Honestly, there are not enough words to describe how hard it is to teach students to read. Since everyone picks up decoding, blending, and segmenting at different speeds, every student is at a different place. While differentiation is critical when learning to read, planning and creating resources can become overwhelming. However, it is essential to…
Reading is hard! It is hard to learn and hard to teach. Students become frustrated over not knowing words and having to sound everything out. Additionally, it is overwhelming to realize that it is impossible to sound out every word. Therefore, it is challenging for teachers to provide strong reading instruction when every student is…
Learning to read is one of the most complex skills for elementary students. Between letter sounds, blends, articulation, and prosody, there is so much to process at the same time. On top of this, students actually have to understand what the words mean. Thus, it makes sense that so many students struggle to improve their…
It is heartbreaking to see students not believe in themselves. This often comes in the form of giving up, becoming frustrated, and wanting to cry. Teachers never want them to feel like this. However, learning to read can do this to students. It can be overwhelming to look at words but not know what they…
1st grade is an important year for building reading skills! At this level, students dive a little deeper into reading and work on developing their comprehension and fluency. To get this practice, you’ll need lots of reading activities for 1st graders at the ready! Here are a few of my favorite low-prep activities to make…
Reading skills are so important! Great reading skills set students up for academic achievement, not just in language arts, but in all of their subjects. They help students with their test taking skills and can even help predict their future success in school. When teaching beginning readers the building blocks of reading, it’s important to…
The ultimate goal of learning to read is to be able to comprehend what you are reading, however many students struggle with reading comprehension. Traditional comprehension instruction of reading stories or passages, and then answering question after question about what they read can be boring. So let’s talk about some fun ways to work on…
Prosody is one of the three main components in reading fluency. It relates to the expression used while reading. Beginning readers typically read word by word and do not use expression when reading aloud. A fluent reader will read in phrases instead of one word at a time. One way to improve prosody in reading…
We all know that reading fluency is an important part of becoming a good reader, but there are many components to fluency. One of those important pieces of reading fluency is accuracy. Having good accuracy is the ability to read the text with very few or no mistakes. Accuracy truly is the most essential skill…
Beginning readers need a lot of phonics practice in order to break the code of reading. These Phonics Reading Mats are perfect practice for students. They will begin by stretching through the sounds in a word family or blend. Then, they will continue to read words practicing that phonics skill as well as sentences and a short story. Students will have to strictly rely on their phonetic skills to read. These correlate well with the Science of Reading and research on dyslexia.
As we’ve all settled into our “new” school year, that could look different in many classrooms across the country. One thing I wanted to focus my attention on was my struggling readers. I wanted to be able to provide high quality reading instruction to my small group students even if that was remotely. Here are some…
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on making Digital Task Cards through the Boom Learning™ platform, and I am now obsessed with them! I love them all, but I am particularly fond of my reading comprehension based cards. These Text Evidence cards are perfect for beginning readers working on going back…
