School and the City

A vowel intensive drill is the perfect way to open a small group lesson for students struggling with phonological awareness. Benefits include strengthening awareness of medial sounds, vowel sounds, and phoneme-grapheme correspondences.  How It Works: Each student gets a set of vowel tents. You can give them all of the vowels at once, or you can give 2 or 3 at a time. (When I first start this with students, I only give them a couple to teach the routine and scaffold as needed.) You, the teacher, will need a word list. I get my word lists from iReady or my favorite GoPhonics Word List Book.  You will say a word, students will repeat it, then they will hold up the tent that represents the vowel sound within the word.  For example… Teacher: “Say ‘bug’” Students: “bug” Students: hold up U tent Students: “U spells /u/” Keep repeating this process until your students become more fluent! Gradually make the words a bit more challenging...

Beginning readers need to be explicitly taught how to sound out and blend unknown words. This will require lots and lots of modeling of using the alphabetic code: matching graphemes and phonemes.  The goal of code-emphasis instruction is to help students automate sound-symbol associations to decode words accurately.  Through lots of practice and exposure, they will begin to recognize some whole words automatically. This means that a word has been stored in orthographic memory through the orthographic processing system. Until then, though, students need to be in the habit of looking at all of the letters in a word in order to sound it out accurately. “There is no comprehension strategy powerful enough to compensate for the fact that you can’t read the words.” - Dr. Anita Archer Classroom Application One of the most common, simplest ways to explicitly teach and practice decoding with your students is to use a blending board. You may like a traditional bl...

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...

Once upon a time, when I first started teaching, I started building my classroom library.  I gathered books from retiring teachers and Goodwill. Throughout my career, I've grown my library by using Scholastic Book Club points, visiting Scholastic Warehouse sales, and shopping for specific series lots on eBay. The bins are from Dollar Tree, and they've held up well!  I must say - I'm super proud of my library!  My first school required me to have my library sorted by guided reading level. I get that! Students, in order to improve reading skills, should be reading books on or slightly above their instructional reading levels.  My library looked like this for six years... until now.  I noticed this year especially that my students rarely visited my classroom library unless I forced them to "book shop." They LOVE reading on Epic! where they can easily search and sort by categories.  Plus, as a grow as a teacher, I've learned that ...

So I heard you love Ivan as much as I do... ! We finished reading last week, but my students weren’t ready to let go yet! I love completing these activities after I finish reading The One and Only Ivan to my class. I don’t tell them that it is based on a true story until after we finish the novel. The surprise makes the content even more captivating and engaging! Ivan was actually adopted by Zoo Atlanta - where we live! - which makes my kids go crazy with excitement! We spent 3 days using these resources. Day one was for researching, day two was spent comparing and contrasting, and on the last day, students chose a newspaper prompt and wrote their articles. Of course, it’s totally up to you how you wish to use these resources. I like to give my students plenty of time to research on their own using QR codes linked to kid-appropriate news articles and videos.  . You may want to copy the “Field Notes” or "Observations" pages double-sided depending on how much time ...

I love to read, and chances are that you do too. As educators, we often read children's literature to stay in-the-know and professional books to improve our practices. But how often do we read fictional novels that can teach us just as much as a teacher textbook? Years ago, when I was in college, my mom (Hi, mom!) handed me a book and said, "If you're going to be a teacher, you need to read this." That book was Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. She told me it was about a school shooting.  I refused for a long time, because I felt the content was too “heavy.” But, mama knows best, and she kept insisting. Now, I'm hoping you will read it too.  Nineteen Minutes tells the story of a school shooting, including multiple perspectives leading up to, during, and after the nineteen-minute event. It’s eye-opening, thought-provoking, and absolutely heartbreaking. It’s changed me as a person, and it’s my favorite book of all time. I fell in love with Jodi Picoult...

I was very lucky to get a Donors Choose project funded recently. I titled my project "Diverse Books for Diverse Readers," which I totally copied from my friend Erin over at The Elementary Darling ! Erin created a list using suggestions from Vera, who has tons of suggestions over on her blog, The Tutu Teacher . Make sure to check out their posts, and see the list below of books I scored for my classroom! Paiute Princess: The Story of Sarah Winnemucca The Girl Who Could Dance in Outer Space: An Inspirational Tale About Mae Jemison (The Girls Who Could) Fancy Party Gowns: The Story of Fashion Designer Ann Cole Lowe Going Places King for a Day Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker  The Water Princess I Got the Rhythm Beautiful Daniel Finds a Poem  Ron's Big Mission She Persisted Around the World: 13 Women Who Changed History It's Back To School We Go!: First Day Stories from Around The World I Am Enough A Piece of Home Hidden Figures:...

Hey teacher friends! I am so excited to show you my new tool for goal setting and data tracking in my classroom. But first, let's rewind to August. During the first week of school, students filled out these goal sheets. They wrote in one goal for each category. It made for a gorgeous, colorful, and meaningful bulletin board for the first half of the year!  A few weeks ago, I pulled my students in small groups to revisit their goals from the beginning of the year. I took them off the bulletin board so we could look at them carefully. They put check marks in the boxes of goal they had achieved, and wrote "not yet" in the boxes that they were still working on. They loved seeing how many goals they had already achieved, and they loved seeing how their handwriting had changed since the beginning of the year! I encouraged my students to use their slips as bookmarks to be a constant reminder of their goals. You can grab a few variations of these goal sheets...

As you may know, I was "promoted" to third grade this year. Because of that, I'm not using Words Their Way anymore (GASP - shocker, I know!). My students have a new spelling list each week, and after a few weeks, I realized I HAD to do something to make spelling practice more engaging for them. I decided to shop with Oriental Trading because they offer a TON of fun alphabet things ! I was impressed with the selection and was excited that I could purchase everything in one place. First, I looked for some letter tiles. I had some plastic tiles that my students loved using at the beginning of the year, but I confiscated them because they made so much noise while other students were trying to read or write. These tiles are colorful and QUIET! They are just thin pieces of cardboard, but I think they'll last a while if my students treat them correctly. Plus, it came with so many pieces, I put many pages aside in storage to pull out later if I need to. Find ...