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Elkonin Boxes helps young readers build their phonological awareness. Elkonin boards do this by helping students segment words into individual sounds, or phonemes.

Elkonin boxes could be used in practice by making a fun game for students as they learn segmenting. If students are having trouble segmenting words, or if the teacher just feels as if it is time for a review, Elkonin boxes could be a great option.

Elkonin Boxes. Reading Rockets. (n.d.-b). https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/elkonin-boxes

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Blachman, B. A., Ball, E. W., Black, R., & Tangel, D. M. (2000). Road to the code: A phonological awareness program for young children. Baltimore: Brookes.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

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Elkonin boxes are used to build phonological awareness skills by having children segment spoken words into their individual sounds (phonemes). To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme.

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Graphic organizers can be used in many different classroom scenarios. Graphic organizers help students to organize their thoughts and information in order to better comprehend the lesson. Perhaps the greatest strength about graphic organizers is that they can be molded by the teacher to fit any lesson or student.

An example of how graphic organizers can be used in practice is by asking students to create a venn diagram that compares and contrasts suffixes and prefixes.

What should content-area teachers know about comprehension instruction?. IRIS Center. (n.d.). https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/sec-rdng/cresource/q3/p11/

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Page 11: Using Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are visual aids designed to help students organize substantial amounts of content information. In addition to being effective for vocabulary instruction, graphic organizers can also enhance reading comprehension by helping students to categorize information and to show the relationships among important concepts. There are many types of graphic organizers. What works for one topic or task may not be appropriate for another.

Listen as Cynthia Shanahan discusses how teachers should select the type of graphic organizers they wish to use based on the content area and desired student outcomes (time: 2:16).

Cynthia Shanahan, PhD
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Executive Director UIC Council on Teacher Education
University of Illinois at Chicago

Transcript: Cynthia Shanahan, PhD

Graphic organizers come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and for all different purposes. They can help in as many ways as there are graphic organizers. There are so many graphic organizers for teachers to choose, so they really need to take several things into account. First, their main questions should be what do they want their students to get out of whatever it is that they're reading. Think about those outcomes and those goals and choose a graphic organizer that's going to help students meet those goals. Then you have to pay attention to the text. Some graphic organizers work better for different kinds of information, and it depends on the information in the text. For instance, if it's a science article or a science text, you're going to be choosing among a number of graphic organizers that might be different than if you are having your students reading a history text or a mathematic text. You have to take into account the kind of information, even within those discipline areas. There are differences in the way that text organize the information, and you need to pay attention to that. For instance, in a social studies textbook you might have comparison-contrast going on if it tells you about one country then tells you about another country, and you want students to compare and contrast, that would lead you to a comparison and contrast organizer. If you want them to read several documents and to come up with an answer to a central question, that's a different kind of graphic organizer than if you want them just to read one document and learn the information in the document. Finally, you have to look at the discipline area that's the focus of the reading. And think about what kinds of questions are typical of that discipline. There are graphic organizers that are specific to English but you would never use in chemistry or history or mathematics. So you really have to think about what it is that you want your students to know, and that's based upon the content area that you're in.

Teachers can find or create a variety of graphic organizer templates to improve reading comprehension in the content areas. It is important to keep in mind that the template's design should be aligned to the teacher's purpose for using it. For example, two teachers from Wilton High use different types of graphic organizers to help students organize information from their texts.

Teacher/ Assignment

Purpose

Graphic Organizer

Ms. Nor, 11th Grade, World History

Select a historical novel and summarize its key elements.

Ms. Nguyen provides a graphic organizer to assist some students with organizing and summarizing information from the historical novel.

Click to enlarge

(Close this panel)

Substances

Properties of Substance

Interactions with other substances

Atomic expression

(Close this panel)

Ms. Chesser, 10th Grade Chemistry

Be able to identify substances and their properties for an end-of-unit test.

Ms. Chesser provides a graphic organizer to assist students to organize their notes for an upcoming test.

Click to enlarge

When they use any kind of graphic organizer for the first time, content-area teachers need to explain its purpose and use. Teachers should model how to complete each section by verbalizing how to extract information from the written text and how to record it. With sufficient demonstration and guided practice, many students will be able to complete graphic organizers independently. In addition, allowing students to complete the graphic organizer with a partner or small group has the added benefit of creating opportunities to discuss the information, which in turn will help them to further clarify and reinforce the concepts.

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IRIS | Page 11: Using Graphic Organizers

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Graphic organizers are visual aids designed to help students organize substantial amounts of content information. In addition to being effective for vocabulary instruction, graphic organizers can also enhance reading comprehension by helping students to categorize information and to show the relationships among important concepts. There are many types of graphic organizers.

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Matching books to phonics features is just how it sounds. It is when a teachers purposefully selects a text that includes a phonics feature that students need to learn. The text should be age appropriate and offer plenty of opportunities to practice the desired phonic feature. This reenforces phonics instruction by allowing students to experience it in an actual book.

An example of how this might be used in practice is if the teacher wants to review rhymes. The teacher could find a book that includes a lot of rhymes and used that as an opportunity to teach the students.

Matching books to phonics features. Reading Rockets. (n.d.-c). https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/matching-books-phonics-features

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Ehri, L. C. (1998). Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is essential for learning to read words in English. In J. L. Metsala & L. C. Ehri (Eds.), Word Recognition in Beginning Literacy (pp.3-40). Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum.

Johnston, F., Invernizzi, M., & Juel, C. (1998). Book Buddies: Guidelines for Volunteer Tutors of Emergent and Early Readers. New York: Guilford Publications.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

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There are several ways to match books to readers - by reader interest, by reading level, and by the phonics features a child is learning. Careful pairing of reading with phonics study gives children a chance to apply what they are learning about letters and sounds to the reading of words and stories.

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A word wall is a collection of words placed in the classroom for all to see. A word wall is a great tool for spelling and reading, but it also offers benefits for phonics instruction because it helps students to see patterns and relationships among words.

A word wall could simply be used by placing it in a location that the entire class can see, and slowly adding words over a period of time. This would allow the teacher to go over each individual word, and allow the teacher to help students make connections or see patterns between the words. It would also help students with spelling, as they would be able to reference back to the word wall if they were ever unsure.

Word walls. Reading Rockets. (n.d.-f). https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/word-walls

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A word wall is a visible display in a classroom that features a collection of words students are studying. Word walls can focus on high-frequency words, word study examples, academic language, and words that are introduced in the content areas. They can be used to support phonics, spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing.

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Dictation is simply writing down what someone else has said. This can be used in the classroom by the teacher writing down what students say. This allows the teacher to model skills, such as sentence formation, hand writing and matching sounds to letters.

Dictation can be used in the classroom by having the class write a story together. This will allow more active engagement, while also giving the teacher many opportunities to model skills such as sentence formation and matching sounds to letters.

Dictation. Reading Rockets. (n.d.-a). https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/dictation

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Dictation is the process of writing down what someone else has said. With young children, dictation offers a way for a parent or a teacher to record a child’s thoughts or ideas when the writing demands surpass writing skills. Dictation provides a chance for an adult to model many writing behaviors i…

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SLAP! is a multi-sensory game that allows students to get up and move. In this game, the teacher projects a series of letters on the whiteboard, and the students are given a fly swatter. Then, the teacher says a word and the students slap the letter to match the sound they hear.

In practice, SLAP! can be used a a fun game that provides students with an opportunity to involve movement in their learning. A movement based game like slap can help physically immerse students in to the lesson, and increase engagement.

Multisensory phonics. Learner Variability Project. (n.d.). https://lvp.digitalpromiseglobal.org/content-area/literacy-pk-3/strategies/multisensory-phonics-literacy-pk-3/summary#:~:text=Multisensory%20phonics%20instruction%20incorporates%20activities,a%20core%20aspect%20of%20reading.

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Multisensory Phonics | Learner Variability Project

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Sound scavenger hunt can be done by giving students a sound, and then asking students to find an item in the room that corresponds with that sound. For example, the teacher might say, "can you find something with the letter "p" ppppp sound?" Then then the students would point out objects that begin with that sound, like a pencil.

It may not be practical for a teacher to base an entire lesson around a sound scavenger hunt, but it may be a fun way for a quick review. If a student is having trouble with letter sounds the teacher could quickly send him on a sound scavenger hunt, and find a real world example.

Phonological and phonemic awareness: Activities for your kindergartener. Reading Rockets. (n.d.-e). https://www.readingrockets.org/literacy-home/reading-101-guide-parents/your-kindergartener/phonological-and-phonemic-awareness

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That's a complicated sounding term, but it's meaning is simple: the ability to hear, recognize, and play with the sounds in spoken language. Phonological awareness is really a group of skills that include a child's ability to:

Identify words that rhyme

Count the number of syllables in a name

Recognize alliteration (words with the same beginning sound)

Segment (break) a sentence into words

Identify the syllables in a word

The most sophisticated phonological awareness skill (and the last to develop) is called phonemic awareness - the ability to hear, recognize, and play with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. When playing with the sounds in word, children learn to:

Blend individual sounds to make a word

Stretch out a word into its individual sounds

Swap in a different sound to the beginning, middle, or end of a word to make a new word

Strong phonemic awareness is one of the strongest predictors of later reading success. Children who struggle with reading, including kids with dyslexia, often have trouble with phonemic awareness, but with the right kind of instruction they can be successful. Learn some of the warning signs for dyslexia in this article, Clues to Dyslexia in Early Childhood.

Parents can make a big difference in helping their children become readers by practicing these pre-reading oral skills at home. Try some of the simple rhyming and word sound games described here.

Try these speech sound activities at home

Rhyme time

"I am thinking of an animal that rhymes with big. What's the animal?" Answer: pig. What else rhymes with big? ( dig, fig, wig)

Road trip rhymes

While you're out driving in the car, spot something out the window and ask your child, "what rhymes with tree or car or shop?" Then switch roles and have your child spot something and ask you for a rhyme. This can turn into a game of nonsense rhymes ("What rhymes with tree stump?") but that's great for practicing sounds, too!

Word families

Word families are sets of words that rhyme. Start to build your family by giving your child the first word, for example, cat. Then ask your child to name all the "kids" in the cat family, such as: bat, fat, sat, rat, pat, mat, hat, flat. This will help your child hear patterns in words.

Silly tongue twisters

Sing songs and say silly tongue twisters. These help your child become sensitive to the sounds in words.

Tongue ticklers

Alliteration or "tongue ticklers" - where the sound you're focusing on is repeated over and over again - can be a fun way to provide practice with a speech sound. Try these:

For M: Miss Mouse makes marvelous meatballs!

For S: Silly Sally sings songs about snakes and snails.

For F: Freddy finds fireflies with a flashlight.

Syllable shopping

While at the grocery store, have your child tell you the syllables in different food names. Have them hold up a finger for each word part. Eggplant = egg-plant, two syllables. Pineapple = pine-ap-ple, three syllables. Show your child the sign for each and ask her to say the word.

"I spy" first sounds

Practice beginning sounds with this simple "I spy" game at home, on a walk, or at the grocery store. Choose words with distinctive, easy-to-hear beginning sounds. For example, if you're in the bathroom you can say, "I spy something red that starts with the "s" ssss sound ( soap)."

Sound scavenger hunt

Choose a letter sound, then have your child find things around your house that start with the same sound. "Can you find something in our house that starts with the letter "p" pppppp sound? Picture, pencil, pear "

Which letter sounds do I teach first?

Reading expert Linda Farrell recommends that you begin with teaching the letter names, and then focus on the letter sounds that are closest to their letter names (such as /v/). And here's a great tip for teaching the trickier letter name-letter sound combinations - use arm motions. In this video, Linda demonstrates motions for /x/ and /y/. (From our video series Reading SOS: Expert Answers to Family Questions About Reading.)

Sound games

Practice blending sounds into words. Ask "Can you guess what this word is? m - o - p." Hold each sound longer than normal.

First sounds

When you're reading together with your child, pick a word from the book and say it with emphasis on the first sound. Pick another word and compare them. "Zzz-zookeeper and rrr-rhinoceros. Can you hear what sound zzz-zookeeper starts with? Is it the same as rrr-rhinoceros?

Jump, skip, hop!

Create simple picture cards that you draw or cut out of magazines. Have your child, identify what's in the picture, and then break that word into its individual sounds. For example dog is d-o-g, three sounds (phonemes). Three sounds? You and your child do three jumping jacks, skips, or hops (followed by a high-five). You can also do this game outdoors without the cards, just call out simple words for your child.

Snail talk

Tell your child you're going to communicate in "snail talk" and they need to figure out what you're saying. Take a simple word and stretch it out very slowly (e.g., /fffffllllaaaag/), then ask your child to tell you the word. Switch roles and have your child stretch out a word for you.

"I spy" blending

Here's an easy phoneme blending game you can play while talking a walk. For blending, you can say, "I see a sign that says s-t-o-p" Then your child has to blend the sounds to guess your word - stop. (Remember to say only the sounds in the word - not the letters.) Keep the words short, moving from two to three to four sounds depending on your child's skill level.

Sound counting

Using LEGO bricks, beads, or pennies, say a word and have your child show you how many sounds the word makes. For example, top = t-o-p = three sounds, so your child would place three objects in a row. Then have them tap each object as they say the sound. Remember, your child is just showing you the sounds they hear. So the word bike would be = b-i-k (silent e) = only three sounds.

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Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Activities for Your Kindergartener

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Phonological and phonemic awareness are important pre-reading skills, related to the ability to hear, identify, and play with the sounds in spoken language - including rhymes, syllables, and the smallest units of sound (phonemes). Children with strong phonological awareness skills are ready to become readers.

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In this exercise, the teacher shows that each syllable is a part of the word by pushing out a block for each syllable as it is said. This provides the students with a visual representation for parts of a word.

This can be used in the classroom as a visual representation of syllables. This would be a great tool for visual learners and would provide the students with another learning method. This could also be a great tool for review for any struggeling students.

11 fun activities for boosting phonological awareness. Brookes Blog. (2022, March 8). https://blog.brookespublishing.com/11-fun-activities-for-boosting-phonological-awareness/

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11 Fun Activities for Boosting Phonological Awareness - Brookes Blog

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Phonological awareness—a child’s understanding of the sound structure of words—is a foundational skill that lays the groundwork for later reading success. In today’s post, we’re offering a collection of fun, low- or no-cost activities that will help you teach children the 4 components of phonological awareness: rhyming, syllable awareness, knowledge of words and sentences, and phonemic awareness.

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The teacher shows each student a flash card with an animal on it. The student then tells the teacher the name of the animal. And then the teacher asks the student to identify the sound at the beginning of the animals name. This activity allows students to apply their phonological knowledge to already known information.

This activity could be used as a quick warm up for younger students. Before beginning a lesson a teacher could used this method to engage students in a fun manner, while also getting them ready to think phonologically.

11 fun activities for boosting phonological awareness. Brookes Blog. (2022, March 8). https://blog.brookespublishing.com/11-fun-activities-for-boosting-phonological-awareness/

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11 Fun Activities for Boosting Phonological Awareness - Brookes Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Phonological awareness—a child’s understanding of the sound structure of words—is a foundational skill that lays the groundwork for later reading success. In today’s post, we’re offering a collection of fun, low- or no-cost activities that will help you teach children the 4 components of phonological awareness: rhyming, syllable awareness, knowledge of words and sentences, and phonemic awareness.

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Highlighting phonological concepts in songs

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Highlighting phonological concepts in songs

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Highlighting phonological concepts in songs is a great idea because it allows students to experience these phonological awareness concepts in a more natural example. This would also be a good way of presenting these concepts in a new way that students may find exciting. Instead of reading another book, students can read the song to see the concepts, and then sing the song to hear the concepts.

This can be used in practice to help students understand rhymes. Many songs include lyrics that rhyme, and it could be fun for students to try and find all the rhymes in their favorite songs.

Examples to promote phonological awareness. Department of Education. (n.d.). https://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/readingviewing/Pages/litfocusphonologicalexample.aspx