Grammar, phonics, and parts of speech often vie for first place at the very pinnacle of the student boredom scale. I have spent a lot of working time as an adult looking for ways to teach these types of mind-numbing concepts in ways that are not only easy to learn but also hard to forget.
Last time, we met Miss S, T, W, and Mr. H, and saw what happened when they walked together. Digraphs cause letters to make new sounds when they come together. Teaching sound spellings is one of the most beneficial things you can do to help your students become fluent readers who can easily decode new and unknown words.
One of the most challenging things about the English language has got to be homophones! These are words that sound the same, but they are spelled differently, and they have different meanings. This can make reading and spelling a bit tricky and frustrating. Take the confusion with this fun and engaging activity!
Now more than ever, teachers need our help and support. Let’s make this school year great by finding ways to step in and help fill the gaps.
Many students who struggle with adding and subtracting numbers larger than one digit have trouble because they are not familiar with their math facts, they get lost when trying to follow the steps to solve a problem, or they are unable to remember those steps to begin with.
All of us enjoy teaching the ABC Song to young children. We get excited when toddlers can sing the song all the way through! And it feels like the first solid step in the process of learning to read. And most children can learn the ABC Song! Most can also recite the ABCs from A to Z. But is that enough?
Silent E can be very tricky for students who struggle with reading. We teach children to sound out words and they grind to a halt in the face of undecodable sound spellings and "silent" letters.
A visual learner cannot rely on memory to recall the sound difference between E and I, or O and U. A visual with a related hand motion is critical. The child will see the symbol and their brain will draw on the image and motion.
I realize that “your” and “you’re” have over time become interchangeable. It seems to be very commonly accepted that “your” can be used both for possessive as well as when a person's trying to say “you are." So here are a couple of ideas on helping your students remember the difference between "your" and "you're."
Math word problems can be a real bear, especially for children who struggle with reading comprehension or for those learning to speak English as a second language. The good news is that there are a few strategies for helping to take the drudgery out of word problems.
We’ve got two options when it comes to teaching a child to recognize SH, CH, TH, and WH. We can either point to SH and say, “This says Shhhh,” OR we can engage the entire child-- mind, emotions, and body-- in an activity that will make learning digraphs unforgettable.
To, too and two are another set of tricky words that are easy to mix up. Visual hooks are pretty powerful! Let's think of some visual hooks we could use to help our right-brained students remember the difference between to, too, and two.
My own students in second grade really struggled with this idea. It took me by surprise because I assumed it was going to be one of those skills that I could show them, and then that they would all just nod and say, “Sure, got it!” But that is not what happened.
It works so well to pre-teach specific sight words and sound spellings using a big book. Rather than jumping right in and reading the story with them, pre-teach and give them the lay of the land ahead of time. Doing this will help the focus concepts jump off the page and reading the story will be more successful.
For the sake of this post, I am using 12 words, but in my classroom, the walls were full of words. We had a word wall which was arranged in ABC order in columns and then we had a wall devoted to our big words grouped by part of speech: nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Last week, we covered the definition, examples, and types of prepositions in our blog, How to Teach Prepositions: Location. We emphasized the importance and benefits of teaching prepositions in a multisensory manner: implementing body movement, color, images, and hands-on activities. Today we will explore prepositions of time. Get ready to soar to new heights with this engaging lesson!
The incredible challenge in teaching really boring material is that it is also boring to the teacher, and believe me, children pick up on our emotions as we teach! If the subject matter bores us to tears, it will bore the children as well. Prepositions fall easily into this category of most boring content.So let’s make it fun! Use body movement, color, images, and hands-on activities, and make it such a riot that the children will never ever forget.
In order to become stellar readers, children need practice finding prepositional phrases in text. One reason for this is to help them read more fluently. Think about the phrasing fluent readers practice that make their reading fluid and easy to understand.
Short vowels and their sounds are often difficult for children. For students who are weak on vowel sound discrimination, spelling tests are torture. It follows that reading is hard for them as well.
Go through all the SnapWords®, pointing out word chunks or sound spellings so that when they come to a more complicated word, you can show how the larger word has pieces that are similar to much smaller words they already know. The brain loves making connections!
Does it seem like your child just can’t learn sight words? Does he struggle with reading? You CAN help your child learn sight words. We will provide you with proven resources to help your child learn easily and in a way that makes sense for him - which means you will see results right away.
There are ways to let your children play this summer and still help boost their reading without paying for tutoring sessions or struggling with your children over spending time working on reading.
A vast number of children have trouble just recognizing high-frequency words. The reason this is a problem is because sight words are a high percentage of the words children encounter in reading. The design of our SnapWords® emphasizes comprehension, correct usage, and word recognition.
Rumors are flying around the web about Bossy R and how he came to have that name. Because everyone has a slightly different version of the story, I am here to set the record straight once and for all. Here you will find the <em>truth</em> about Bossy R.
Many types of learners cannot memorize and retain facts that involve symbols. (This includes memorizing words or math facts, too!) They might be able to retain the letters and sequence of a word for a few minutes, but 30 minutes later, the information will have disappeared from their brains.
My students always had a really hard time understanding the use of apostrophes, both in making contractions and in possessive tense. I had to use little drawings and stories to drive the learning home in a way the children would remember.
Something about this process worked so well with these first graders that before very long, most of the class was on their SIXTH list of 100 words! By the end of the year, in the last week or so of the school year, I found myself making an EIGHTH list of 100 words for three of my kids.
There are some words that are just hard to remember how to spell, and if they sound the same as each other, it simply compounds the problem. Here are a few of the tricks I used with my students when teaching these three words.
Possessive tense can be very confusing for young children. My students had a terrible time distinguishing between possessive and the plural form of a word.
Visuals, stories, and body motions work wonders in helping children learn to read, but honestly, they are stellar vehicles for teaching anything! One of the best times I've had in the classroom was the day we studied the water cycle in first grade.
I am a strong believer in several things when it comes to teaching the very young. One is that drill and memorization have no place with preschoolers. Another is that anything you can passively impart to preschoolers is going to be really potent in terms of their learning gains.
It is our experience that using images and other memory hooks is more effective than anything when teaching new material to children since it allows them to remember and not struggle.
