Fluency is the ability to read smoothly and automatically with accuracy, expression, and attention to punctuation. It is essential to reading and the bridge between decoding and comprehension. Fluency is not a natural skill for many students, but the good news is, even the most disfluent readers can improve their fluency skills with explicit instruction, guided practice, and effective interventions!… View Post
Poetry is a wonderful tool and is especially helpful for “hooking” reluctant readers and motivating them to practice their literacy skills. Through repeated reading, students can develop confidence and improve their fluency. As an added bonus, most poetry lends itself to practicing additional literacy skills, as well. If you work with students in grades 3-5 and are looking for a… View Post
When students are faced with challenging words, it’s essential they have the tools to break the words apart. Through explicit phonics instruction and word work, students can develop the essential skills they need to identify common phonics and spelling patterns within words. Students need to be able to identify word parts, as well as the phonics and spelling patterns, in… View Post
If you enjoyed my pumpkin visualizing activity for the fall season, you’re going to love the winter-themed “Roll a Snowman” version of the activity! Engage your students in rolling dice to create snowmen using the different descriptive words. More often than not, the snowmen come out looking VERY silly, which makes it fun for the students to visualize and illustrate…. View Post
Phonics is one the building blocks of literacy and is an essential component to reading proficiency. In order to read with accuracy and automaticity, students need to be able to map sounds to letters AND letters to sounds. Once students have sound-letter correspondence in place, they need opportunities to practice automatically recognizing sounds within words. Decoding strategies alone are not… View Post
Partner poems are “poems for two voices” and exactly what they sound like… poems for two students or two voices! With each poem, students work in partner pairs to read their assigned character parts and practice the back-and-forth poem together. Your students will have fun using their voices to perform the highlighted reader’s theater style poetry scripts. Why Use Poems… View Post
