Guided reading–it truly is the heart of reading instruction in my classroom. Not only is it my favorite part of the day, but it’s a time when kids get instruction that leaves them truly feeling empowered to be the best readers they can be! Whether you are new to guided reading or you’re already successfully […]
After launching literacy stations and putting procedures in place, they tend to go pretty smoothly. Some days, however, they can get chaotic, especially after a break, a long holiday weekend, or a few days with a substitute. We all have been there! It also happens between station rotations in a single day. Friends, even classrooms […]
Launching literacy stations is a big task! You plan each station, carefully explain each one, provide time for your students to practice the station, and then let them go. But what happens when they don’t last the full 20 minutes at a workstation? What happens when they constantly need help? What happens when your little […]
Using music in the classroom to reach our little learners is a fabulous tool. Research tells us that when we are learning through music and movement, more parts of the brain is engaged than any other time. Music is enjoyable, engaging, and motivating for our little learners! It also helps keep our students on track […]
“What are your best sight word tips to help my readers learn them quickly?” is one question I get asked often. Well friends, I think it all comes down to how you introduce high-frequency words and how you keep reinforcing them. Once students understand how to orthographically map a word, it helps their brains learn […]
Differentiation. It’s definitely a buzzword in education these days and I think there is a solid reason for that. It works. It’s how we reach ALL students. It’s what is best for students. I’ll never forget in college when I was taught about it. All I could think of was the crazy amount of work […]
Guided reading has several tiny bits and pieces that come together to make your time at the table successful. I feel like the more I taught guided reading, the more aware I became of each puzzle piece. One of the pieces that I don’t think I fully grasped the power of until years later was […]
Hooking students at the beginning of a lesson can be a make or break moment. It’s the time that you truly create buy in for the topic you are teaching. I would do my best every day to make the hook of my lesson engaging and to truly capture the attention of every child. Here […]
Teaching children to read is truly a more difficult task than I feel like any primary teacher receives credit for. Let’s be honest–if you handed the right tools to just anyone do you think they could get the job done? I remember my first year in kindergarten and just how overwhelmed I was by the responsibility […]
A step-by-step guide to getting started with guided reading to grow strong readers. Guided reading. Those two simple words bring either happiness or fear to you. They bring happiness because you are able to reach each and every student, differentiate learning, meet each student where they are, and provide coaching as you see them blossom […]
If you hang out here often, you know how much I love guided reading. If you are on my email list, you have read about my guided reading journey. I jumped in during my first year of teaching and often felt like I was drowning. I wasn’t really sure what to think of the whole […]
We all know the drill. We often times are sent to PD sessions that don’t keep our attention or that don’t quite meet our needs. This is why, as teachers, most of us are readers. We are life-long learners. We take our learning into our own hands. We own it! Often times with balanced literacy, […]
Interactive read alouds are one of my favorite parts of our day! It’s a time for us to gather close, emulate the bedtime story time that so many kids do not get at home, and recreate that intimate time. It’s the time that I get to model how to think like a reader. I also […]
Mastering phonemic awareness is a key factor in reading readiness for little learners. No matter what reading level a child is on – pre-readers to high readers, they ALL have or need a strong foundation of phonemic awareness. Sometimes we just don’t know where to begin to help our students build the foundation of reading and other […]
RTI–those 3 letters that just make you want to pull your hair out sometimes. As elementary teachers, we already prep for so many content areas. Sometimes adding RTI to the plate is just too much. At least this is how I felt at times. Managing RTI was just going to send me to the looney […]
I have a brand new, updated post about Reading Small Groups with Pre-Readers with the Science of Reading in Mind that you may also find helpful! One question I get more than any other is, “What do I do for guided reading with non-readers?” It’s a very common question and a very realistic question. We […]
Writing is a time of our day that often gets squished to the end of the day, especially in kindergarten. So often we think, “Well, they aren’t reading yet so they aren’t ready to write much. They can just draw pictures.” You’re right, they can draw pictures, but have you ever thought about how that is […]
Though guided reading is a short time with students that seems to fly by, it is filled with many essential elements. It’s truly a time to coach students in their reading. One of the essential elements includes identifying a teaching point as a student reads. It’s easy to let this go and focus on a the many other […]
