School and the City

When it comes to explicit phonics instruction, students need lots of practice both decoding (reading) and encoding (writing). It's easy to make decoding fun with phonics games to practice fluency! Check out my favorite ways to get kids reading with no-prep games that are easy to implement with any skill. Gamify Decoding Practice Tic-Tac-Toe This is the easiest option when you only have a few minutes to play. Use paper, whiteboards, or even windows. Students read before each play. Connect 4 Students of all ages love this one! The setup is quick but the game is exciting. Turn Connect 4 into a phonics fluency game by having students read before each play. Quick and easy! Jenga Jenga is - by far - the favorite in my classroom. A big pro for Jenga is that you can play in 3's if you have an odd number of students. Of course, a majoy con is the setup time and the fact that young students can't keep a tower standing for long....

Looking for a new activity for your small group phonics instruction? Try using a word chain!  Word chaining is like word building, but better, because it adds another level of thinking. Using a word chain gives students the opportunity to build words, but also to recognize differences between similar words. Word chains draw attention to the individual phonemes that make up words and their locations within words. Therefore, word chaining involves practice with both phonemic awareness and phonics skills.  Classroom Application Word chains have to be planned in advance. A few things to think about when planning: What is our current target skill? You’ll want most (or all) of the words in your word chain to include this skill to ensure that students get plenty of practice.  What skills have students learned previously? Make sure your word chain does not include any patterns that students have not yet been explicitly taught. I also try to include an...

You may have heard the term “orthographic mapping” more and more often lately. Wondering what it is and how it benefits students? Let me break it down simply for you.  What is orthographic mapping? “Orthographic mapping is the process we use to permanently store words into long-term memory.” - David Kilpatrick In other words, orthographic mapping is not a classroom task or activity - It’s a mental process that happens in our brains when we are learning to read.  Elementary Classroom Application We can support students’ brains in orthographic mapping by intentionally using evidence-based instructional routines. You may hear of classroom activities called… Word Mapping  Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping Sound-Symbol Mapping These are all different names for the same thing: matching spoken sounds to written letters.  When students are able to match spoken sounds (phonemes) to the respective written letters (graphemes...