Understanding
the Science of Reading
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How Can I Teach Literacy Skills in PreK? (Part 4: Embedding Practice Opportunities)
The last one in this PreK series, this blog will discuss meaningful ways to embed brief opportunities to practice skills to develop word recognition throughout the day, not just during “reading time”. I’ve also used some of these, such as “Say the Password!”, in Kindergarten and 1st grade! Adapt as you see fit. These specific…
How Can I Teach Literacy Skills in PreK? (Part 3: Literacy Centers)
I’ve recently discussed how you might align practice with research on teaching word recognition skills during whole group and small group lessons in PreK. This post will focus on what the rest of your students could be doing while you are working with a small group. I’ll lay out ideas for varied activities focusing on…
How Can I Teach Literacy Skills in PreK? (Part 2: Small Group)
This is Part 2 in the “How Can I Teach Literacy Skills in PreK?” series. This one focuses on small group instruction for PreK literacy that complements the whole group instruction described in Part 1. These activities are designed to promote students’ understanding of the alphabetic principle (understanding that speech can be represented by print)…
How Can I Teach Literacy Skills in PreK? (Part 1: Overview & Whole Group)
I’ve recently received questions and seen more discussion around what high-quality literacy instruction looks like in PreK. Below I will outline a simple plan for introducing the foundation for word recognition skills. This is a very similar outline to how I taught in my own PreK classroom, and hope it helps those teaching PreK now.…
2021 Summer Book Study
Want to learn more about the Science of Reading? Learn evidence-aligned strategies for teaching foundational reading skills? How word recognition instruction looks in practice? We are holding a summer book club around one of the most comprehensive research to practice texts there is–CORE’s Teaching Reading Sourcebook–every Saturday in July. More info just released here: https://bit.ly/COREsummerbookstudysignup
Dr. Linnea Ehri’s List of Instructional Guidelines for Enhancing Orthographic Mapping and Word Learning
In a recent discussion with Dr. Linnea Ehri, she wrote up and sent over a document with instructional guidelines that follow from her theory of orthographic mapping and research studies. She gave permission to share this with a wide audience of teachers and stakeholders in order to help increase understanding in the Science of Reading.
How Do I Start Teaching Phonemic Awareness?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word that makes a difference in the meaning. For example, the word shop has 3 phonemes, /sh/-/o/-/p/, and the word clipped has 5 phonemes, /k/-/l/-/i/-/p/-/t/. This blog post will help you figure out how to help a child begin to become aware of phonemes. Previous…
The Practicalities of Teaching in a First Grade Classroom: Part 2
Let’s continue with how the science of reading may look in a first grade classroom. The last post discussed phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and high-frequency word instruction in a whole group setting, as well as differentiated spelling instruction. In this post, I’ll discuss what small-group reading instruction, when informed by research, may look like in…
The Practicalities of Teaching in a First Grade Classroom: Part 1
We all know that using evidence-aligned practices in our classrooms is important. But how does this look, practically, in a first grade classroom? This post is not meant to be prescriptive, but descriptive–meaning these are the practices that have worked for me in the classroom and that are aligned to the evidence about what is…
The Foundational Importance of Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness, although of great importance, is one of the least understood components of reading instruction. Less than a third of teacher prep programs reviewed by the National Council for Teacher Quality are providing training in phonemic awareness. This is probably why many teachers and teacher educators have misconceptions about phonemic awareness and have trouble…
What is dyslexia?
Let’s start off with a little test-yourself time! True or false: A characteristic of dyslexia is to see letters or words backwards.Dyslexia is a visual-perceptual difficulty.Dyslexia is a disability that is recognized by law in schools. Have you answered? What did you think? What is dyslexia?? Over 80% of pre-service and in-service teachers surveyed* believe…
The Complexities of the Simple View of Reading
The Simple View of Reading was first proposed by Gough and Tunmer in 1986 and is one of the most supported models of reading to date. The gist of the Simple View is that Reading Comprehension (RC) is the product of Decoding (D) and Linguistic (or Language) Comprehension (LC). RC is the *product* of D and…
Understanding the Science of Reading 