Graphic Organizers with Language Support
When students struggle to explain what they’ve read, the gap is usually not about understanding. They understood the text. What’s hard is organizing their thinking and putting it into academic…
Strong reading instruction develops foundational skills, builds comprehension, and fosters a lifelong love of reading. In elementary classrooms, literacy includes early decoding skills, comprehension strategies, informational text instruction, and meaningful opportunities for students to engage with books.
When students struggle to explain what they’ve read, the gap is usually not about understanding. They understood the text. What’s hard is organizing their thinking and putting it into academic…
Understanding the difference between stop sounds vs. continuous sounds is one of the most practical things you can know as a reading teacher. How you model each sound directly affects…
If you teach early reading, consider how you are teaching your students to read. Do you teach students to memorize words? Or, do you teach them to sound out a word and…
When you sit down to plan what you’re teaching for your small group reading instruction, how do you decide the kind of text you are putting in front of your…
Working with other teachers is hard. No doubt about it. You all have different teaching styles and viewpoints on what is important and how to teach it. When teaching phonics,…
Do you teach and assess nonsense words? Do you know why you do it? There’s a reason why we teach these types of non-words in schools. In fact, teaching…
This elementary Thanksgiving unit helps students understand the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving and gives them tools to make connections between those events. By the end of the…
Our favorite October picture books for the primary classroom that are engaging, have good pictures and are well received by my students. These are our classroom favorites that I go back to each and every year during the fall season.
Phonemic awareness is a key component of early literacy development, particularly for preschoolers and kindergarteners. This skill is akin to an auditory playground where children learn to manipulate individual sounds,…
Engaging students in reading and writing about high-interest topics, like African animals for kids, can be achieved through the use of real text. Students need on-level information text in order…
Second graders are at a sweet spot with reading. They are ready for longer stories, strong characters, and running jokes that carry across chapters, but many are not quite ready…
Describe the connections between historical events is a Common Core Standard that is hard to teach! Here is how I taught this standard with the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving. Through this unit, students asked and answered questions, we made a timeline, we read great books, AND we figured out the connection between historical events.
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