Compound Words are fun! Are you looking for creative ways to enhance your students' phonological awareness and word-building skills? Check out compound words! While forming compound words and combining two or more words to create a new one, offer a…
Segmenting and Blending phonemes in the early grades is not just a game, it’s crucial. This vital part of phonemic awareness will lead to future success in decoding and encoding. For kindergarten and first-grade teachers, fostering phoneme segmenting and blending…
Silent e is a familiar lesson in first and second grade classrooms all over. I’ve even taught it in kindergarten. We LOVE the magic e, silent e, bossy e, and any other kind of e we can think of…but that…
Homonyms and multi-meaning words are lessons that add dimension to reading. When students start to understand words can have more than one meaning, the things they say can be funny. Once I had a student ask about how my throat…
Vowel diphthongs, specifically ou and ow, can be tricky for early learners. BUT, breaking down words into phonemes and focusing on the diphthong can prove meaningful. Our guide for this adventure is the mentor text, "Cowboy Sam and those Confounded…
An Interactive Notebook can combine independence, phonics, and word building in a fun creative way. Phonics instruction plays a crucial role in developing early reading skills among kindergarten students. It provides them with the foundation needed to decode words, recognize…
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…
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…
I love word families! If you've read my blog before you know I have several posts all about word families or onset and rime. Helping students break down words between the onset and rime can help build a foundation for…
Step 4 in Phonological Awareness deals with word parts and counting syllables. We started with words with sentence segmentation and now we're moving to word parts. This IS NOT a blog post about syllable types, we're just talking the introduction…
In the last five years I discovered the true value of vowels. I have come to realize vowels rule the world. If we want to produce great decoders, vowels are the key. It all started with one student (we'll call…