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Sand or shaving cream writing

Air writing (also called sky writing) reinforces the sound each letter makes through " muscle memory." It can also help reinforce commonly confused letter forms like b and d. Kids use two fingers as a pointer (keeping elbows and wrists straight) to write letters in the air. They say the sound each letter makes as they write it.

Encourage kids to imagine the letter as they write it. They can also pretend they're writing in a certain color.

Letters cut out of sandpaper can help kids retain a tactile (touch) memory of letters and their sounds. Kids trace each letter with their fingers while saying the sound of the letter out loud. They can feel the shape of the letters as they write.

Kids say each letter's sound as they lay it down. Once they've built the word, they read it out loud.

Read it, build it, write it

You can use this technique to teach sight words to one or more kids at a time. Kids each have a piece of paper with three boxes on it, labeled "Read," "Build," and "Write." They also have cards with sight words, magnetic letters (or tiles), and a marker.

Have kids read the sight word that's in the "Read" box together with you. Then have them build the word in the "Build" box, using their letters. Finally, have kids practice writing the word in the "Write" box.

Take the word bat. Kids tap an index finger to their thumb as they say the b sound. They tap their middle finger to their thumb as they say the short a sound. And they tap their ring finger to their thumb as they say the t sound. Then they put the sounds together to say bat.

Story sticks can help kids who struggle with reading comprehension visualize the elements of a story. Use a different color craft stick to represent each element. Yellow sticks might ask the question, "Who are the characters?" while blue sticks ask, "What is the setting?"

While reading together, hand kids a stick and ask them to answer the question on it. Or ask kids to highlight the elements of a printed story using the proper colors.

During shared reading, kids can use printable books. Printable books leave a space for kids to write in sight words or draw pictures to match sentences.

About the author

About the author

Amanda Morin is the author of "The Everything Parent's Guide to Special Education" and the former director of thought leadership at Understood. As an expert and writer, she helped build Understood from its earliest days.

Reviewed by

Reviewed by

Ginny Osewalt is a dually certified elementary and special education teacher with more than 15 years of experience in general education, inclusion, resource room, and self-contained settings.

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Multisensory instruction can help kids with reading issues like dyslexia learn to read. Here are a few examples of multisensory reading techniques teachers use.

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1.  Complete Step 1 and submit to dropbox
2.  Complete entries 6-14
3.  Read article Task, Text, and Talk ( in last column) and complete the Exit Slip (3, 2, 1)

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More Barriers in Reading (yep, yep, yep)

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Science Essential Questions

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A Giant List Of Really Good Essential Questions

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Essential questions are ‘essential’ in the sense of signaling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries.

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Really work on a great hook to get kids wondering!  

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Really work on a great hook to get kids wondering!  

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Dr. Suz's alter ego....The Cookie

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Simply Delicious Shower Thoughts with Cookie Monster

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We learned a lot about Essential Questions last week. Here are a list of Essential Questions used in an English class. Take a moment to write a few MOTIVATING essential questions for a topic in your discipline. For example, when a high school teacher was teaching about EXPLORATION, she asked, "Why do the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have this name?" note: this draws in a group of high schoolers quickly.

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Read the following passage, and as you are reading, locate one line that tells you what you think the purpose of this article is.

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Entry #16 Follow up:  Answer the following:

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Entry #16 Follow up:  Answer the following:

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1.  What was the sentence you selected?  Why?
2.  Now, would that sentence (or now sentences) change if I told you to read from the perspective of a thief?
3.  What about a real estate agent?
4.  What about two boys skipping school?
5. So, what did you learn from this about PURPOSE in reading?

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# 17  MODELS for teaching READING STRATEGIES

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# 17  MODELS for teaching READING STRATEGIES

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Attached you will find two models.  Yes, one is my model and one is a model used by Buehl, the author of your textbook.  Compare and contract the two models.  Which would you use, and why (please do not think that I want you to say mine).   You do realize that it is NOT the reading teacher's job to teach all the reading, right?  It is every teacher's job.

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Let's think about the Reading Strategies you learned about in Entry 16.  PLEASE remember is it critical for all of us to teach reading strategies and MODEL them for our students while using our texts and other materials.  I want you to take the following table and listen to the picture book, Rose Blanche.  Stop several times during the video to make predictions.  If you are correct, note it.  IF NOT, write in what actually happens in the book. This help kids remember and engage with the book, while also providing PURPOSE for their reading.

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If you are interested in handouts for any of the other reading strategies, they are located in the module.

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How about an inspirational way to start class AND a review game?

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How about an inspirational way to start class AND a review game?

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The Processes Involved in Reading (4) (1)

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Entry # 19 (Doubles as your discussion grade and a notebook grade)

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Entry # 19 (Doubles as your discussion grade and a notebook grade)

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Below is an article that describes, IN GREAT DETAIL, the Foundations of Reading.  Instead of you reading the whole article, let's JIGSAW IT!

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ZOOM video to help with Group Padlet (Entry 15)

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ZOOM video to help with Group Padlet (Entry 15)

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So, could homework be the lecture and then class time becomes work time? Collaboration time?

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Clark's Couch - "Basics of Free-Market Economy"

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If is important that you protect YOURSELF when showing movies or reading books parents might question. Attached is a letter that I wrote while teaching high school. Read the letter. Why is this important?

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My 5-year-old and I are lying on the couch, our bare summer legs in a tangle, faces pushed into our books. He's teaching himself how to read, beginning with " Dog Man," the Dav Pilkey graphic novel about a half-dog half-man superhero. I'm binge-reading " Firekeeper's Daughter, " gulping words greedily in the five minutes of quiet time he'll give me. "Mama, how can you read that long book without pictures?" asks my son, pity in his voice for my thick novel that does not include brightly colored illustrations.

That's when I realize with a jolt: I've never told another person what happens in my mind when I read. It's mystical and intimate, like sharing how I pray or dream.

I try to explain that my brain lifts off in flight. With " Firekeeper's Daughter, " I become an avatar of the main character, Daunis Fontaine, an 18-year-old Ojibwe woman, sprinting through the damp reservation woods in Michigan, chest heaving, trying to bust up a local drug ring. It feels so real, and I am so focused on trying to understand and respect her world, which is so unlike mine, that when I am interrupted mid-paragraph, it takes me seconds to land back on the couch, into my 41-year-old mom body, gripping my son's emptied yogurt pouch in one hand.

Summer reading struggles? Here's how to help your child now and into the school year.

How do our brains take us to other realms like that? Are there ways to help my child learn to visualize and create his own rich inner world through words? And beyond being the closest thing we have to teleportation, why is this skill important?

Peter Mendelsund set out to decipher how people abstractly visualize literature with " What We See When We Read," a poetic book presented through design, art and text. Speaking to me from a Vermont barn, he explained that "reading is a co-creation between author and reader": Writers give us clues to a character's appearance, habits and setting, and our reader brains interpret key details from those prompts. And because no author, not even Tolstoy, can describe every last thing, we are left to fill in whole patches on our own and each end up seeing something unique.

Clara Bernstein, a 13-year-old from D.C., has repeatedly reread Jessica Townsend's Nevermoor fantasy series and lets in more details each time. She has teleported to the eponymous magical city, watching the characters from the corner of a room like a spy. Only she's never the main protagonist, Morrigan Crow, an 11-year-old girl cursed to die on her 12th birthday. She thinks that is because "the book isn't from one character's point of view. We can hear Morrigan's thoughts, but it's written in the third person." Clara says that even when she is assigned a book she does not connect with as deeply, she can't help imagining herself inside it, although "sometimes the visualization is less vivid."

Children's literacy educator Timothy Shanahan explains how such visual imagery works: "The most basic theories in reading comprehension would claim that we take verbal information and we translate it into some kind of a [multisensory] form." It's those sensory images that help us to recall something we've read.

Being able to visualize is a skill young readers build over time. The more children read, the more they will be able to imagine and understand. In fact, it is impossible to deeply comprehend a text without the ability to visualize, says Shanahan, who is based in Chicago. This skill is indispensable later in life. Think about what surgeons learn to do by studying textbooks. They must visualize pathways and know where in the body to make an incision before they see their patient on the table.

Until age 8, Shanahan says, kids are so focused on mastering the mechanics of reading - recognizing words and lacing them together into sentences with meaning - that they do not begin to imagine plots or characters. "It's all pretty verbal and phonemic," he says, "and anything visual seems to be tied specifically to just recognizing the words and trying to make sense of it."

Shanahan explains: "It's not uncommon for young kids to assume that the pictures carry the story, and the adult reader is actually making it up on the basis of the picture." He advises grown-ups to point to the text as they read aloud and pause their reading if a toddler puts their fingers over the print, to show that the story cannot continue without the author's words.

Kamilah Hayes-Lewis, a tutor with the Literacy Lab, which provides reading support for pre-kindergarteners to third-graders from low-income families, works with the youngest students in D.C.-area public and charter schools. To ensure comprehension, her pre-K kids spend an entire week reading one book, and each day, they are introduced to three new vocabulary words. Grown-ups who want to help young readers with visual imagery should ask questions while turning the pages, she suggests: "Prediction questions get the wheels turning: What do you think is going to happen on the next page? What does that look like?" This cues children to place themselves in the story's setting.

The Literacy Lab's tutors stress comprehension of vocabulary to help with visualization, says Jax Chaudhry, the organization's regional director. She cites "rye bread" and "Super Soaker" as examples of terms they have helped young readers imagine and contextualize: "The vocabulary really allows them to build out this larger world in their minds." The tutors paste an image of a word on one side of an index card and spell out the word on the other side. Parents can do the same at home.

The approach is working. "Beep-bop-boop!" Elias Gahagan, 7, reads over Zoom from his kitchen in D.C. Elias, a Literacy Lab student who was not too interested in books until he began receiving support, looks up proudly from " Star Wars: I Am a Droid " and tells me, "I become R2-D2. I like him because he is small."

Why I still read aloud to my tween and teen

For kids age 8 and older, visualization training can improve their comprehension, Shanahan tells me, citing a 2013 study from the Netherlands. Adults can support this by pausing their reading to ask questions. "You might say things like, 'I want you to try to get a picture of the setting in your mind. Where is this, and what do you see there? How does the main character look, and what is her greatest problem?' " Shanahan recommends. "Essentially, what you're doing is taking kids through the structure of the story."

Can watching a screen adaptation of a book help children learn to do this? They are not all bad, Shanahan says, but they can get in the way of improving visualization skills if kids decide they do not need to read the original too: "It can become a distraction from the print. You can say, 'I already know that story. I saw it on Netflix, so I don't have to look at the words.' " That is where the danger lies. If we don't read, we don't visualize, and we don't comprehend. We lose the skill set: Our imaginations - and the future talent pool of architects and surgeons - diminish, or worse, dry up.

Chaudhry is passionate about making sure Literacy Lab students have access to books with diverse protagonists. One reason is her experience with visually interpreting a beloved story. "As a child, I remember reading Harry Potter and thinking Hermione Granger looked like me. Then the movie came out, and I was like, 'Oh, she doesn't look like me.' " Chaudhry says one young reader in the program recently read a story with a Black female protagonist with her tutor and was told, "She's the boss." Now when the girl reads on her own, she visualizes the main protagonists as Black and always tells her dad, "See, she's the boss." It is clear this student is beginning to visualize herself as a leader, too.

Danna Lorch is a freelance writer covering parenting, the visual arts, design and architecture from Brookline, Mass.

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Perspective | Why visualizing images is so important for young readers, and how to foster the skill

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My 5-year-old and I are lying on the couch, our bare summer legs in a tangle, faces pushed into our books. He's teaching himself how to read, beginning with " Dog Man," the Dav Pilkey graphic novel about a half-dog half-man superhero.

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HERE ARE THE VOCABULARY STANDARDS (called Language).  Use at least one. 

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HERE ARE THE VOCABULARY STANDARDS (called Language).  Use at least one. 

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Communicating Orally (Listening and Speaking)

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(Just if you are curious, as these will start being used 2022 and you are NOT required to use them this term.])

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https://www.ajjuliani.com/blog/research/

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17 Test Review Game Ideas for Middle & High School | Teach 'n Thrive

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Games are fun, and test review games are useful and AWESOME. Reviewing for an exam can be an enlightening formative assessment in and of itself. Before administering the test you can see what the students have retained. As the review unfolds you can identify weaknesses, clarify a misunderstanding and support students before they face the exam.

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Read:  Tell me, what did you learn?  Give me the 1, 2, 3 on it!

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Read:  Tell me, what did you learn?  Give me the 1, 2, 3 on it!

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Essential Questions for ISS, Psychology, etc. If you are working in the court systems or with troubled teens, there are a lot of resources out there that are research-based.  Here is an example. 

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Essential Questions for ISS, Psychology, etc. If you are working in the court systems or with troubled teens, there are a lot of resources out there that are research-based.  Here is an example. 

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The 8 Minutes of Class that Matter the MOST!

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The 8 Minutes of Class that Matter the MOST!

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Like a story, lessons deserve compelling beginnings and endings. From pop culture connections to finishing with a level-up, here are eight strategies for holding students’ attention.

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Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Wallendiner Hogan Logan Bogan was her name

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Ms. Julie reads "Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Wallendiner Hogan Logan Bogan Was Her Name"