A child more readily learns material if it is embedded within a pattern. Brain research tells us that the human brain is a pattern-seeking organ, and we have only to watch children at work in pattern discovery to know that this is true.
We hope you have been enjoying this fun and unique approach to teaching a tricky topic. Over the past few weeks, we have covered many different sound spellings, integrating multisensory components that allow all learners to gain confidence in their abilities. We will conclude this series today with six more sound spellings!
In part 1 of this series, we looked at the benefits of teaching sound spellings and gave a few examples of the best ways to teach them. Part 2 covered an AUGH spelling as well as several OUGH spellings. In the third part of this series, we will be looking at two Bossy R spellings, two sounds of OW, and two sounds of OU. Let’s have some more fun with sound spellings!
Last week we looked at how teaching sound spelling patterns helps students derive meaning, improve comprehension, and experience success in reading. Today, we are going to take a deeper look at the OUGH spelling pattern, as well as an AUGH word.
Children who have trouble learning phonics also struggle with reading. With time at a premium, I decided to meet the challenge of struggling readers by dedicating 30 minutes every day for teaching phonics. Here is how you can teach phonics to your whole class in 30 minutes a day and reach those who are lagging behind.
Here are two engaging, colorful, kinesthetic, and visual tools that have proven to work together beautifully to rocket kids into reading. The tools do the work for you of answering the learning needs of children and letting them experience success rather quickly.
When basic skills are missing, learning problems will only deepen with each passing year. When students struggle with reading, it makes learning anything else a serious challenge. It is far better to effectively address learning issues as soon as they appear. RTI came about in order to address this very problem.
I've come to believe that if a child is struggling with memorizing spelling words, she might also have difficulty with reading – and vice versa. The figure below shows the process of sound-spelling pattern acquisition and how a child uses it to advance in reading.
Orton Gillingham has his list of red words: words that cannot be decoded. He also designates some high-frequency words as green words or those you can go ahead and decode. You can find 643 words in our inventory which are colorfully stylized to make learning them easy for your children.
I have a theory: if we access each child’s area of giftedness, we will turn them on to learning. In reality, the brain is already wired to learn. What remains is for us to figure out how to create a learning environment in which brains can learn, want to learn, and do so without a ton of effort on our part as teachers.
Using hooks in teaching is incredibly important when teaching right-brain-dominant children. Another very important concept that makes learning more meaningful is to teach a concept in context and apply it to as many different scenarios as possible.
Those are just a few ideas for helping children learn from the bottom up so that the ideas sink in deeply and create a strong and lasting foundation for future learning.
I have worked extensively with children who struggle with reading. If there is a gap in understanding, that gap might as well be a mile wide. Many gaps arise from teaching reading in a sequential, left-brained manner. Right-brained kids will not learn material that is presented verbally, sequentially, and abstractly.
That is the fact that so many non-traditional learners learn best through images and hands-on experiences. What many of these children have in common is they think in pictures, not in words. What follows is that presenting new concepts via image and hands-on experience helps them learn using their strongest abilities.
What we can do is change how our children learn the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. If we can utilize visuals and play, kids will gain the knowledge they need, but will not feel the stress of “doing school” too early. Best of all, using visuals and play will have the effect of cutting “school time” greatly.
Children, even very young ones, have the ability to become their own best friends by learning what helps them the most - by asking themselves the question: "What helps me focus the best?"
There are specific strategies we can employ when we teach that will help create a rich and supportive environment for the right-brained learners in our classrooms. The strategies are not difficult to execute but for the children who benefit from them, they can be game changers.
If your child is struggling or simply not enjoying school, instead of teaching in traditional ways, try a multisensory teaching method, which simultaneously engages all of the senses
These hints are all powerfully visual and tactile, and make for the friendliest way to teach a child so that learning is easy and fun! Using these types of methods to teach will act very much like glue, in that you will attract the child to learning, and the concept will stick in their memory unforgettably.
What is so important about fingermapping for visual children is that this one practice could mean the difference between success and failure in reading. Using a visual tool such as fingermapping is very powerful for visual learners.
Stories used in teaching and learning don’t have to be long, they don’t have to be highbrow, nor do they have to be serious! Make them funny and the child will be sure to remember them forever!
Being engaging while teaching might be a real pain at first, but once we begin thinking that way, ideas will flow more and more readily from our imaginations. And the outcome will be priceless for our kids.
Stories are how children most naturally communicate their thoughts and make sense of their world. Young children also utilize stories as they rehearse procedures. Stories are powerful ways of teaching concepts that would otherwise be uninteresting, boring, irrelevant, abstract, and hard to remember.
While our SnapWords® are meant to be used in an open learning environment that allows children to explore all lists of words regardless of their age, for those parents and teachers who prefer a more structured method of teaching, we have labeled our products by grade level.
A variety of types of input during a lesson stimulate several areas in the brain at one time, causing neurons to fire in each of those areas. The neurons that fire together, wire together, making one neural network that represents the whole learning experience. The richer and more varied it is, the greater the recall.
Another school year is here! As we prepare for the new school year, we understand that there could be a mix of optimism and anxiety for children and parents alike. There are so many items on our to-do lists: shopping for clothing, shoes, backpacks, lunch bags, and school supplies.
Right-brained children learn differently from left-brained children. The more we understand how right-brained children learn, the easier it will be to create lessons that reach both left-and right-brained learners. This blog post will provide tips for creating a right-brained lesson and will give you an example of left-brained content made right-brained friendly. The lesson is free to download and use!
Children that are not allowed to make mistakes, who have an adult hovering closely to prevent any consequences from arising might be preventing a few disappointments, scrapes, or bruises, but they are at the same time not allowing the child to learn much about how to make good choices.
Don’t ever, ever expect a very active child to just listen to you. Can they listen? Probably; maybe. But that is one doomed approach! Try instead putting something in their hands that relates to the thing you want them to learn.
When I taught second grade, the majority of my students had a hard time with quotation marks. They were not sure how to use them, when to use them, or how to identify in writing the words that were actually being spoken by someone. Once I infused my lessons with multisensory elements, my students were easily able to comprehend and correctly use quotation marks. The following lesson will show you how to help your students experience success, too!
I’ve been thinking about visual learners for several years now--teaching them, working to understand how they think and learn, and then creating visual helps embedded in left brain material so they can grasp new material with ease.
When it comes to children, all too often we choose the negative rather than the positive term to describe them. The consequences to doing so are monumental. It is so critical how we reflect to a child who he is when he is in a stage of life in which his self-concept is being shaped.
Given that roughly 66% of children prefer a right-brained approach to learning, it is no wonder that math is such a struggle for a large portion of students. Right-brained children CAN learn math easily if it is designed in a way that makes sense to their brains.
This very simple exercise was critically important in readying the brain to learn. The images the children created originated in the right hemisphere of their brains, and they when they put words to what they had drawn, they were accessing their left-brain - the whole activity strengthened the links between the two.
In my experience, many students who struggle with reading rely heavily on their brain’s tendency to look for patterns or reasons why in what they are learning. So if we group like elements together and teach them at one time, it goes a long way towards demystifying spelling patterns for them.
Just like a tiny seed grows into a mature tree, one hardly noticeable trait, if encouraged, can flourish into a character quality that will ensure a child's success as an adult: imagination.
Whether you're a classroom teacher, a parent working with their child at home in the evenings, or a full-time homeschooling parent, this approach may be exactly what your student needs. Writing is a great and worthy vehicle for learning to read! I found great success with this method of teaching reading.
This experience with the SnapWords® card is a complete teaching experience with a visual that requires no memorization, a body motion that reflects the word, and then a sentence that draws attention to the meaning of the word.
Our teachers are required to cover an increasing amount of content and to boost test scores on a rising number of standardized tests. But if we are teaching to the test, are kids missing out on things far more important than a test grade?
