Free R-Controlled Vowels Posters

admin June 8, 2013 No Comments

Creating these R-Controlled Vowels posters has been on my to-do list for quite sometime.  Today is my official first day of summer vacation and there’s no better way to begin vacation than to get going on that never-ending list.  Of course, there’s a few household chores, but those items aren’t quite as fun.  Okay, there’s one household chore that’ll absolutely have to get done today–it’s early June and our Christmas lights still need to be taken down from around the house.  Yikes! Click HERE to download the FREE R-Controlled Vowels Posters    

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Preventing the Summer Slide

admin May 28, 2013 No Comments

As much as teachers love summer vacation, there’s always a little (actually, big) panic that sets in as we pack up the classrooms and send our children off during those three lazy months of fun in the sun.  What if they never pick up a book?  Oh, and they were so close in learning all their math facts- will they forget?  We’ve worked so diligently teaching skills and the kids have learned so much—what if when they return in September and they forget?  The loss of skills during the summer in the educational world is known as “The Summer Slide” and it is very real.   Research indicates that children who live in poverty consistently lose 2 months of reading performance

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Dolch 220 Sight Word Assessment

admin April 28, 2013 No Comments

The Dolch 220 sight words make up between 50-70% of the words we encounter in text.  Most of these words cannot be sounded out and students need to be taught to instantly recognize these words in order to be fluent readers.  Because recognizing these words is so important during reading, it is important that we use a variety of activities to teach, practice and memorize sight words. It all begins with assessment.  Before you begin teaching sight words, it is important to know which words your student(s) already know.   When you download the Sight Word Assessment and Progress Monitoring file, you’ll receive the assessment, student recording forms and progress monitoring charts.  You’ll want to periodically re-assess you student(s) to be

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It’s a Soccer Shoot Out!

admin April 11, 2013 No Comments

Soccer is my sport!  I love, love, love soccer.  My oldest child was five when we enrolled him in our city recreational league.   Our family has been hooked ever since.   You know how organizations are always short on volunteers?  Well, the soccer league was short on coaches.  When I was asked to coach I remember saying, “I’ll think about it” and the next thing I know I received a roster of 15 10-year-old boys.  Having never played soccer, I did what any rational person would do–googled “how to coach soccer.”  How difficult can it be- right?  Well, ever since I’ve coached all three of my kids recreational league teams as well as Lizzie’s travel team.  I loved every minute of

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Short Vowels Cue Cards

admin February 5, 2013 No Comments

Some of our little readers are still having trouble confusing those short vowel sounds.  We certainly see this in their written work.  I’m hoping these cue cards can help.  Simply print the cards, cut them out and place them on the desk or table.  They serve as a visual cue to help with correct use of the vowel when writing.    Of course, not every student will need the cue card;  just those students who are still substituting one vowel for another. Click the following link to download FREE short vowel cue strips Vowel Prompt Cards If you are working with short vowel sounds in your small group intervention, the Vowels Sticks and Vowel Snatch are two great activities for teaching these

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Teaching Sight Words

admin January 28, 2013 No Comments

A few months back I posted the 10 Activities for Learning Letters and Sounds activity kit that I developed for a few first graders who hadn’t yet mastered letters and sounds.  The idea behind the kit was to provide fun, hands-on activities for either classroom voluteers or parents to work with their child at home.  Well, since that time, those little first graders have learned their letters and sounds and are now ready to focus on sight words.  So here’s the activity kit for learning the Dolch sight words.  Of course we’ll begin with list 1 (first 25), but I’ve made the activities through list 3. To assemble your very own kit, first print this 4-page pdf.  This file contains

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Teaching Blends and Digraphs

admin January 23, 2013 No Comments

Seems like this week there’s been quite a few questions about blends and digraphs.  Teachers have been asking and wanting to know what the difference is between a blend and a digraph, which to teach first and the best way to teach these skills.  Well, with all these questions, that was motivation enough for me to finish this post that I started literally a year ago.  I’m hoping this post can answer some of these burning questions about teaching blends and digraphs. Question 1: What’s the difference between a blend and a digraph? Consonant Blends A consonant blend is when two or more consonants are blended together, but each sound may be heard in the blend.  The most common beginning

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10 Activities for Teaching and Practicing Letters and Sounds

admin November 23, 2012 No Comments

So it’s late November and we have just a few first graders who have not yet mastered their letters and sounds.  For these little firsties, we needed to readjust their intervention plan and bump it up a knotch in terms of intensity.  It’s always difficult to find time in a jam-packed school day, but mastering letters and sounds is really important and must take priority right now.  One way to add intervention time is to teach volunteers and/or the child’s parent in how to teach and practice letters and sounds.   Having the right activities available and directions for correctly using the activities is really important.  I’ve collected 10 of my most favorite activities for teaching letters and sounds and gathered them

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Parent Handouts- Perfect for Conferences!

admin September 30, 2012 No Comments

I am really envious of my friends and colleagues who are organized.  I am just not one of those people.  I’ll confess my computer files are a mess.  Files are saved on several different computers, in different folders and under a variety of file names.   Well, conferences are coming up soon and I’m on a mission this morning to organize all my handouts and put them into one file on my hard drive and under file names that I can easily recognize.   It was my goal to have a parent handout developed for each of the 5 Big Ideas of Reading Instruction–Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension–and to have them grade specific.  Well, I’m not quite done yet.  I have

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8 Great Ideas for Teaching Segmenting and Blending

admin August 10, 2012 No Comments

  Phonemic awareness- the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992) The best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllabes into constituent sound units (Lyon, 1995) The research is very clear on the important role phonemic awareness plays in the reading process.  Children must understand that language is comprised of spoken words and that those words can be broken down into separate sounds.  The child’s level of phonemic awareness upon entering school is one of the strongest indicators of how well he/she will learn to read.  The exciting part is that, as teachers, by assessing our students’ phonemic

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