What’s the best way to organize your decodables? There are many different ways to go about this. Here, K-5 reading specialist, Savannah Campbell, shares some helpful tips and tricks to make your classroom library user friendly. Now that you have decodables, how do you organize them? I’m lucky to live in a district that…
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Systematic Phonics programs now talk of ‘consonant blends’ or ‘adjacent consonants’, but what are they? Why is it that the letters ‘bl’ in the word ‘black’ are adjacent consonants while ‘ck’ are not? Speech and language therapist, Hema Desai explains the difference and suggests fun, multisensory activities to embed learning. As a speech and language…
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Ann Sullivan of Phonics for Pupils with Special Educational Needs, is an experienced SEND teacher, who has created her own phonics programme specifically for SEND children. This is what she has to say about our latest set of Books: Moon Dogs Extras for Catch-Up Readers. If there is one question I am asked more than…
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Our kids are out for summer, and now all learning rests squarely on the parents’ shoulders. I know that it can be daunting. You want to make sure your child doesn’t lose any of the skills they’ve learned, but you aren’t always sure of the best way to help during the summer. So today, I…
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Phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge are the biggest indicators of how well a child will learn to read in the first two years of school. Yet phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge are NOT the end goal. Our end goal will always be proficient readers. To reach that end, we must work to instruct children on…
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The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the US Department of Education periodically issues free practice guides for teachers. They convene a panel, review the research, and formulate general recommendations based on the evidence. What I like about these practice guides is that they are concise, accessible, and practical. The goal is not to get…
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Happy Spring!! The weather is getting warmer, the flowers will be in bloom, and the Kindergarten Center teachers are wondering when it will be time to teach letter names! For those of you who did not read, “Lynbrook Takes the Lead on Long Island,” the Lynbrook School District is revamping its reading curriculum and is…
Read MoreScaffolding the teaching of multisyllabic words – simple to complex Many teachers are focused on teaching kids how to sound out graphemes (spellings) and to blend sounds together into words. They will even be teaching kids how to manipulate phonemes in phonemic awareness activities. These are all essential underlying skills necessary for learning to read. …
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I’m a reading girl, but let’s talk math. If you were teaching long division to your students, what does that practice look like? Are you giving children 2 division, 4 multiplication, 18 addition, and 2 simplifying fraction problems (even though they’ve never seen them) for a challenge? Of course you aren’t! In math, ample amounts…
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So often in the past, I have had parents sit in my reading tuition lessons observe their child, a struggling reader, learn to read. With a structured phonics program and decodable books that support it, the child begins to decode words independently. At first it is laborious and some children may need a great deal…
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