Teaching Tip: Making Words: an Update

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Making Words is an engaging word building activity that helps link your students’ knowledge of letter-sound relationships with phonemic awareness. If you have used this activity in the past, you know how much students learn from it, but I now recommend some changes in how the activity is done so students can practice both encoding […]

Teaching Tip: Shared Reading in Kindergarten

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Shared reading provides a wonderful opportunity to guide and support students as they read aloud together from a large version of text. Our kindergarten students enter school with a wide variety of experiences with books and print. Some may already be readers, while others may have only a little knowledge of letters, sounds, words, and/or […]

Teaching Tip: Accelerate, Not Remediate

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I eavesdropped on my granddaughter Mae’s remote first grade class this morning and felt awed by how comfortable the class seemed with participating and conversing online. Mae is doing great, and the best part of the situation is that my son and his family have been here in Florida with us for several weeks—because she […]

Teaching Tip: Learning with Kyliee

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I am noticing that we have many Emergent readers spending a long time reading at Levels A and B. If we want to accelerate learning, we need to move students quickly out of the highly patterned text and into Level C. At Level C, there are many more opportunities to learn literacy processing strategies. The […]

Teaching Tip: Teach for Transfer

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One of the positive, yet unexpected, outcomes of COVID-19 has been the opportunity for me to work regularly with my grandchildren (and great-nieces!) on their reading. My granddaughter Mae, a first grader, has been moving very nicely up the text levels—but my running records showed that cracks were forming at Levels G and H. My […]

Teaching Tip: Video Book Introductions

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Hi everyone, Since the Literacy Footprints Digital Reader launched last week, I have been looking for a way to create engaging book introductions to accompany the digital reader in a format that displays both the teacher and the digital book on the same screen. As we all know, in a guided reading lesson, the book […]