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Using Our Flexible Phonics Lesson Template (Part 4): Blending Words
Let’s get reeeeaaadyy for a warm-up! No, not that kind of warm-up! The phonemic awareness warm-up portion of the Explicit Phonics Lesson Template won’t have you breaking a sweat, but it WILL support your students while they exercise their phonological processors! Last...
Using Our Flexible Phonics Lesson Template (Part 3): Explicit Skills Practice
Last week we warmed up our phonological processors during the Phonemic Awareness Warm-up component of the Explicit Phonics Lesson Template, (If you missed that post you can find it here.) Now that your students are all warmed...
Using Our Flexible Phonics Lesson Template (Part 2): The Phonemic Awareness Warm-up
Let’s get reeeeaaadyy for a warm-up! No, not that kind of warm-up! The phonemic awareness warm-up portion of the Explicit Phonics Lesson Template won’t have you breaking a sweat, but it WILL support your students while they exercise their phonological processors! Last...
Using Our Flexible Phonics Lesson Template Part 1: An Introduction
The start of the 2022-2023 school year is here! One wonderful thing about being an educator is the gift of fresh beginnings that a new school year brings! If only we could bottle the special mix of emotions that accompanies the back-to-school season--excitement,...
School leaders! Want to customize literacy PD for your school this year? We can help.
If you’re a school leader, an instructional coach, or a teacher longing for science-aligned but practical professional development, we have something that can help. With the current push for more science-aligned literacy practices and with the start of a new school...
4 Simple Steps for Using Elkonin Boxes to Help Children Lock Words in Memory
Orthographic mapping (Ehri, 2014) is essentially alignment work. It is the brain making sense of, or proving, how the sounds in a spoken word (phonemes) match up with the series of sound-spellings in the same word (graphemes). So, if orthographic mapping is truly an...
Sight Word learning in 1-4 exposures! That’s crazy talk! Or is it?
If we asked you to guess how many encounters with a new word a typical reader needs to be able to retrieve the word instantly and automatically, without guessing, decoding, or relying on other hacks . . . what number would you guess? 20? 30? 40? More? Well, you might...
Looking for a bit of ✨magic✨in your sight word instruction? Start here!
If you’re looking for a bit of magic in your sight word instruction, you’re in the right place! The real magic, of course, comes from HOW you teach high-frequency words. And spoiler alert - successful word instruction has everything to do with leveraging the power of...
“But you KNOW that word!” Sound familiar?
We’ve all been there! We’ve all said some version of this phrase! After chanting and practicing and highlighting and rainbow writing a word repeatedly, a student encounters the word in print (or goes to use it in their writing) and looks at it like it’s a martian with...
Confused about the difference between sight words and high-frequency words? This can help.
If you’re like us, you’ve likely used these two terms - high-frequency words and sight words - interchangeably. But to really understand the brain science of word recognition, it's important to get clear on the difference between these two labels because - accurately...
Looking for read-aloud titles to nurture word learning? We have a list for you!
Words! Oh, wonderful words.Serendipity, keen, disparate, convivial, camaraderie, eclectic, gratuitous, inveterate--and the list goes on and on (and on!) We are definitely lovers and learners of words ourselves, and we know you are, too! Word learning is for everyone...
7+ Tools to Help YOU Make Learning to Read Easier for Students (Including a Lesson Template for Scaffolding Orthographic Mapping)
If you are a teacher or literacy interventionist struggling to:assess students in meaningful ways,provide more effective differentiated instruction,manage the diverse needs of your students with limited time, orfind the instructional resources you need (like quality...
Looking for free decodable texts? We wrote one for you!
What could be more fun than thinking about pups? We really can’t think of much. Speaking of puppies, if you’re familiar with our book, Shifting the Balance, then you know that Chapter 6 is about finding “aligned” texts for students. Aligned texts are more than...
Wondering how to provide fun independent practice specific phonics concepts? Try this fun partner game!
Last week we offered seven ways to use our “Decodable Lists and Sentences” to supplement and support your phonics instruction. Based on the positive response from readers, we decided to add one more way to use these collections. Today's idea is focused specifically...
7 Ways to Use Our Decodable Word Lists and Sentences (Part 2)
Last week, we introduced you to our two sets of decodable word lists, and we even suggested you might want to organize them in a binder for easy access. And today, we share seven simple and practical ideas for using these two collections of word lists and sentences....
7 Ways to Use Our Decodable Word Lists and Sentences (Part 1)
Maybe you already knew about our Decodable Word Lists and Sentences. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you saw the lists and weren’t sure what to do with them. Whatever the case, we want to offer seven simple ways to use these resources to enhance your phonics instruction and...
Laying Language Track for the Word Reading Train
In Chapter 1 of Shifting the Balance, we untangle a widespread misunderstanding about reading comprehension. It is “Misunderstanding 4” in the chapter that is about language comprehension. Misunderstanding 4 goes like this,“Successful comprehension in beginning...
METANOIA . . .
We didn’t know this word a few weeks ago. But since we first became aware of it, we seem to be noticing it more and more. Maybe it’s because we’re immersed in thinking about children’s language development these days. Maybe it’s because we’re thinking a lot about the...
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