young readers to decode unfamiliar words is a big step toward reading independence. This strategy teaches students to try both the short and long…
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…
Successive Blending can help new reader with decoding automaticity. Kindergarten is a magical time in a child's life where the foundations for learning are laid, and curiosity is at its peak. I talked about the importance of blending, Phonological Awareness…
CVC is the beginning of a beginner students writing. We can't hold them back. We need to encourage them to build bigger words with cvc components.
CVC Activities for Word Building are the foundation of all spelling. Students need to practice word building over and over and over! Providing a variety of CVC word building activities will help students make solid letter/sound associations, understand letter order…
Learning to read is an incredibly important and rewarding task for young learners. One of the foundational skills we can use to support young learners is word building. Starting with a strong foundation of phonics and systematic manipulation of words can…
Making Inferences seems to be a tall task for kindergartners, but it isn't really that hard...if you step it out correctly. AND I mean step it out. Students CAN infer as long as you start at an easily understood level.…
Fix-Up Monitoring can be tricky for kindergartners and you may be thinking why should I do it at all. BUT, if we introduce the ideas of fix-up monitoring to students early, they will be able to apply the skills independently.…
Let's wrap this up with Phonemic Awareness. As mentioned before, Phonological Awareness is oral and students need to understand letters and sounds before the symbols are added. Previously, we have looked at matching beginning (alliteration) and ending (rhyming) sounds...moved to…
Mrs. Nelson was my kindergarten teacher. We read The Gingerbread Man Monday, went to lunch, and he was gone. I remember running around the school in kindergarten chasing The Gingerbread Man. Each day we'd find him somewhere in the building…