In our ‘how to…’ series we are going to delve into all things phonics instruction and give you our expert advice on developing confident readers. *** Decodable books often include target words that students may not know. There are many reasons why students may not know words in a text: The word may be unusual.…
Read MoreIn our ‘how to…’ series we are going to delve into all things phonics instruction and give you our expert advice on developing confident readers. *** Dictation is a great way to consolidate the bonds between reading and spelling. It is a controlled exercise where students can succeed because the teacher includes words with spellings…
Read MoreIn our ‘how to…’ series we are going to delve into all things phonics instruction and give you our expert advice on developing confident readers. *** One of the most important elements of learning is receiving error feedback (How We Learn, Dahaene). With every error feedback, the student can adjust their knowledge or skill and…
Read MoreIn our ‘how to…’ series we are going to delve into all things phonics instruction and give you our expert advice on developing confident readers. *** Many students will have been encouraged to use guessing strategies by well-meaning teachers and tutors, such as guessing clues from the picture or the context, and/or skipping the word…
Read MoreIn our ‘how to…’ series we are going to delve into all things phonics instruction and give you our expert advice on developing confident readers. *** Nonfiction decodable books are wonderful reading resources. They combine two essential parts of reading: word recognition (decoding) and world knowledge (language comprehension and subject vocabulary). Educators now recognize that…
Read MoreIn our ‘how to…’ series we are going to delve into all things phonics instruction and give you our expert advice on developing confident readers. *** First, what is segmenting? Segmenting is the ability to separate sounds in words. The smallest sounds are called phonemes. We use segmenting when we sound out a new word,…
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This is a guest blog by Rayna Dineen, Reading Quest Founder and Executive Director. Reading Quest is an outgrowth of the student – led literacy campaign, Hooked on Books, and the NM Alliance for Literacy created by Santa Fe middle school students and their teaching principal, Rayna, at Santa Fe School for the Arts &…
Read MoreWhen children begin their reading instruction, it is really important that they learn good habits so that they don’t need to unlearn them at a later stage. The first thing children will learn is how sounds of speech are represented by letters. In other words, they learn the relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.…
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“The magic for these kids was finding a series that they could decode, that could keep their interest, that motivated hard work, and that made them sound and feel like successful readers.” ~Brin Tucker Last year I was serving as an instructional coach, intern mentor, and also ran some intervention groups. Our intern, Amelia Fontein…
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“So, the books are more than just books!” – Miriam Fein I’d like to share my experience of using Phonic Books resources and my wholehearted recommendation! Just the other day I was telling another tutor (who will be working with a former student of mine) about Phonic Books. She was not familiar and I’m so…
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