School and the City

I'm thrilled to recap our elementary school family literacy night for you! We've been working really hard on aligning and strengthening our writing instruction over the years, so we decided to lean in on writing. During the event, we wanted parents to experience some of the writing tasks students work on in class, see the resources and language that we use, and have some takeaways that they can use to support writing at home. I'm sharing everything with you! Click here to download a PDF that has a list of all stations, all of my notes, and links to all printed resources. Click here to view my Amazon list (commissionable) where I've linked all products that we purchased or used for this event. Let's get into it! We held this event in our cafeteria. Each table had a different activity and a staff member to support. K-2 activities were on one side of the room and 3-5 on the other. Families moved at their own pace throughout! Every ...

What should students be working on independently while you teach small groups? This is a question that is continuously asked in my building and on social media. As teachers, we recognize the importance of time. There’s never enough time to do it all, so it’s imperative that all time students spend at school is purposeful.  Below you’ll find many simple, evergreen ideas for word work centers that align with the science of reading research and evidence-based practices. Word work can include phonics , vocabulary , and comprehension .  No need to make copies each week - Place these in dry erase pockets or have students complete it using an online tool like Seesaw.  Phonics & Fluency Sound-Spelling Mapping Level up your spelling practice! Say goodbye to rainbow writing and hello to phoneme-grapheme mapping , which gets students thinking about the spelling patterns that match the sounds in words. Mapping is an opportunity to practice sp...

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...

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...