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If you teach students to read, then you know how important building a base of phonemic awareness is. When students are aware of the sounds they are hearing, it helps them encode as they write or spell and decode as they read. Elkonin boxes can be a helpful part of that teaching process. Named after their creator, psychologist D.B. Elkonin, the boxes are a teaching tool that helps students break down words into their component sounds.

How do Elkonin boxes work? It's easy. Each time a student hears a new sound, they drag a colored circle into a new box. For example, the word "see" would have two circles. The first circle for the sound "s" and the second one for the sound "ee." Diagraph or combined letter sounds count as one phoneme. For example, for the word "sheep" there would be three circles for the sounds or phonemes /sh/ /ee/ /p/.

You can easily modify the online Elkonin boxes to fit your lessons by changing the color of the circles and the number of the boxes. Select the color from the drop-down menu by clicking on the blue circle. Tap on the number "2" to select the number of boxes. Clear the Elkonin boxes by pressing the restart symbol.

Visit classplayground.com for more resources and printables related to Elkonin boxes and literacy.

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Elkonin Boxes | Free Educational Activities | Toy Theater

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Online Elkonin boxes make early reading, phonics, and literacy lessons fun and exciting. Students will build awareness of sound and phonemes.

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Founded in 2005, 95 Percent Group emerged as early pioneers in bringing the science of reading into classrooms - creating and advocating for the systematic, explicit literacy instruction and resources relied upon nationwide today. Nearly two decades later, we're proud to continue empowering educators in their transformative work with tomorrow's readers.

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Evidence-Based Literacy Solutions | 95 Percent Group

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Transform literacy outcomes with evidence-based instruction. Explore 95 Percent Group's solutions for reading, writing, and assessment today.

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Video 15: Phonemes Linked to Letters (REL Southeast)

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Is My Kid Learning How to Read? Part 1: Purple Challenge

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Routinely use a set of comprehension-building practices to help students make sense of the text

Part 3A. Build students' world and word knowledge so they can make sense of the text

Part 3B. Consistently provide students with opportunities to ask and answer questions to better understand the text they read

Part 3C. Teach students a routine for determining the gist of a short section of text

Part 3D. Teach students to monitor their comprehension as they read

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reading intervention; reading instruction; literacy; reading difficulties; reading disabilities; comprehension; fluency; decoding; comprehension monitoring; world knowledge; word knowledge; vocabulary; stretch text; grade 4; grade 5; grade 6; grade 7; grade 8; grade 9

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WWC | Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9

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Routinely use a set of comprehension-building practices to help students make sense of the text Part 3A. Build students' world and word knowledge so they can make sense of the text Part 3B. Consistently provide students with opportunities to ask and answer questions to better understand the text they read Part 3C.

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Bitmoji Classroom of Resources

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Phonics & Stuff is dedicated to providing high-quality resources for learning and teaching phonics. Explore our games for learners or our sophisticated tools to create customized phonics lessons.

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Free through 2023-2024 school year

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Flyleaf Publishing - Online Materials Portal

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This portal is offered as a free resource through the 2023-2024 school year.

There are two areas of the site, one for Students and one for Instructors. Materials are organized by our Foundational Skills Scope & Sequence, and can be quickly navigated using the Menu at the top of the page.

If you would like more information about Flyleaf products, please visit flyleafpublishing.com.

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Home - Flyleaf Publishing - Online Materials Portal

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Online Materials PortalThis portal is offered as a free resource through the 2023-2024 school year. There are two areas of the site, one for Students and one for Instructors. Materials are organized by our Foundational Skills Scope & Sequence, and can be quickly navigated using the Menu at the top of the page.

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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.

Clay, M. (1993). Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training. NH: Heinemann.

Elkonin, D. (1971). "Development of Speech". In A.V. Zaporozhets and D. B. Elkonin (Eds.). The Psychology of Preschool Children. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Ellis, E. (1997). How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities.

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 build phonological awareness skills by segmenting words into individual sounds, or phonemes. To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme. In some cases different colored tokens may be used for consonants and vowels or just for each phoneme in the word.

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Top 10 SoR Podcasts

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Since 2019, Science of Reading: The Podcast has topped charts, delivering the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Hosted by Chief Academic Officer Susan Lambert, each episode welcomes a renowned leader in the education and literacy community at large, explores a timely topic related to the Science of Reading, and offers instructional advice to educators implementing evidence-based practices in their schools.

New to the podcast? Below are 10 popular episodes to acquaint yourself with the Science of Reading. Listen, enjoy, and subscribe - we have new episodes every other Wednesday!

S1-E1: Natalie Wexler on "The Knowledge Gap"

Susan and Natalie dive into her latest book, The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System - And How to Fix It, and discuss the lack of equity in reading education among students, the benefits of knowledge-rich curriculum inside and beyond the classroom, why it's important to build background knowledge while teaching foundational skills, and why professional development doesn't seem to be making a difference and how it can be improved.

S1-E3: Emily Hanford on reporting on education and the Science of Reading

Susan sits down with Emily Hanford, education reporter and host of the Education Post podcast, and examines the big takeaways from her experience reporting on dyslexia, the patterns that emerged in her investigation, why reading instruction isn't more aligned with the science of reading, and the evolution of whole language, balanced literacy, and phonics instruction.

S1-E8: Tim Shanahan on evidence-based literacy practices

Reading expert Tim Shanahan discusses his view on the teaching of reading. What are the four crucial things you need to teach reading? What does it mean to really do a "close read" in literature?

S3-E3: Dr. Louisa Moats on decoding

Join Dr. Louisa Moats, President of Moats Associates Consulting, as she unwinds decoding, a strand of Scarborough's Reading Rope. In the third episode of our Deconstructing the Rope series, Louisa highlights the significance of decoding in the science of reading and discusses the value of becoming students of our own language. She also mentions the reciprocal relationship between decoding and encoding and why both are essential to provide effective phonics instruction to children in the classroom.

S3-E1: Dr. Jane Oakhill on Scarborough's Reading Rope

Dive into our first episode of our Deconstructing the Rope series as Dr. Jane Oakhill, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Sussex, provides an overview of Scarborough's Reading Rope. She also emphasizes the importance of inferencing in comprehension, why the Simple View of Reading is still relevant almost 40 years later, and how each element of the Rope comes together to deconstruct the complexity of reading.

S2-E7: Sonia Cabell on research, comprehension, and content-rich literacy instruction

Join Sonia Cabell, Assistant Professor of Education at Florida State University, as she shares findings from her research trials on content-rich literacy curricula and whether activating students' background knowledge alongside explicit phonics instruction is more effective than traditional approaches. She also explains what constitutes "compelling evidence" in the science of reading and why students need to interact with both written and spoken language while learning to read.

S3-E5: Dr. Bruce McCandliss on sight recognition

Join Dr. Bruce McCandliss, Professor at the Graduate School of Education of Stanford University, as he unwinds sight recognition, a strand of Scarborough's Reading Rope. In the fifth episode of our series, Bruce explains the role of sight and word recognition in the science of reading and highlights the importance of the rapid integration of print, speech, and meaning. He also encourages listeners to be cognizant of the ever-changing, technological learning environment while nurturing young readers and writers.

S2-E1: Dr. LaTonya Goffney on a district-wide SoR adoption

Join Dr. LaTonya Goffney, Superintendent of Schools for Aldine Independent School District in Texas, as she recounts her two-year journey with her team of district educators to adopt a new early literacy curriculum. Hear how they successfully challenged the traditional adoption process, studied the science of teaching reading, analyzed student data and experiences, and developed a district-wide set of beliefs and expectations.

S1-E15: Ernesto Ortiz on principals navigating a Science of Reading adoption

Ernesto Ortiz, principal at an elementary school in Pennsylvania, discusses how to understand when materials are meaningfully "research-based", how his school made the shift to the science of reading, and how he is supporting his students with remote learning resources to continue their literacy development at home.

S3-E7: Maria Murray on The Reading League's Defining Movement

In this special episode, Dr. Maria Murray, President and CEO of The Reading League, analyzes the intricacies of literacy instruction and shares common misconceptions that educators have about the science of reading. She explains why The Science of Reading: A Defining Movement coalition was founded: the belief of clear understandings of what the science of reading is and what it is not to promote the proper use of instructional practices aligned with the findings from the Science of Reading.

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Top 10 Science of Reading Podcasts for Getting Started

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Since 2019, Science of Reading: The Podcast has topped charts, delivering the latest insights from researchers and practitioners in early reading. Hosted by Chief Academic Officer Susan Lambert, each episode welcomes a renowned leader in the education and literacy community at large, explores a timely topic related to the Science of Reading, and offers instructional advice to educators implementing evidence-based practices in their schools.

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SoR Podcast

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

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Comprehension

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Comprehension Strategies

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The Science of Reading Comprehension - Keys to Literacy

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The term Science of Reading has been the focus of attention for several years (see my January, 2020 post). The term refers to the research that reading experts, especially cognitive scientists, have conducted on how we learn to read. This body of knowledge, over twenty years in the making, has helped debunk older methods of reading instruction that were based on tradition and observation, not evidence. Much of the discourse around instruction based on the Science of Reading tends to focus on the importance of explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency. But what does the research tell us about effective instruction for comprehension?

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Fluency for MS/HS

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Oh goodness, everybody's least favorite topic (except maybe Tim Rasinski's). What I'm talking about is fluency instruction/practice for older students ... grades 4 and up, let's say.

No one gets too bent out of shape if I talk about little kids working on their oral reading, but when those young'uns reach 9- or 10-years-old that presumably is baby stuff.

I get why that is.

First, the research on fluency instruction has focused heavily on two groups: kids in grades 1-4 and remedial readers in grades 1-12 (NICHD, 2001). I can't tell a 6th grade teacher that there is research showing that if she devotes sufficient time to fluency her students will do better with reading comprehension. My own professional practice suggests that it can be powerful but that's a different level of support.

Second, round robin reading has given oral reading a bad name. Most teachers have memories of hating round robin when they were kids, so being enlightened they avoid oral reading at much cost. Kids should be able to develop fluency from silent reading practice. Unfortunately, you can't tell if kids are making progress unless you listen to them read and it is hard to intervene and help without that kind of monitoring. Practice can "make perfect" as the old saying claims but it often doesn't. (Given this, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that research has found the amount of oral reading practice in high school is correlated with reading achievement gains more closely than the amount of in class silent reading practice (Stallings, 1980).

Third, older kids will often resist. One of my least favorite instructional activities (Popcorn) sometimes results in kids balking: "You can call on me, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to read aloud to the class!"

Recently, I've astonished some teachers and district administrators by encouraging fluency teaching with older kids. They are getting a lot of pressure these days to emphasize phonics - yeah, phonics in regular high school English classes (which I think is lunatic) and they have no idea that oral reading fluency instruction has been found to improve kids' word reading and decoding. Many of these kids have had a ton of phonics instruction and don't know how to apply it. Fluency instruction began with the notion that such practice would enable the application of what the kids had already learned about letters, sounds, spelling patterns.

Don't get me wrong. There definitely are a relatively small number of high school kids who would likely get some benefit from explicit phonics. That instruction, however, should be relegated to remedial reading or special education, not the English class. Likewise, the idea of English classes devoting some of their valuable minutes to morphological study - which can impact decoding - makes great sense, too. That should be a regular part of the vocabulary teaching that should be going on.

Nevertheless, fluency training can have a remarkable impact on kids' reading comprehension in the upper grades - most likely by consolidating what those kids have already learned about decoding along the way.

Let me define and explain a few basic ideas about fluency and then the rest of this blog is aimed at providing instructional advice on fluency teaching with older students.

Fluency refers to the ability to read text accurately, with automaticity, and with proper expression (NICHD, 2001).

Accuracy is about reading an author's words. If you don't do that, then miscomprehension may occur. Students must get into the habit of respecting authors. That means reading the words that the author put on the page, rather than replacing them with context-based guesses as to what may have been meant. Words matter and becoming an effective reader requires reading the author's words; not substituting them with our own.

This word reading must be accomplished with automaticity. That means reading the words accurately without conscious attention. Automaticity is usually estimated by tracking reading speed. If a student reads text too slowly, comprehension deteriorates. Adult proficient readers read text aloud at about 166-178 words correct per minute (Baer, et al., 2009). Fourth graders who read at fewer than 100 words correct per minute tend to be "below basic" in reading comprehension. Reading so slowly makes it difficult to integrate information. By the time you get to the end of the sentence, you've likely lost the thread of the first part.

Proper expression is important because there are many aspects to translating text that are not on the page. Except for punctuation, authors do little to help readers to group words together, pause appropriately, or raise or lower pitch. If you don't get those things right it can be difficult to understand.

Here are some activities that have been used successfully in upper elementary, middle, and high school.

Instructional activities aimed at building fluency

Paired Reading: Pair students up. Have them take turns reading the text to each other. One student read a page or paragraph and the other gives feedback. Then the students switch roles. During this activity, the teacher circulates throughout the room, giving feedback as needed. Link some comprehension work to this. At the end of each section of reading, have the students determine the main point(s) of that section or compose a good test question about that part of the material.

Repeated Reading: Students read aloud a portion of text (perhaps a 100-word chunk, or the first couple of paragraphs). The teacher or another student gives feedback, and the student tries it again. This repetition continues three times or until the student can read it with 99% accuracy, at more than 100 words per minute, and with expression that suggests successful comprehension (White, et al., 2021). This can be combined with paired reading. Repeated reading is especially valuable with content materials. Understanding such texts often requires this kind of intensive rereading anyway, so the rereading is appropriate.

Pause, Prompt, Praise: Not all students are great fluency partners. PPP provides some support in this area. Partners and teachers are encouraged to give students some slack if a mistake is made. Let the student read to the end of the clause or sentence and see what they do. Better readers try to fix the mistake. That's the pause. But if a student can't remedy the error (or doesn't notice it), then provide a Prompt. If the mistake doesn't make sense, then give some feedback about meaning. If the word read doesn't look or sound like the word in the book, then direct the student to look more closely. If the student can't fix the error after one prompt, tell them what the word is. Finally, for anything done well, provide praise.

Recorded Readings: Students can make progress without much individual feedback. Consider having students record oral reading for homework. Have them read an assigned portion of text (no more than 5-10 minutes worth). To complete the assignment successfully, the students will likely need to practice prior to recording. Teacher can spot check these to check on performance. Again, it is a good idea to link to some comprehension tasks.

Chunking: Studies suggest that chunking can be helpful with older students. In this, the teacher initially provides text with phrasal boundaries marked. Students of all ability levels tend to get a boost from this material. After they have had some practice reading materials so marked, then give them unmarked texts and have them working in teams or individually to identify phrasal boundaries.

FAQs about fluency instruction

Do all high school students need work with fluency?

No, not all older students need fluency work. Some students are particularly good at fluency. If students can read grade level text with a high degree of accuracy, speeds of about 150 wcpm, and with proper expression, then fluency instruction/practice is a time waster. As kids progress through the grades, the proportion who are sufficiently fluent increases. Fewer students should require fluency work as time goes on.

Our students are getting low test scores in reading comprehension. Why no focusing on rather than fluency?

Low comprehension scores can result from many things. One of those things is fluency. For those kids, improving fluency has a direct positive impact on their reading comprehension.

How much fluency teaching should we provide?

I recommend up to 30 minutes a day of fluency instruction. But remember, this is across all classes. If every middle school or high school class provided 10 minutes of fluency work once or twice a week, that should do the trick.

Isn't oral reading embarrassing for struggling readers?

Fluency work is a kind of practice activity, not much different from Lebron James shooting free throws to get ready for a big game. Practice isn't embarrassing, as long as everyone recognizes it as practice. Most students enjoy the fluency work as it is involving, and they can see their own improvement. Avoid situations like round robin, in which a student is supposed to perform before the group or the whole class. But having everyone or half the class reading aloud at the same time does not get the same push back that more performance-oriented tasks do.

How do I pair the kids?

Don't make a big deal out of pairing up, as that can be a real time waster. One rule is to make sure that the students who are working together on a given day are using the same book. That's easy to do in most classrooms. A second rule is don't pair up the same kids all the time; kids differ in their ability to give feedback, so share the wealth.

Does fluency work make sense in a content classes like science or math?

Yes. It is important that students learn how to read those books well. If students are to become independent learners in algebra or chemistry, they must read those texts fluently. Technical subjects require that students read texts intensively, rereading some parts again and again. Unfortunately, many high school students read this material once for gist only. Fluency work can become a powerful way for teaching students how to understand these materials.

Paired reading, repeated reading, and the other recommended activities don't look difficult, but how do I know that they'll work?

Research on these techniques has found them to improve word reading, fluency, and reading comprehension. Whatever it is that students learn from fluency training with particular texts has been found to transfer to their performance with other texts.

References

Baer, J., Kutner, M., & Sabatini, J. (2009). Basic reading skills and the literacy of America's least literate adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Stallings, J. A. (1980). Allocated academic learning time revisited, or beyond time on task. Educational Researcher 9 (11):11-16.

White, S., Sabatini, J., Park, B. J., Chen, J., Bernstein, J., and Li, M. (2021). The 2018 NAEP oral reading fluency study. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics.

Selected comments

Comment from Andrew Biemiller

I'm interested in your discussion of children's oral reading in the upper elementary grades. Seems to me that there are at least two quite different functions for oral reading.

(1) Diagnostic oral reading - as you point out ◊ allows teachers to detect reading problems. Also - as you point out - when students can read "grade-level" texts at 150 wpm or more, further use of this diagnostic reading may no longer be needed.

(2) Performative oral reading - oral reading as might be done for an audience. A different kind of diagnostic reading - for showing a deeper understanding of a text. Note that teachers (and parents?) are advised to read a text to themselves prior to reading aloud to an audience. You really should have a good understanding of a text before reading it to an audience-reading with effective "feeling", emphasis, etc.

Performative oral reading may also be a good "consolidation" activity - in some cases reading for younger audiences. But it's quite a different instructional activity than diagnostic reading in a classroom.

Reply from Tim Shanahan

Andie -

Both diagnostic and performative oral reading have a place in middle and high school. However, so does the pedagogical. Research has found that such practice improves reading comprehension (and at least with younger students and poor readers it has a positive impact on word reading ability). The point isn't to make kids great performative readers but to provide supported practice in reading text in which all the words are articulated (rather than skipped if they pose some kind of problem which can be the case with silent reading). S.J. Samuels also emphasized the importance of repetition in such practice - improving performance with a particular text with the idea that what is being learned will generalize to other text.

Thanks.

Comment from Anne Rowell

I teach 4/5 and I used to have a schedule to meet with students as they practiced their fluency passages. I notice huge gains, but - exhausting. Hard to get to everyone. Then COVID hit. We started using Classkick (I am sure there are other options) - and it was miraculous. I recorded their passage so they could listen first, then they read and recorded it, then they listened to themselves and commented. That gave me time to listen to everyone when I was free, and I could leave a comment and a goal back. Repeat! Also - just read, "Know Better, Do Better," and that helped me tweak it even more. The kids really enjoy it!

Comment from Shamyra

This is a great encouragement to teachers who are currently doing fluency practice. I work with students with dyslexia; would fluency practice be as beneficial for these students if they are in the early beginnings of receiving explicit phonics instruction?

Reply from Tim Shanahan

Shamyra -

The honest answer to your question is, I don't know. I know of no research done with kids early in the phonics sequence. Theoretically, such fluency training would NOT be expected to have much payoff. I think one of the reasons that fluency training has a positive influence on decoding ability is that it gives kids practice applying their phonics (in fact, that was why Carol Chomsky first proposed this kind of teaching back in the 1970s- it was to help the kids with phonics knowledge to learn to use that knowledge when reading text).

Fluency work MIGHT help kids early in the phonics learning process, but not necessarily (or not in the same way that it does later).

Thanks.

Comment from Tim Rasinski

Tim - Very good blog. Juding from the comments I (and you also) am not the only folks interested in fluency.

In a perfect world fluency should not be a concern at the middle and secondary levels - however, as you point out, it definitely is for many older students. Our own work (with David Paige) has shown that a significant and substantial number of secondary students who are identified as struggling in reading in general exhibit difficulties in fluency. You are spot one when you suggest it is something that middle and secondary teachers need to be aware of.

I appreciate also your (and Andy's) distinction betwee diagnostic, performative, and pedagogical oral reading. Again, our own work, especially by Chase Young, on performative reading (e.g. readers theater, poetry) has found that it can can be used pedagogically - demonstrating not improvements in oral reading fluency, but also in comprehension.

I just posted a paper on my own blog - www.timrasinski.com by Paula Williams, a psychologist in the UK, who found that pedagogial fluency instruction resulted in improvements in word recognition accuracy, rate (automaticity), and comprehension when compared with students not receiving such instruction.

Thanks for keeping the spotlight on reading fluency! I appreciate all you do to inform all of us with you timely blog.

Comment from Laurie

What are your thoughts about having English Language students listen to a three or four paragraph text that they are working on in their native language as part of a fluency/comprehension lesson sequence which they are working on in English?

Reply from Tim Shanahan

Laurie -

What a complicated question. I know of no research on that but as someone who is learning a foreign language I can tell you that plan would not help me at all. I can read reasonably well in French, but hearing the language is a real problem for me (even worse than speaking it). If you have an English learner who is still struggling to hear the language, I doubt that would help.

If the kids are further along with English, then what you are suggesting could be beneficial, but again will depend greatly on proficiency. Many ELs and first language English users, struggle with decoding. In such cases, that kind of oral model can be useful, but a sentence at a time (3-4 paragraphs would overwhelm memory and make the model useless). The oral rendition of a sentence is not usually enough to give kids perfect memory for the sentence, but that information along with the print can allow kids to recognize the words sufficiently well and then through rereading to get better at that.

If the kids are further along than that, some oral modeling can be useful but don't over do that ... especially if the kids are much better with oral language than reading (in such cases, they start to ignore the text/reading and just rely on the information provided in the model).

Thanks.
See all comments and replies here ›

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Teaching Oral Reading Fluency to Older Students

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Oh goodness, everybody's least favorite topic (except maybe Tim Rasinski's). What I'm talking about is fluency instruction/practice for older students ... grades 4 and up, let's say. No one gets too bent out of shape if I talk about little kids working on their oral reading, but when those young'uns reach 9- or 10-years-old that presumably is baby stuff.

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Semantic Maps

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Knowledge helps you remember new information, and people who know a great deal about a topic also know its vocabulary. One critical finding from research is that word learning takes place most efficiently when the reader or listener already understands the context well. In fact, we learn words up to four times faster in a familiar context than in an unfamiliar one (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Hirsch, 2006). Vocabulary instruction that compares and contrasts word meanings and that activates prior knowledge not only helps students learn new words, but also has been shown to improve comprehension of a reading selection (Graves, 2006). Therefore, an important goal of instruction in any subject grade, in any grade, should be to help students acquire the vocabulary associated with the content and to make connections between known and unknown words.

There are four activities that are part of my professional development program titled The Key Vocabulary Routine that are designed to teach words in relation to other words: Semantic Mapping, Categorizing, Semantic Feature Analysis, and Opposites (sometimes called Scaling). This post will provide details for how to use Semantic Mapping (Heimlich & Pittelman, 1986) which is a well-researched activity that helps students draw on background knowledge of a topic and see connections between ideas and words related to that topic. It is highly interactive and offers opportunities for rich, collaborative discussion among students.

There are two steps for generating a semantic map. First, the teacher chooses a key concept word that is central to the topic covered in the reading or classroom lesson and writes this word in the center of a page or on the board. Students are then asked to brainstorm as many words as they know associated with the key word. This brainstorming is best done as a whole class or in smaller cooperative groups. The teacher or a scribe writes the words generated on the board. The visual below is an example of semantic map that was generated in a fifth grade classroom related to text students were reading that had information about baseball.

Once a significant number of words has been generated, students are asked to make connections among the words and group them into categories. See the visual below of the categorized baseball words. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer to this task! Sometimes one of the words on the map becomes the word for a category (e.g., uniform), and sometimes a new word needs to be generated for the category (e.g., referee, equipment). Once the categories are identified, students can be asked to add more words to each category. Sometimes there will be words that are not easily grouped into a category (e.g., innings, game, summer, dugout). This is a simple example, but semantic mapping can be used with any grade level, right up through high school, using a sophisticated key content word and more advanced academic vocabulary.

Scaffolds
Sometimes a new concept word will be so foreign to students that they are unable to generate many of their own words. For example, the background information for students growing up in a city may not be sufficient to brainstorm many words related to the word harvest. When this happens, teachers can provide some background knowledge about the topic to get the brainstorm going. Another scaffold is to provide a list of words that includes some that are related to the key word and some that are not. Students consider each word to determine if it should be added to the semantic map. The categorizing part of the activity can also be scaffolded by the teacher providing category topics. If you are working with young children who have not yet developed solid reading and writing skills, you can use a picture in the center of the map instead of a word, an the brainstorming can be done orally with the teacher transcribing the words.
A Before and After Activity
A semantic mapping activity can begin before students read or learn new information as a way to help them access what they already know about a topic. It also serves as a great "after" activity to extend the vocabulary learning. The teacher can bring back the semantic map or the words listed in categories and ask students to add any new words they have learned about the topic. As noted above, one advantages of semantic mapping is that it is a collaborative task that provides lots of opportunities for the students to talk about words and how they are related, using real-life contexts to explain the words they generate. It also is engaging and motivating, and important part of developing a word conscious classroom in which students enjoy learning words!

I'll end this post by showing several classroom examples of semantic maps. The first one from a grade 2 classroom is interesting because you can see that the words at the top of the map were generated before the students listened to a read aloud about snails. Word such as slow, slimy, small, and slithery are words the students already associated with snails. The words on the bottom of the map were generated after the read aloud. Words such as gastropod, herbivore, and mollusk represent new, academic words that the students learned.

References:
Graves, M.F. 2006. The vocabulary book. New York: Teachers College Press

Heimlich, J.E., & Pittelman, S. D. (1986). Semantic mapping: Classroom applications. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Hirsch, E.D. (2006). The case for bringing content into the language arts block and for a knowledge-rich curriculum core for all children. American educator. Spring, 2006.

Landauer, T.K., & Dumais, S. T., (1997). A solution to Plato's problem" The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review, 104 (2).

Joan Sedita

Joan Sedita is the founder of Keys to Literacy and author of the Keys to Literacy professional development programs. She is an experienced educator, nationally recognized speaker and teacher trainer. She has worked for over 35 years in the literacy education field and has presented to thousands of teachers and related professionals at schools, colleges, clinics, and professional conferences.

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Semantic Mapping to Grow Vocabulary - Keys to Literacy

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Knowledge helps you remember new information, and people who know a great deal about a topic also know its vocabulary. One critical finding from research is that word learning takes place most efficiently when the reader or listener already understands the context well.

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Semantic Maps

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When you get a great critical thinking exercise and pair it with a great vocabulary activity...well, let's change their Facebook status to "in a relationship with..."

Semantic Maps are just such a pair. Let me persuade you!

Semantic Maps are a tool we use to help students to identify, understand, and recall the meaning of words they read in the text.
They're research-based, they lend themselves to use with graphic organizers, they support struggling readers, and they are easy to use.
I've found that lots of teachers think they're a great idea, but aren't sure of exactly how to implement them in a real classroom.

🌺 What is a Semantic Map?

Semantic Maps are a visual strategy for teaching vocabulary.

"Semantic" just means "related to meaning in language", so a semantic map is essentially a "map" that connects related words.

With Semantic Maps, students create "maps" or webs of words.

Words are sorted into categories based on what they are, what they do, or other categories.

Semantic Maps can be very simple, using just words grouped together, or they can be more complex, using graphic organizers or other visual structure.

Often, the words are generated as a list and then coverted in a more visual format.

Semantic Maps can be created on paper or digitally.

Semantic Maps can be created individually, in small groups, or as a whole class activity.

Semantic Maps are dynamic. Students can add to their maps as they learn more information and gather more words.

Do Semantic Maps sound like something that could be useful to your students? I'd love to tell you more about exactly how they work in class.

🌺 How are Semantic Maps different from graphic organizers?

First, let's look at what they're not.

While Semantic Maps may use a graphic organizer to arrange the words, Semantic Maps go beyond just a graphic organizer.

The don't ask students to recreate already mastered/learned information.

They ask students to think, "What do I know related to this? What does this make me think of?"

Their strength is that they build on students' current schema or understanding, allowing those neural pathways to fire up.

Here's an example of a graphic organizer I created using Smart Art in PowerPoint. This has one "right" answer, doesn't it? If a student put anything else under "legislative", we'd be worried, wouldn't we?

Here's a Semantic Map over the same topic. In this case, I just gave the student the word "Government" in the center, along with the three branches of government. The student then created the Semantic Map, generating lots of words related to those three areas. This was also created using Smart Art and shapes in PowerPoint:

Do you see the difference? We're still looking at branches of government, but we're going to get different results from different students.

It requires less rote recall and more thinking.

I'll be coming back to graphic organizers later.

🌺 How do I teach students to use a Semantic Map?

When introducing Semantic Maps to students, I find it's best to guide them in two processes: generating words and then grouping or categorizing those words.

For example, let's say we've just had a lesson on the structure of the cell. For a review, I could write the term "cell structure" on the board (or screen) and ask students to think of all the words they can think of related to cell structure.

Tell them to think of words that:

define what we're talking about

describe what we're talking about

tell the purpose of what we're talking about

give information about what we're talking about

I could do this as a whole class activity, have students work in pairs or groups, or have students work individually.

Once we had a list of words and terms, I would ask them to sort those words into groups. I can either give them categories, or I can have them come up with categories on their own.

If students are coming up with their own categories, tell students that to this, they need to think about ways in which the words are alike and ways which they are different.

Once they've grouped their words, they come up with a word or term that describes the group.

If I'm giving students the categories, I will simply tell them what they are and have students sort their words into the category in which they think they fit. That's what I did in the government example above.

For my cell structure example, I'd give students the categories Nucleus, Cytoplasm, and Cell Membrane.

You can use Semantic Maps as a simple daily activity that takes only a few minutes, or you can have students work with them to create a visually pleasing representation.

🌺 Semantic Maps Step-by-Step

There's no one right way to use Semantic Maps (you've already seen a couple of ideas here), but I did want to share a sample idea that is a great way to get started if you're unfamiliar with the strategy.

Choose a word from the text you're using. This could be a textbook, a story, or any other part of your curriculum.

Write that word on the board or using a digital tool. Just make sure everyone can see it.

Have students look at the text that's near that word to see if there are any words that are connected to this target word.

You may wish to have students look up the word in a dictionary or thesaurus (that would add to the standards addressed!).

Brainstorm words the class can come up with that are related or connected to this word in some way. Remember, these should not only include examples of the word ("cat" is an example of an animal, for example), but also what the things can do. For instance, "can fly" or "can run".

Once you have a robust list of words, then you do the categorization. Remember, you can give categories or you can have students generate categories.

Now, transform these into a map. This can be a circle with spokes coming off of it or a more formal graphic organizer.

Here's an example of a simple one generated after a discussion of verbs.

🌺 How can I use Semantic Maps with technology?

You've seen above how you can use PowerPoint to create Semantic Maps. There are other tech tools that work, as well.

This table lists some possible tech tools, with the pros and cons of each.

PowerPoint/ Keynote

Free

Students probably familiar with it; very flexible; easy to convert to other formats (images or PDFs); SmartArt has built-in graphic organizers

Harder to integrate with other platforms (uploading, etc.); difficult to collaborate; takes more time than some other tools.

Google Slides

Free

Same as PowerPoint except Smart Art

Not as powerful as PowerPoint, so fewer possibilities.

Google Draw

Free

Very similar to Google Slides, except a little more flexible

Students are usually less familiar with this than other Google tools.

Google Jamboard

Free

Built for collaboration; easy to use; easy to share; easy to add images; no need to own software

Students may be less familiar with this than other Google tools.

Freemium (free & paid versions

Built for collaboration; browser-based, so no software to download or install; low-distraction interface; easy to share; easy to present with

The free version is very limited, which gets frustrating very quickly.

Mindmup.com
Freemium (free & paid versions)

Easily converts to PDF, PowerPoint, or outlines; easily save to Google Drive; add images or even documents; easy to share

Students and teachers are usually unfamiliar with it, so there will be a learning curve.

🌺 What are the benefits of using a Semantic Map?

Semantic Maps are particularly useful for students who are struggling or who are English Learners, but they work really well with everyone.

First, we have the creativity side. One of the Torrance Traits of Creativity is Fluency - coming up with lots of ideas.

That's the first part of what we do with a Semantic Map.

Next, we have the added strength of categorizing. Sorting and categorizing are powerful tools. We see it in little children sorting blocks, but the power of dividing things into categories or groups isn't something that ends in Kindergarten.

We can have students come up with their own categories, or we can give them the categories we want them to use (as I demonstrated above).

If we really want to up the ante, we can have them create new categories and recategorize all of the words. That's super fun!

Another benefit of Semantic Maps is that they are a no-prep activity. Nothing to print out. Nothing to copy. Just minds and something on which to write. It just doesn't get easier than this.

🌺 How do Semantic Maps work with graphic organizers?

While you don't need to use a formal graphic organizer to create a Semantic Map, they go very well together.

Almost any graphic organizer can be used as a Semantic Map.

If you use Thinking Maps®, then a Bubble Map® or a Double Bubble Map® would be my first choice.

The key is to pick a graphic organizer that works for the students, so it's less about what it looks like and how effective it is in helping them create a visual represenation of their thinking.

You've got a few options:

Give students a particular graphic organizer that you want them to use

Give students a few graphic organizers they can pick from to use

Have students generate their own graphic organizer

Let students search for a graphic organizer

The most important thing is to not let the organizer become more important than the thinking!

🌺 How do Semantic Maps align with standards & research?

Semantic Maps have been studied in research, and those studies have shown some strong benefits.

Semantic Maps are a part of the group of "[i]nstructional activities that allow for a visual display of words and promote students' comparing and contrasting of new words to known words [that] can be a beneficial means for increasing their vocabulary knowledge " (Rupley, Logan, & Nichols, 1998).

As we practiced above, Semantic Maps not only identify important ideas, but they also show the relationships among those words and ideas (Kholi, & Sharifafar, 2013).

That's where research shows their power lies.

As far as standards, clearly they address some of the CCSS ELA standards, such as:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.L.3 Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.L.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues, analyzing meaningful word parts, and consulting general and specialized reference materials, as appropriate.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.L.5 Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.

But you also see them apply in math standards such as:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.6.EE.A.2.B
Identify parts of an expression using mathematical terms (sum, term, product, factor, quotient, coefficient); view one or more parts of an expression as a single entity.

If you're using Next Gen Science Standards, Semantic Maps are a strategy for Crosscutting Concepts, as students begin to recognize the patterns.

These are just examples. Whatever standards system you're working with, Semantic Maps fit beautifully.

🌺 How do I use Semantic Maps in Writing?

Semantic Maps can be used to organize thoughts before writing, creating a structure students can follow. They are a perfect pre-writing strategy.

When students group their ideas, they can easily see where there is unbalance.

They can then add in more details where they are lacking or eliminate some where they have too many.

🌺 Wrapping Up

Semantic Maps are a vocabulary strategy that belong in every teacher's toolbox. I hope that after reading this you feel confident in giving them a try.

There's no "wrong" way to do them and the rewards are terrific, so go ahead and see how they work with your students.

Like anything else, it may take a few tries until you (and your students) feel comfortable.

Pretty soon, the strategy will be second nature to you! 🌺

🌺 You May Also Like:

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How to Use Semantic Maps for Teaching Vocabulary | Vocabulary Luau

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When you get a great critical thinking exercise and pair it with a great vocabulary activity...well, let's change their Facebook status to "in a relationship with..." Semantic Maps are just such a pair. Let me persuade you! Semantic Maps are a tool we use to help students to identify, understand, and recall the meaning of words they read in the text.

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Semantic Mapping

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Connecting Word Meanings Through Semantic Mapping

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Semantic maps (or graphic organizers) help students, especially struggling students and those with disabilities, to identify, understand, and recall the meaning of words they read in the text.

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Ways to Build Phonological Awareness in Middle-Schoolers

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Middle-schoolers with decoding problems may need evaluation and help building phonological or phonemic awareness. Learn about how you can help your child develop key reading skills.

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Phonics Instruction for Middle and High School ELLs

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I recently had the opportunity to teach summer school, and two of my sixth-grade students barely read at a first-grade level. This was very challenging for me, and I struggled to find the right way to address their need for phonics and comprehension instruction. Little by little, however, I began to…

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Phonemic Awareness for MS

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"Phonemic awareness" refers to the understanding of how sounds are written in standard English, and how these sounds can combine to make words. Elementary school teachers spend much time teaching phonemic awareness. By the time students advance to middle school grades, many teachers assume that their students have a well-developed understanding of this complex skill. This belief that students already possess the phonemic skills necessary by middle school is often false. Teachers can assist their students in developing these skills by engaging them in phonemic awareness activities.

Study words that represent sounds by asking students to compose a a story incorporating onomatopoeia (defined by Webster's as "the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it-as buzz, hiss"). Start this activity by discussing the concept of onomatopoeia with your students and brainstorming a list of onomatopoeia words. After creating an extensive list, copy the student-suggested sound words onto slips of paper. Instruct each student to draw or two slips of paper from a hat or basket. Instruct students to write a story featuring their selected onomatopoeia word.

When students comprehend the concept of syllables, they can better understand how they can break up the sounds that make up a single word. Allow students to participate in an interactive ball game to improve their syllable understanding. To play the game, ask students to stand in a circle. Start the game by saying a number between one and four, then tossing the ball to a student. The student must then say a word that contains the number of syllables that you announced. If the student answers correctly, he has the opportunity to pass the ball. If not, he must keep the ball until he correctly states a word containing the specified number of syllables.

Once the student gives a correct answer, allow him to announce another number between one and four and toss the ball to a classmate, who must then provide the class with a word containing that number of syllables. Continue play in this fashion until every child has had the opportunity to participate in the game.

Study the concept of rhyming as an extension to a classroom poetry activity. Each day, present the students with a rhyming challenge. Write a word on the board before students enter the class. As students enter, ask them to write a word that rhymes with the provided word on the board. Discuss the rhymes once class begins. Ask a classroom recorder to create a dictionary page, placing the word at the top of the page, and all of the rhyming matches below it. Combine the daily pages into a classroom rhyming dictionary that students can consult as they use their phonemic skills to compose poems for class.

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Phonemic Awareness Activities for Middle School | Synonym

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"Phonemic awareness" refers to the understanding of how sounds are written in standard English, and how these sounds can combine to make words. Elementary school teachers spend much time teaching phonemic awareness. By the time students advance to middle school grades, many teachers assume that their students have a well-developed understanding of this complex skill.

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MS/HS intro to SoR

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SoR in Secondary

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Let's get this out there right away: I'm not an expert in the Science of Reading in secondary. I'm a beginner, a learner - starting out on my journey to understand more and do what I can to fill in the gaps that my students are coming to me with.

If you're new to the Science of Reading (SoR), in its basic definition, it's the body of research that has been found to be effective with regard to how students learn to read and comprehend text. Doesn't sound controversial, right? Wrong.

At the secondary level, this doesn't seem as big of a deal as most of the conflict is around teaching student to read (the three cueing system vs. explicit phonics); however, it very much impacts us as we inherit students who either can read and comprehend on grade level, or students who have struggles in one or both of these areas.

SoR Resources

If you want to know more about the basics and ideas behind SoR, here are some suggestions (keep in mind that some of these are obviously biased, but they do provide good information):

At a Loss for Words (AMP Reports - I happened upon this first and it shook my world!)

What Is the Science of Reading? (Really Great Reading)

David Kilpatrick Webinar Series (95 Percent Group)

Science of Reading (Facebook Group - amazing resources!)

And this list, which has basically everything you could ever want to know, and then some.

So back to the science of reading in secondary. Many of our students struggle with reading. Yet I find that once they hit middle school, we seem to focus solely on comprehension, which is really hard if you can't understand the words on the page. This year I decided to drill down and really try to figure out my students' needs. Was it that they actually couldn't figure out the main idea of paragraph 2? Or could they just not READ paragraph 2? (And on a completely different note, can we not just forget about standardized tests in general?)

Using what I know about the Science of Reading, I knew I wanted to focus on phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency.

Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness is "the ability to recognize and manipulate sound properties of spoken words, such as syllables, initial sounds, rhyming parts and phonemes" (D. Kilpatrick, Equipped for Reading Success, p. 13).

Knowing this, I guessed that all of my students would need instruction in this. Being virtual, I knew that it would take roughly 17.3 years to assess each of them individually using the PAST (Phonological Awareness Screening Test), so I decided instead to start at the first level of drills in Kilpatrick's book Equipped for Reading Success. Each day we do one drill (ex. Say "tent" - Now say "tent" but instead of /n/ say /ks/ (text)) and it takes about one minute. After the drill, I put up a poll asking if it was easy, just right, or difficult. Once the majority of the class says that it's easy, we move on to the next level.

Doing it this way assumes a lot. One, I'm assuming that they're actually saying things out loud in their homes. With no camera or microphones, it's just trust. I've told them that it'll help them as readers, and honestly, I think most of them participate. Two, I'm assuming they're being honest in the poll. I've never had one poll where everyone said it was easy, so I'm going to continue trusting them and their feedback!

Phonics

Based on the spelling patterns of some of my students, I made the assumption that there were some gaps in basic phonics skills. In order to assess for this, if my students were disfluent readers or I suspected gaps based on their writing, I gave them the CORE Phonics Survey. Based on this, I put them into groups as needed and am currently using the S.P.I.R.E. curriculum to fill in the gaps (it's free right now!). I have one group where we literally started at the very beginning.

Fluency

I was listening to the ILA Conference recently, and I heard that you want your students to be able to read more quickly than they talk, because if they can't, there's really no point in them getting their information from texts. They would get it much faster if it were spoken. This made a LOT of sense to me, so I started every assessment with a word-per-minute check-in. I just took a text from a previous state assessment, wrote it out on Google slides, and had the students read to me for one minute. After a minute, I asked them what it was about just to check their comprehension. Based on their fluency, I then either administered the CORE or not.

All of my students need fluency practice. ALL. Fluency incorporates four aspects: rate, accuracy, prosody and expression. There were no students who I felt were well versed in all of these areas. However, I don't really feel like there's a lot I can do in a virtual environment - so, I started with simple. I figured it was better to do something than nothing.

Currently, we read a poem for a few days. I read it one, we read it "together" (I'm trusting them, again) and then they read it on their own. On Friday, they record themselves reading it on FlipGrid so I can see where we're at. Repeated readings are a simple way to begin to address their fluency concerns, although it's certainly not as comprehensive as I would like.

So, that's it! Three simple changes that I'm hoping will begin to fill some of the gaps that my students have as readers, because if they can't read, it truly doesn't matter whether or not they can comprehend.

As we begin to understand and incorporate the Science of Reading in secondary, I'm hopeful that we'll see more motivated students, less avoidance and more love for what we love - reading.

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The Science of Reading in Secondary : Secondary Reading Workshop

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Let's get this out there right away: I'm not an expert in the Science of Reading in secondary. I'm a beginner, a learner - starting out on my journey to understand more and do what I can to fill in the gaps that my students are coming to me with.

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How to set up Literacy Blocks that align with the Science of Reading

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Thrive Literacy Corner - Thrive Educational Services

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Since I have written about the science of reading, heart words, and explicit phonics instruction, so many of you have reached out and asked, "so how do I set up my literacy block and work with students in small groups?"

I know it can be overwhelming learning that what you've been doing needs to change, especially with all the challenges teachers face with time and curriculum restraints.

In this post, I'm sharing a literacy block template you can use to set up your reading and writing instruction, just in time for the new school year!

But before I get into it, make sure you complete the right literacy assessments before planning out anything for the year.

What should literacy instruction include?

The 3 main areas that you want to focus on in your literacy instruction are:

When planning out your literacy block, make sure every activity targets one of these three areas.

Decoding

Decoding requires phonological awareness, phonics, and blending and segmenting. Students should be able to hear and manipulate sounds in words, understand relationships between graphemes and phonemes, and manipulate parts of words. These are the things you will focus on in your phonics lessons and activities.

Some activities that you can include in your lessons that address decoding include:

Elkonin boxes

Syllable splitting

Syllable blending

Segmenting phonemes

Blending phonemes

Phoneme deletion and subsitution

Highlight target phonics pattern

Phonics games

Memory or matching game

Word building

Search for target phonics pattern

Word work worksheets

Heart words (high frequency words)

Fluency

Fluency requires the ability to read smoothly, with expression, at the right pace, and with attention to punctuation. Including activities that build fluency is important.

Some activities that address fluency include:

Read alouds

Shared reading

Re-reading

Independent reading

Listening to an audio book

Choral reading

Partner reding

Readers' Theatre

Grammar instruction

Comprehension

Comprehension requires vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge, and language comprehension. These are the things you will focus on in your comprehension instruction.

Some activities that address comprehension include:

Reading a nonfiction passage to increase background knowledge

Voabulary instruction

Retelling

Summarizing

Shared reading

Read-Alouds

Independent reading

Science & social studies content (increases background knowledge)

Think alouds

Stop and retell

Visualization

Literacy Block Schedule Template

I know that every school has different time requirements and even specific activity requirements for reading and writing instruction. You might be able to adapt what you are currently doing and swap some activities or change up the timing to fit with what research says actually works to improve reading.

Sometimes administrators need a little education on why certain programs or activities need to be updated or changed, and hopefully, you don't encounter a lot of pushback with this.

Here is a sample of what a literacy block should look like for kindergarten through second grade:

Sound Manipulation - 10 minutes of activities that build phonological awareness

Phonics - about 30 minutes of activities that focus on decoding, encoding, phonological awareness, high frequency words, and vocabulary

Shared or close reading - 10 minutes of activities that adress print and book skills, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary

Read-aloud & vocabulary - 15 minutes of activities that focus on comprehension, vocabulary, and modeling fluency

Writing - 30-45 minutes of acvities that teach encoding, fine motor skills, and grammar

Independent Reading - 10 minutes or less

Small Groups - 30-45 minutes of activities that reinforce phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocbaulary

These activities DO NOT have to be scheduled in this order, nor do the activities need to stick within these recommended time frames.

Think of transition times that you can do phonemic awareness activities like while walking to lunch. You could do a read-aloud while students eat their morning or afternoon snack. Some of these activities could be independent small group activities that your students work on while you work with another group.

Break up the longer time frames if needed. For example, in Kindergarten you may do half of your small group instruction in the morning and the other half in the afternoon, so that the other students are not doing independent work for so long (because you know they will get off task after about 10 minutes or so).

Think about what programs you're currently using and assess which areas they address: decoding, fluency, and/or comprehension. You don't need to include everything every day. You can do certain activities less often, or try a schedule that alternates activities so it takes 2 days to go through all the areas.

What you do want to have each day is a little bit of instruction that addresses decoding, fluency, and comprehension. But be flexible and realistic. Some people can't fit all this into their daily schedule. Do the best that you can with what you have available to you.

What do students do for independent work while you are working with a small group?

I get this question so often, so I'm betting you were thinking about this while looking at that schedule.

Here are a few ideas for independent work:

Follow up activity from the small group lesson

Independent reading

Read a decodable text

Partner reading

Summary writing or filling out a graphic organizer about a text

Listening to an audiobook

Spelling practice

Handwriting practice

Word work

Peer dictation

Phonics games students can play with a partner or small group

Heart word practice

Phonics apps or computer games

Writing activity/journal

You want students to practice what you have taught previously. Choose activities that don't require you to check their work too often and that have little room for error. This time can easily be wasted if students don't understand what to do or do not have enough instruction to practice the target skills.

Using decodable texts is key for independent activities to be beneficial for students. Students should be using texts that they can read 100% on their own.

How to make small groups/centers and Daily 5 work with the Science of Reading

During your small group instruction, you can choose to set up groups or centers for students to do their independent work. You can adapt the Daily 5 to work with this by modifying centers a bit.

Choose the 4 activities that you want students to work on independently. Choose activities that you can easily swap out the skill without creating new materials or a completely new activity that needs to be taught. For example, you can choose Summary Writing as an activity where students use a graphic organizer to write a short summary of a story. Or you could use a partner phonics game where you simply need to swap out the words used in the game to align with current instruction. Just make sure every activity includes skills the students can do on their own.

And you probably already know this, but make sure to explicitly teach all of these before you set them off to work independently!

Example Literacy Block

Below is an example of a literacy block for one week.

I hope this post helps you plan out your literacy instruction. If you need a more specific guide and outline to follow, I recommend the book How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction (grades k-3).
Visit my Teachers Pay Teachers shop to see all my literacy products.
Want to remember this? Save How To Set Up Literacy Blocks Thatr Align With the Science of Reading to your favorite Pinterest board!

If you're looking for more tips on teaching reading to struggling learners, check out these other posts:

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Literacy Block Scheduling That Aligns With the Science of Reading

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Since I have written about the science of reading, heart words, and explicit phonics instruction, so many of you have reached out and asked, "so how do I set up my literacy block and work with students in small groups?"

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Katie’s Science of Reading Resource Page

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IDA - International Dyslexia Association

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Having a child diagnosed with dyslexia can be a traumatic experience. While dyslexia can make reading more difficult, with the right instruction, almost all individuals with dyslexia can learn to read. Many people with dyslexia have gone on to accomplish great things. Among the many dyslexia success stories are Thomas Edison, Stephen Spielberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Schwab.

Dyslexia is a neurological condition caused by a different wiring of the brain. There is no cure for dyslexia and individuals with this condition must learn coping strategies. Research indicates that dyslexia has no relationship to intelligence. Individuals with dyslexia are neither more nor less intelligent than the general population. But some say the way individuals with dyslexia think can actually be an asset in achieving success.

In public school settings where many teachers are not knowledgeable about this condition, students with dyslexia may be considered stupid or lazy. Parents who have children diagnosed with dyslexia should seek out reading instruction that is based upon a systematic and explicit understanding of language structure, including phonics. This reading instruction goes by many names, Structured Literacy, Orton- Gillingham, Simultaneous Multisensory, Explicit Phonics, and others (See IDA's fact sheet Effective Reading Instruction n ). If you think you or your child may be dyslexic, you can take IDA's test which will evaluate the chance that you have this condition.

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Dyslexia At a Glance - International Dyslexia Association

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Having a child diagnosed with dyslexia can be a traumatic experience. While dyslexia can make reading more difficult, with the right instruction, almost all

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ODE Dyslexia Supports website

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New Changes to Ohio's Dyslexia Support Laws

House Bill 33 of the 135th General Assembly included several important updates to Ohio's dyslexia support laws.

Professional Development (Ohio Revised Code 3319.077)

The following dyslexia professional development requirements apply to teachers in grades K-3 and special education teachers in grades K-12 who are employed by a city, local or exempted village school district, community school or STEM school.

Teachers hired before April 12, 2021, who provide instruction to students in the following grade bands must complete the required professional development in accordance with the following timeline:

By the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year: Teachers of grades K-1, including special education teachers.

By Sept. 15 of the 2024-2025 school year: Teachers of grades 2-3, including special education teachers.

By Sept. 15 of the 2025-2026 school year: Special education teachers of students in grades 4-12.

Teachers hired after April 12, 2021, who provide instruction to students in the grade bands outlined above must complete the required professional development by the later of the aforementioned dates or two calendar years after the hiring date (unless the teacher completed the professional development while employed by a different district or school).

Dyslexia Screening (ORC 3323.251)

A district or school is not required to administer a tier one dyslexia screening measure to a student in grades K-6 who transfers into the district or school midyear if the student's records indicate a screening was administered to the student by the district or school from which the student transferred during that year.

Additional updates for screening transfer students can be found on the Dyslexia Screening webpage.

The 2023-2024 List of Approved Universal Dyslexia Screeners is now available

The list and detailed information are available at the List of Approved Assessments page on the Department's website.

A streamlined list of approved assessments that meet the requirements of tier 1 dyslexia screening and/or the K-3 diagnostic can be found here.

Administering Literacy Assessments for students with Low incidence disabilities and complex communication needs

This document provides resources and recommendations for accommodations and scaffolds districts may use when administering district wide literacy screenings and benchmarks or reading diagnostics. These can be used when administering the required tier 1 dyslexia screener, as well as the reading diagnostic required under the Third Grade Reading Guarantee and other district assessments. The purpose of these is to ensure these assessments provide proper data related to the reading abilities of students with complex communication need and low incidence disabilities. The document can be found here.

Literacy Assessment SelEction Tool K-6 now available

This document describes the different skills that should be assessed by tier 1 and tier 2 dyslexia screeners and will assist districts and schools with choosing screeners. The document can be found here.

Ohio's Introduction to Dyslexia, Kindergarten-Grade 3 course is available through the learning management system

Questions can be sent to Dyslexia@education.ohio.gov. If you need additional account support after consulting the linked support documents above, please contact OH|ID Profile Help at Profile.Help@education.ohio.gov for OH|ID assistance. If you are in the LMS application and need additional support, please contact LMS Support at LMSSupport@education.ohio.gov.

OHIO'S INTRODUCTION TO DYSLEXIA, Grade 4-12 COURSE IS AVAILABLE THROUGH THE LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Questions can be sent to Dyslexia@education.ohio.gov. If you need additional account support after consulting the linked support documents above, please contact OH|ID Profile Help at Profile.Help@education.ohio.gov for OH|ID assistance. If you are in the LMS application and need additional support, please contact LMS Support at LMSSupport@education.ohio.gov.

Helpful Resources for Districts and Families

Ohio's Dyslexia Guidebook

The Department is pleased to announce Ohio's Dyslexia Guidebook is available. As required by Ohio law, Ohio's Dyslexia Guidebook contains best practices and methods for universal screening, intervention and remediation for children with dyslexia or children displaying dyslexic characteristics and tendencies. Districts and schools should use the guidebook to access critical information for successful implementation of Ohio's dyslexia support laws.

The Department will develop additional resources and guidance to support schools and districts. The FAQ page will be updated as needed.

For questions about Ohio's Dyslexia Guidebook or Ohio's dyslexia support laws, please contact Dyslexia@education.ohio.gov.

Helpful Resources

Federal Funding Guidance: This document contains federal funding guidance for districts and schools to use federal Title funds, IDEA Part B School-aged Special Education funds (ages 3-21) and IDEA Part B Early Childhood Special Education funds (ages 3-5) to implement Ohio's Dyslexia Support laws.

House Bill 436 mandated a cost analysis report to ascertain the potential financial costs incurred by school districts to implement Ohio's dyslexia support laws. The final Cost Study Analysis is now available to download as well as the accompanying Appendix with detailed information.

On January 9, 2021, Governor Mike DeWine signed a set of laws strengthening dyslexia supports for Ohio's children. The new dyslexia support laws establish dyslexia screening measures (ORC 3323.251), professional development for identifying dyslexia and instructing students with dyslexia (ORC 3319.077), a structured literacy certification process for teachers (ORC 3319.078) and the Ohio Dyslexia Committee (ORC 3323.25). The following is a summary of the new set of laws:

Requires the Ohio Department of Education to establish the Ohio Dyslexia Committee consisting of 11 members;

Requires the Ohio Dyslexia Committee to develop a dyslexia guidebook for screening, intervention and remediation for children with dyslexia or displaying dyslexic characteristics and tendencies;

Requires the Ohio Dyslexia Committee to prescribe the number of clock hours of dyslexia-related professional development required for teachers;

Permits the Ohio Dyslexia Committee to make recommendations regarding ratios of students to teachers who have received certification in identifying and addressing dyslexia, the school personnel who should receive the certification and whether professional development requirements should include completing a practicum;

Requires the Department, in collaboration with the Ohio Dyslexia Committee, to identify screening and intervention measures that evaluate the literacy skills of students using a structured literacy program;

Requires school districts and other public schools to administer annual dyslexia screenings beginning in the 2022-2023 school year;

Phases in over three years dyslexia-related professional development requirements for public school teachers;

Requires school districts and other public schools, beginning in the 2022-2023 school year, to establish a structured literacy certification process for teachers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ohio's Rule for Phonics

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House Bill 33 of the 135th General Assembly included several important updates to Ohio's dyslexia support laws. The following dyslexia professional development requirements apply to teachers in grades K-3 and special education teachers in grades K-12 who are employed by a city, local or exempted village school district, community school or STEM school.

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National Center on Improving Literacy

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This toolkit provides information about dyslexia and how to best support the literacy development of students with dyslexia. Explore the five sections to learn more about what dyslexia is, how schools can screen students for dyslexia risk, using data to identify supports for students with dyslexia,…

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Science of Reading Free Courst - Reading Rockets, Reading 101

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Reading 101: Self-Paced Learning Modules

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Core knowledge about reading is a key to effective literacy instruction. Our free, self-paced learning modules can help you deepen your understanding of the building blocks of reading and writing.

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The ABC's and All Their Tricks

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The ABC’s and All Their Tricks - paperback

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The ABC’s and All Their Tricks - paperback: Margaret Bishop

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UFLI

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Welcome to the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI, pronounced "you fly"). UFLI is an ongoing effort by UF faculty, students, and staff to improve literacy outcomes for children learning to read.

The work of UFLI focuses on two main areas: teacher development and reader development. The place where those two overlap ... that is where the work of UFLI lives. Our programs and resources are designed to help teachers become more confident and more successful in their capacity to help kids learn to read. We do this through:

Academic programs for both pre-service and practicing educators to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to be effective reading teachers

Professional learning opportunities to help classroom reading teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders expand their knowledge, enhance their teaching practices, and build capacity in their schools

Resources for teachers, parents, and teacher educators to use in their reading instruction

Much, much more!

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UF Literacy Institute | Where teacher development and reader development overlap

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Welcome to the University of Florida Literacy Institute (UFLI, pronounced "you fly"). UFLI is an ongoing effort by UF faculty, students, and staff to improve literacy outcomes for children learning to read. The work of UFLI focuses on two main areas: teacher development and reader development. The place where those two overlap ...

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There are thousands of YouTube videos to help with implementation of the Science of Reading and Structured Literacy

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Science of Reading on TikTok

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Science of reading (@scienceofreading) TikTok | Watch Science of reading's Newest TikTok Videos

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Science of reading (@scienceofreading) on TikTok | 5.9K Likes. 2.9K Followers. 23 Year veteran teacher Science of Reading Advocate www.GuidedReaders.com

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snippetsbysarah

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campbellcreatesreaders

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droppinknowledgewithheidi

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Science of Reading for Middle School & Beyond

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Science of Reading - 3rd grade and beyond | Facebook

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The purpose of this group is to connect the research from the science of reading to develop proficient, skilled readers for those students in 3rd grade and beyond. Our mission is to create a safe...

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Science of Reading: Book Study

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Science of Reading: Book Study | Facebook

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A group of educators eager to learn about the Science of Reading through book studies!

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Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College

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Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College | Facebook

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Science of Reading-What I Should Have Learned in College Mission Statement "Researchers now estimate that 95 percent of all children can be taught to read by the end of first grade...." Dr....

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44 Phonemes

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Despite there being just 26 letters in the English language there are approximately 44 unique sounds, also known as phonemes. The 44 sounds help distinguish one word or meaning from another. Various letters and letter combinations known as graphemes are used to represent the sounds.

The 44 English sounds fall into two categories: consonants and vowels. Below is a list of the 44 phonemes along with their International Phonetic Alphabet symbols and some examples of their use. Note that there is no such thing as a definitive list of phonemes because of accents, dialects and the evolution of language itself. Therefore you may discover lists with more or less than these 44 sounds.

Consonants

What is the International Phonetic Alphabet?

How can you pronounce a word you've never read? It can be a bit tricky. How about a word in a foreign language? Now that must be impossible! Or is it? Imagine a set of symbols that could tell you how to pronounce any word in any language on the planet? Well that is exactly what the International Phonetic Alphabet is. Currently, the IPA consists of 107 sound symbols, 52 diacritics (accents) and 4 prosodic marks (intonations) encompassing virtually every phoneme used in every language on the earth. So for any written word, you can identify the associated phoneme symbols, and with a bit of practice, pronounce the word! Congratulations, you can speak Greek now!

The IPA was created by the International Phonetic Association. Founded in 1886 in Paris, their original mission was to help school children pronounce words in foreign languages and to aid in the teaching of reading. Today their mission is to promote the scientific study of phonetics.

Vowels

Teaching phonemic awareness

Knowing that phonemic awareness is a critical skill and being able to effectively teach it are two different things. The book 50 Reading Strategies for K-8 Learners ( Sage Publications uggests 5 guidelines for phonemic awareness instruction:

Analysis of phonemic awareness assessment data should drive instruction, as only a small percentage of students need explicit instruction (Ehri & Roberts, 2006).

Phonemic awareness instruction should be a positive, enriching experience that allows students to engage in language play (Yopp, 1992).

Effective phonemic awareness instruction provides for individual differences in abilities and uses leveled scaffolding to facilitate growth (McGee & Ukrainetz, 2009).

Developmentally appropriate phonemic awareness instruction uses chants, poetry, songs, and rhymes to engage students' curiosity about language and to develop metalinguistic awareness (Yopp & Yopp, 2000).

Effective phonemic awareness instruction explicitly labels sounds and demonstrates the process of blending-segmenting of sounds (Ehri et al., 2001).

Begin with assessment and then use playful, individualized, multisensory instruction

Consistent with all the researched advice on teaching phonemic awareness above, educational therapist and author Dr. Erica Warren, believes that the key to successfully teaching the 44 phonemes in English is assessment, followed by individualized, multi-sensory instruction. She has developed a helpful assessment tool and a number of fun, effective instruction/remediation tools for helping young readers master the essential sounds of the English language. And she created a custom bundle of tools just for Reading Well parents and professional visitors at a special discounted price. The bundle includes an easy to administer assessment tool and over 50 fun, multisensory games and activities which children love. We suggest you check it out.

Final sounds on the 44 phonemes in English

The difficulty people with dyslexia have in distinguishing phonemes is most clearly revealed in their poor spelling. While any phoneme can be a challenge, some are more problematic than others. The vowels and digraphs generally present more difficulty than the consonants, although any sound can present difficulty depending on the particular word and phrase in which it resides.

Good luck and good reading!

Stay up to date, subscribe to our newsletter: The Oasis

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Despite there being just 26 letters in the English language there are approximately 44 unique sounds, also known as phonemes. The 44 sounds help distinguish one word or meaning from another. Various letters and letter combinations known as graphemes are used to represent the sounds.

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Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping

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phonics and spelling through phoneme grapheme mapping

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Phonics and Spelling Through Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping

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Phonics and Spelling Through Phoneme-Grapheme MappingWritten by Kathryn E. S.

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Foundational Reading Skills Infographic

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A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words

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Overview of suggested restructuring

Teach 10-15 "sight words" before phonics instruction begins

Flash Words and Heart Words defined

Flash Words with advanced vowels to teach with early phonics instruction

Flash Words with two and three syllables

Implementing the new model

You are welcome to print copies for non-commercial use, or a limited number for educational purposes, as long as credit is given to Reading Rockets and the author(s). For commercial use, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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A New Model for Teaching High-Frequency Words

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Integrating high-frequency words into phonics lessons allows students to make sense of spelling patterns for these words. To do this, high-frequency words need to be categorized according to whether they are spelled entirely regularly or not. This article describes how to "rethink" teaching of high-frequency words.

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Free PA/Phonics Course

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course: on-demand equipped for reading success

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Module 2 will focus on Orthographic Mapping. It aligns with the information included in Chapter 1 in the Equipped for Reading Success manual.

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Decoding Strategies

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Nancy Lewis Hennessy M.Ed. (Author), Louisa Cook Moats Ed.D. (Foreword)

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The Reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text

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The Reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text [Hennessy M.Ed., Nancy Lewis, Moats Ed.D., Louisa Cook] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text

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Multiple award-winning book on reading and spelling education that will transform how you think about English! Discover this revolutionary method that Dr. Temple Grandin called "really helpful for teaching reading to children who are mathematical pattern thinkers..." eliminates the need to guess and provides a logical solution to English spelling.As the rules unfold it becomes apparent how this knowledge is vital to reversing the educational crisis that is plaguing America. This slim volume is easy to read and accessible to parents and classroom teachers. A thorough appendix summarizes the most important concepts for quick reference.

Do you know a student who is good at math or science but struggles with reading or spelling?

Has a student ever asked you a question about English spelling to which you replied, "That's an exception"?

Have you ever abandoned a word while writing because spell check didn't recognize it?

Predominant reading methods require students to break the complex code of English without help. This has resulted in low literacy rates and explains why many highly educated professionals cannot spell. By revealing the logical patterns underlying 98% of English words, Uncovering the Logic of English

Simple answers are given for questions such as:

ForeWord Reviews - Finalist 2012
Midwest Book Awards - Winner 2012
Independent Publisher Book Awards - Silver Medalist 2011
Indie Excellence Awards - Gold Medalist 2011
Benjamin Franklin Awards - Finalist 2012
Awards:

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Uncovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy

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Amazon.com: Uncovering the Logic of English: A Common-Sense Approach to Reading, Spelling, and Literacy: 9781936706211: Denise Eide: Books

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The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America’s broken education system--and how to fix it

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The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America’s broken education system--and how to fix it [Wexler, Natalie] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America’s broken education system--and how to fix it

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Shifting the Balance

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"Finally, a book that has the power to stop the literacy pendulum swings! In Shifting the Balance, Burkins and Yates skillfully explore 'balanced literacy' and 'the science of reading' to find the sweet spots where they overlap, connect, and actually complement one another. The result is a resource that raises our level of instruction while helping children discover and reap the joyful rewards of reading."

"What are the research-based, critical elements for teaching reading? In Shifting the Balance, Jan and Kari give you the information, classroom examples, and tools to help you make the best decisions around six key shifts for instruction. After reviewing the misunderstandings, the science, and the needs of your students, you will be able to audit your current practices (individually, in a PLC, or system-wide) to provide responsive and effective literacy learning for all your students."

"In Shifting the Balance, Jan and Kari invite us to reflect and reexamine our beliefs about teaching reading. They gently nudge us to rethink and possibly adjust our early literacy practices. Jan and Kari have taken on this controversial topic by embracing vulnerability and modeling what it means to be truly reflective practitioners. This book is a must read for new and veteran teachers!"

"In Shifting the Balance, Kari and Jan have masterfully dispelled many of the myths and misunderstandings associated with reading instruction. Additionally, they offer classroom teachers and coaches six simple, practical shifts that have the power to transform the way we teach children how to read. Indeed, balanced literacy and science do exist in harmony, and we practitioners can offer our children both concurrently. Thank you, Kari and Jan, for this important work that is sure to change lives!"

"In Shifting the Balance, Jan Burkins and Kari Yates provide a safe space for teachers to courageously examine some long-held balanced literacy practices and turn a critical eye to where those practices have gotten out of balance. If you're willing to be vulnerable and move towards resolving the gap between research and practice, this book provides actionable steps you can take to shift your thinking and bring instruction into alignment with the scientific evidence."

"Shifting the Balance is a welcoming opportunity to reexamine our familiar teaching practices. Without judgment, Burkins and Yates invigorate these practices by inviting educators to make scientific shifts in the systems that have been in place for years. This book will revolutionize reading instruction and in turn, the lives of countless students."

"This book speaks to teachers. It is overwhelmingly clear that Jan Burkins and Kari Yates have been and are immersed in the world of today's classrooms. Shifting the Balance will help many rethink instruction in ways that will support all students. In the current version of the Reading Wars, it is difficult for any of us to say we were wrong about some of our beliefs or practices. And thus, few do. However, Jan Burkins and Kari Yates have done just that. This is as commendable as it is unusual."

"This book found me at just the right time! Shifting the Balance gives voice to the questions I've had in my mind about Balanced Literacy and the Science of Reading and provides clear insights on how to connect the best parts of both to benefit early readers. Throughout the book, Jan and Kari confirm practices worth holding onto while providing actionable next steps I can't wait to implement with students to strengthen my reading instruction."

Dr. Jan Burkins was an elementary classroom teacher for seven years and a literacy coach for seven years. She has worked as a part-time assistant professor, a district literacy leader, and is currently a fulltime writer and consultant.

Kari Yates is an author, speaker, consultant and staff developer with a passion for helping busy literacy educators thrive. Her experiences include classroom teacher, special education, Reading Recovery teacher, elementary principal and district literacy coordinator.

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Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom

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Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom

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A Fresh Look at Phonics

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For each of these seven must haves, Wiley shares lessons, routines, word lists, tips for ELL and advanced learners, and advice on pitfalls to avoid regarding pacing, decodable texts, transition time, and more.

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A Fresh Look at Phonics, Grades K-2: Common Causes of Failure and 7 Ingredients for Success (Corwin Literacy)

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A Fresh Look at Phonics, Grades K-2: Common Causes of Failure and 7 Ingredients for Success (Corwin Literacy)

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers

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of assessment and instruction in today's classrooms. supplies K-12 educators with in-depth knowledge of the structure and function of language-fundamentals they need to deliver successful structured literacy instruction. Renowned literacy expert Louisa Cook Moats gives current and future teachers comprehensive, accurate, and accessible information on the underpinnings of language instruction, including: their students should be taught. Ideal for use in preservice courses and in-service professional development sessions, this essential textbook will give educators the strong foundation they need to teach language and reading skills to students with and without disabilities. Support your instruction with a complete package of online companion materials, including chapter quizzes, a sample syllabus/course outline, PowerPoints to accompany each chapter, PDF handouts for selected concepts, and a video demonstrating production of all the sounds in the English language. Learn more about the new edition! Speech to Print has been a bestselling, widely adopted textbook on explicit, high-quality literacy instruction. Now the anticipated third edition is here, fully updated with ten years of new research, a complete package of supporting materials, and expanded guidance on the how Speech to Print

Filling a critical gap in teacher preparation courses,

the history of the English language and its effect on spelling

English phonology, including speech sounds and their distinctive features

how print represents speech in English

the morphological aspects of words

syntax and its instruction

how meaning is conveyed with language

how
Through case studies, activities, recommended teaching principles, and close analysis of real-world student work samples, teachers will also receive invaluable insight into WHAT'S NEW:

New and expanded practical content on the how of language and reading instruction

New and updated chapter exercises

New faculty support materials

More on key topics like program and curricula selection, frameworks for instructional planning, and problem solving when students are slow to respond to intervention

More accessible, undergraduate-friendly tone and structure

Additional graphics to illustrate key concepts

NEW FACULTY SUPPORT MATERIALS!

Watch the webinar recording

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Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers

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Speech to Print: Language... by Moats Ed.D., Louisa Cook

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Science of Reading Virtual Workshop

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Attend a Science of Reading Virtual Workshop

for Emerging (PK-1) or Developing (1-12) Readers

What is the Science of Reading - click here>> Do you know how to bring the Science of Reading to your classroom?

Select the dates and times that work for you! ​ Educators, register below for a complimentary seat to Part 1 and 2.

Emerging Reader (PK-1)

REGISTER FOR PART 1

APRIL 14, 2022

Part 1 - Emerging Reader
10:00 am - 1:00 pm EST
Register Now

APRIL 19, 2022 (FULL)

MAY 10, 2022

MAY 25, 2022

Emerging Reader (PK-1)

REGISTER FOR PART 2

APRIL 14, 2022

Part 2 - Emerging Reader
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm EST
Register Now

APRIL 20, 2022

MAY 11, 2022

MAY 25, 2022
egister Now

Developing Reader (1-12)

REGISTER FOR PART 1

APRIL 6, 2022

Part 1 - Developing Reader
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm EST
Register Now

APRIL 28, 2022

MAY 17, 2022

JUNE 1, 2022

Developing Reader (1-12)

REGISTER FOR PART 2

APRIL 7, 2022

Part 2 - Developing Reader
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm EST
Register Now

APRIL 28, 2022

Part 2 - Developing Reader
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm EST
Register Now

MAY 17, 2022

Part 2 - Developing Reader
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm EST
Register Now

JUNE 2, 2022

Part 2 - Developing Reader
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm EST
Register Now

SUMMER DATES COMING

Attend on a complimentary seat: Your complimentary seat includes hands-on, activity-driven professional development. You will leave the workshop with practical, efficient strategies and techniques to help emerging, developing, and struggling readers.

Upgrade to a PAID seat: As a paid registrant you can select a Countdown, Blast or HD Word starter kit.

Click the link below to see what your starter kit includes:

Upgrade and Get a Starter Kit

Register for this three-part virtual workshop. Educators will leave with:

An understanding of the research behind how individuals learn to read

Strategies to align scientific research with classroom practices

Valuable insights to help you unlock the English Code for all students, including emerging, developing, and struggling readers

Part 1 - Developing Readers

The Science Behind How Students Master Decoding (3 Hours)

We kick off this three-part virtual workshop with a straightforward exploration of the research behind how the brain decodes increasingly complex words, and the processes involved in storing words for effortless retrieval. In this three-hour, fact-filled session we will explore:

Common explanations of the Science of Reading

Orthographic mapping and how words are anchored for automatic, effortless retrieval

How this body of research has an impact on teacher decision making and student learning

The impact of early instruction on long-term success

Part 2 - Developing Readers

Practical Strategies to Implement the Science of Reading with Developing Readers (3 Hours - Prerequisite Part 1)

We continue this three-part virtual workshop with an exploration of the practical application of the Science of Reading in the classroom. In this three-hour, activity-filled session we will explore:

What the scientifically aligned decoding instruction looks like for growing and struggling readers

How to use clear, concise language to easily deliver concepts to students

Ready to use instructional routines to provide consistency in your decoding instruction

Strategies to ensure your older readers will have the skills and knowledge they need to orthographically map the increasingly complex word structures they encounter

BONUS - Part 3 - Developing Readers

Reaching Mastery and Automaticity through Effective Practice, Differentiation and Diagnosing Decoding Needs (Recorded Webinar)

Part 3 is available exclusively to those who have completed Parts 1 and 2. It is a recorded, on-demand session. We will send invitations as soon as it is available (Coming Soon).

The last part of this three-part virtual workshop is an exploration of key topics related to helping children reach mastery and automaticity through effective practice, differentiation, and diagnostic assessments.

Topics covered include:

Key practice routines and strategies to promote automaticity with single-syllable and multi-syllabic words.

Providing meaningful feedback to build confidence and endurance in reading complex word structures

Differentiating amounts and types of practice to meet the needs of struggling learners

Using diagnostic decoding assessments to answer these key questions: Which students are struggling with decoding? What types of words cause them difficulty? What is the source of the underlying confusion?

Are your classroom practices aligned with the Science of Reading? Join us for this 3-part, virtual workshop to explore this important topic. Educators will leave with:

Straightforward exploration of the research behind how the brain learns to read

Information about orthographic mapping and how words are stored for automatic, effortless retrieval

A practical, scientifically aligned, evidence-based foundational skill approach

Can be taught across a wide range of ages, ability levels, and settings (even distance learning environments)

Valuable insights to help you unlock the English Code for all students and put students on the path to becoming strong decoders

Strategies to align scientific research with classroom practices

Part 1- Emerging Readers

The Science Behind How Young Children Learn to Read

What the Science of Reading is and how this body of research has an impact on teacher decision making and student learning

The how, the what, and the why of how the brain learns to read, store, and retrieve words

Why the alphabetic principle is a key concept to understanding the structure of the English Code

Impact of early instruction alignment with the Science of Reading on long term success

Part 2 - Emerging Readers

Practical Strategies to Implement the Science of Reading with Emerging Readers

What the Science of Reading looks like in everyday instruction

Clear, concise language to easily deliver concepts to students

Ready to use instructional routines to provide consistency in your instruction

Strategies to ensure your emerging readers will establish a firm foundation in the subskills that lead to strong decoding and fluent reading

Leveraging phonemic awareness and single-syllable word-level knowledge to easily attack multi-syllabic words

Teaching skills, not words, to allow students to experience long-term success and easily build a robust orthographic lexicon

BONUS - Part 3 - Emerging Readers

Reaching Mastery and Automaticity through Effective Practice, Differentiation, and Diagnosing Decoding Needs

Part 3 is available exclusively to those who have completed Parts 1 and 2. It is a recorded, on-demand session, and it will automatically send to you when you complete Part 2.

The last part of this three-part virtual workshop is an exploration of key topics related to helping children reach mastery and automaticity through effective practice, differentiation, and diagnostic assessments.

Key practice routines and strategies to promote automaticity with single-syllable and multi-syllabic words

Providing meaningful feedback to build confidence and endurance in reading complex word structures

Differentiating amounts and types of practice to meet the needs of all learners

Using diagnostic decoding assessments to answer these key questions: Which students are struggling with decoding? What types of words are they struggling with? What is the source of the underlying confusion?

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for Emerging (PK-1) or Developing (1-12) Readers What is the Science of Reading - click here>> Do you know how to bring the Science of Reading to your classroom? Select the dates and times that work for you! ​ Educators, register below for a complimentary seat to Part 1 and 2.

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Free Resources - Keys to Literacy

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Welcome to our Free Literacy Resources Pages

We do our best to include articles, links and templates that we feel are of value to educators interested in advancing their literacy knowledge, district/building strategies, and classroom practice. Please note that these files are copyright protected - contact us for permission to reproduce or distribute any of this content.
Videos & Webinars Templates & Printables Websites & Organizations

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Articles, links and templates for educators interested in advancing their literacy knowledge, district/building strategies, and classroom practice

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Start learning now with our free webinars and videos.

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Why is explicit writing instruction essential for adolescent learners?

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Why is explicit writing instruction essential for adolescent learners?

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In this 6-minute video Joan Sedita, founder of Keys to Literacy, explains why students in grades 5-12 benefit from explicit writing instruction. She summarizes the categories of writing instruction represented in The Writing Rope. For information about professional development for teaching writing, visit the Keys to Literacy website: www.keystoliteracy.com

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Syntax: The Link Between Sentence Writing & Sentence Comprehending

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William Van Cleave - Syntax: The Link Between Sentence Writing & Sentence Comprehending

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Transcription Skills

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William Van Cleave - Transcription Skills

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An Informed Framework for Comprehension Instruction

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Nancy Hennessy - An Informed Framework for Comprehension Instruction

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The Critical Role of Vocabulary

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Nancy Hennessy - The Critical Role of Vocabulary

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ODE: World Smarts Using Morphology Bases & Affixes to Develop Vocabulary Skills

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Ohio Department of Education and Workforce

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ODE: World Smarts Using Morphology Bases & Affixes to Develop Vocabulary Skills

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Reading Fluency

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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{On-Demand Webinar} What Adolescent Learners Need for Good Reading Comprehension That Is Often Ignored - Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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When it comes to reading comprehension, teachers generally think of vocabulary, comprehension skills, and background knowledge as the critical components for students entering the middle grades. While this is true, we're learning it's an incomplete picture. Reading fluency is also vital to becoming a competent reader.

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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{On-Demand Webinar} Seriously, Syntax Matters: Critical Connections to Comprehension

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Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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{On-Demand Webinar} Seriously, Syntax Matters: Critical Connections to Comprehension - Teacher Professional Learning | Literacy, Math | MTSS

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Syntax and sentence comprehension are critical yet often forgotten contributors to comprehension. The science tells us that the ability to understand sentence structure, or syntax, is critical to students' comprehension of written text. The skilled reader has to understand not only the meanings of the words but also the ideas conveyed within and between sentences [...]

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7 Best Phonics Apps

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In this post, I share the 7 best phonics apps (many FREE) for beginning readers to practice phonics skills. You'll also get details about my No PREP Printable and Digital Yearlong Phonics Activities Bundle. Finally, be sure to download the FREE sample that includes a variety of phonics skills practice activities for kindergarten, first and second grade students!

As K-2 teachers, we spend much of our day teaching and practicing phonics skills - and for good reason! Studies show that building strong phonics skills in the primary years is key to helping ensure students become successful independent readers.

The Science of Reading tells us that for students to master the phonics skills you teach they first need direct instruction from you. Then they need plenty of opportunities to practice specific phonics skills with you. Finally, they need time to practice and apply these skills on their own.

Students need to spend a lot of time practicing phonics skills. According to Wiley Blevins, a new skill should be systematically and purposefully reviewed for four to six weeks after being introduced. To keep things fresh and engaging for our students we must offer a range of activities that give them different ways to practice these skills.

Today I'm happy to share with you a variety of activities that give students the practice they need to master the phonics skills you teach. I'll share 7 of the best phonics apps, as well as resources of my own that provide a digital and hands-on approach to phonics practice.

The 7 Best Phonics Apps

1. Lalilo

is a FREE and paid literacy app based on a K-2 scope and sequence. It provides extensive coverage of every letter sound and word family, and gives students practice reading stories. As students progress, Lalilo leans on artificial intelligence to offer students targeted exercises and repeat things as necessary. Another cool feature is that at various intervals, students answer questions about how hard the questions they've been working on are. They can say if they'd like to be more challenged, less challenged, or if it's just right.

2. Starfall Learn to Read

Starfall Learn to Read is a FREE app that offers phonics basics and caters to a variety of learning styles. Students get practice through instructional songs and videos, complete-the-word activities, concentration matching games, and more. Standards content includes blending, isolating, short and long vowels, vowel pairs, and consonant digraphs.

3. Blending Board

Blending Board is a great FREE phonics app to help students who are learning the foundations of blending sounds and the multisyllabic rules of English. Students create a deck of phonemes that they can substitute and manipulate for various kinds of blending activities. The decks enable students to practice decoding simple and multisyllabic words.

4. Poio

is an early reading and phonics app that teaches kids letters, letter sounds, and words playfully and organically. The focus is on fun, but learning is definitely layered-in. There's a lot of repetition and reinforcement. This is a particularly good app to use with students who have struggled with learning letters and letter sounds.

The app offers daily emailed reports about students' progress. These reports explain what percentage of the book is completed, which vowels and consonants have been mastered, and the six last words that were learned. You can also choose to purchase a hard copy of the storybook that kids work to complete.

5. Articulation Station

Articulation Station is a unique FREE app that helps students improve their pronunciation and articulation. Using very specific exercises, games, and stories that focus on just one letter sound for 22 English language sounds, this app can improve pronunciation and understanding of how letter sounds form words. This could be a great addition to the work you do with your sound wall!

6. Planet Lettra

Planet Lettra is an entertaining and educational app for experimenting with word building. Students arrange a set of letter blocks any way they want and then hear what they've built. Blocks are designed to guide children in building the most important sight words for reading fluency and exposure to important letter blends.

7. Teach Your Monster to Read

Teach Your Monster to Read is an engaging, rigorous, award-winning phonics and reading game. It covers the first two years of learning to read, from matching letters and sounds to enjoying little books. While it is a paid app ($5.99 to purchase), several times a year they offer it for FREE to download, so stay on the lookout! The computer version is totally FREE!

If you are looking for additional ideas to give your students more phonics practice activities (with or without a device!) I'm happy to share my very own Digital and Printable Yearlong Phonics Bundle.

These Science of Reading-aligned, printable and digital, NO PREP phonics and spelling activities give Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd-grade students the practice they need to master phonics skills and spelling patterns you teach.

This Phonics Bundle is broken up into word study units that each focus on different phonetic word patterns. Within each unit, you'll find:

A variety of systematically designed activities

Printable and Digital interactive and self-checking activities

Tasks of varying levels to help you differentiate

Consistent activities so don't waste time teaching procedures and expectations for every unit

Enough activities to last all year long.

Are you reading to give these phonics activities a try? I'm thrilled to share this incredible FREE sample of the phonics activities included in this bundle.
This FREE download includes both printable and digital phonics skills activities from each of the units in the bundle. Grab it here
We know that building strong phonics skills in the primary years is key to helping ensure students become strong independent readers. I hope the information and resources I have shared today will help bring a variety of meaningful phonics practice activities to your classroom and students.
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In this post, I share the 7 best phonics apps (many FREE) for beginning readers to practice phonics skills. You'll also get details about my No PREP Printable and Digital Yearlong Phonics Activities Bundle. Finally, be sure to download the FREE sample that includes a variety of phonics skills practice activities for kindergarten, first and second grade students!

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National Center on Improving Literacy

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Comprehension lessons PK-Grade 3 created by OSU

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Language and Reading Research Consortium -

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Let's Know! and Vamos a Aprender! Curriculum Supplements

LARRC created two versions of the Let's Know! and Vamos A Aprender! curriculum supplement.

The Group B instantiation targets five lower- and higher-level language skills (grammar, vocabulary, inferencing, comprehension monitoring, text-structure knowledge). There are 5 main lesson types that recur within each unit three or four times: Read To Me; Words To Know; Text mapping; Integration; and Read To Know.

The Group C instantiation targets three lower- and higher-level language skills (vocabulary, inferencing, comprehension monitoring) and provides more practice opportunities on those skills. There are three main lesson types that recur within each unit three or four times: Read To Me; Words To Know; and Integration.

Some units have accompanying slideshows with the curriculum supplement. In most cases, these slideshows cannot be played directly by clicking on the link. You may download the file and open it with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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Downloads - Language and Reading Research Consortium

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Let’s Know! and Vamos a Aprender! Curriculum Supplements LARRC created two versions of the Let’s Know! and Vamos A Aprender! curriculum supplement. The Group B instantiation targets five lower- and higher-level language skills (grammar, vocabulary, inferencing, comprehension monitoring, text-structu…

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PA, Phonics, Fluency, Vocab, Comprehension Resources

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R.I.S.E Arkansas Science of Reading Resources - Phonological Awareness

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PA, Phonics, Fluency, Vocab, Comprehension Practice

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Kindergarten and First Grade Student Center Activities Phonological Awareness | Phonics | Fluency | Vocabulary | Comprehension

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How to Use a Sound Wall in Your Classroom- Explicit Sound Wall Lesson Routines

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How to Use a Sound Wall in Your Classroom- Explicit Sound Wall Lesson Routines

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Using Sound Walls Effectively

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Using Sound Walls Effectively: A Kendore Learning Webinar

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Sound Walls

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Sound Walls

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There are 44 phonemes in English, but only 26 letters. Yet, there are more than 240 ways to represent the sounds in English—whew! Sound walls are helpful instructional tools because they provide teachers with an approachable way to begin incorporating evidence-based instruction in the classroom. Tha…

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Science of Reading PD

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I am passionate about teachers learning and applying the science of reading in their classrooms, so I am offering these modules for free! However, if you’d like to donate to show your appreciation, you are welcome to donate to my Donor’s Choose project here.

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Free Phonology/Phonics resources

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Enjoy these free, customizable Orton-Gillingham lesson templates on IMSE!

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What is Explicit Instruction?

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Explicit instruction is a purposeful way of overtly teaching students. Explicit in this case means a clear-cut and finite way of teaching that includes both instructional and delivery procedures. Torgesen (2004) described explicit instruction as "instruction that does not leave anything to chance and does not make assumptions about skills and knowledge that children will acquire on their own." Rosenshine (1987) described explicit instruction as "a systematic method of teaching with emphasis on proceeding in small steps, checking for understanding, and achieving active and successful participation by all students."

Explicit instruction is a series of instructional behaviors that increase the likelihood for student achievement. Think of it as improving student outcomes with elevating your practice. The instructional behaviors that we will look at are all about increasing modeling, providing students with frequent opportunities to respond and providing both guided and independent practice. Instruction is explicit when teachers tell students what they need to to do using direct explanations along with sharing and modeling new knowledge (Flethcer, Lynn, Fuchs & Barnes 2019).

We will explore each of these practices in two way: individually and in a case study. We will look at each of the sixteen elements individually and explore each of their attributes. We will then apply these sixteen elements to a case study of teacher and her instruction in the classroom.

Archer and Hughes have provided access to the first chapter of their book "Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching."
Please click on the link to download the chapter which includes a table to the "Sixteen Elements of Explicit Instruction." Chapter One - Explicit Instruction by Archer and Hughes 2011 Let's get started! List of the 16 Elements of Explicit Instruction - Click Here Focus instruction on critical content
The sixteen elements of explicit instruction are describe in Explicit Teaching by Anita Archer and Charles Hughes. These sixteen elements are both accessible to teachers and have research to back their impact on student learning. We are now going to explore each of the elements and their features individually.
Example:
Teach skills, strategies, vocabulary terms, concepts, and rules that will empower students on the future to match the students instructional needs (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Sequence skills logically
If you're teaching a unit about plants, you wouldn't focus the content on the different types of plants you would focus on the critical features of plants and how they keep a plant alive. The knowledge of the parts of plants and how a plant stays alive are more critical for students future success than the different types of plants.
Example:
Consider several curricular variables, such as teaching easier skills before harder skills, teaching high-frequency skills before skills that are less frequent in usage, ensuring mastery of prerequisites to a skill before teaching the skill itself, and separating skills and strategies that are similar and thus may be confusing to students (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Break down complex skills and strategies into smaller instructional units
You wouldn't teach your students how to do double addition with regrouping before teaching them simple addition. Ensuring that students have mastery of the prerequisite skill of addition will increase the likelihood that students will apply the prerequisite skills to the harder skill of addition with regrouping.
Example:
Teach in small steps. Segmenting complex skills into smaller instructional units of new material addresses concerns about cognitive overloading, processing demands, and the capacity of students' working memory. Once mastered, units are synthesized. (i.e. practiced as a whole). (Archer & Hughes, 2011)
Design organized and focused lessons
If you are teaching a new science unit on light and sound, you wouldn't teach all of the content and skills in one day. You would break apart the content into smaller units, teach them individually and then once all the smaller units are taught you would review the entire unit, with all the content, together.
Example:
Make sure lessons are organized and focused, in order to make optimal use of instructional time. Organized lessons are on topic, well sequenced, and contain no irrelevant digressions (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Begin lessons with a clear statement of the lesson's goals and your expectations
When you create a lesson plan, you have the content you are going to teach, the order in which to teach and any modeling, opportunities for students to respond, etc. and a place for the order in which you will teach the content. Doing this means that your lesson is designed around teaching critical content and focused on how and when you will teach skills.
Example:
Tell learners clearly what is to be learned and why is important. Students achieve better if they understand the instructional goals and outcomes expected, as well, as how the information or skills presented will help them (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Review prior skills and knowledge before beginning instruction
When you begin a lesson, you wouldn't just start the lesson without telling students what they will be learning and why. You also wouldn't just begin a lesson without telling the students the expectations you have for the lesson. You would explain to students the skills they will be learning and the reason why they are learning them and what you expect for the lesson you are about to teach.
Example:
Provide a review of relevant information. Verify that students have the prerequisite skills and knowledge to learn the skill being taught in the lesson. This element also provides an opportunity to link the new skill with other related skills (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Provide step-by-step instruction
When you begin your lesson on two-by-two multiplication, you would first ensure that students have the relevant multiplication skills. If student's do not have the prerequisite skills, then a review lesson may need to be done first. Doing so demonstrates to students that basic multiplication skills connect with higher order multiplication skills like two-by-two digit multiplication.
Example:
Model the skill and clarify the decision-making processed needed to complete a task or procedure by thinking aloud as you perform the skill. Clearly demonstrate the target skill or strategy, in order to show the students a model of proficient performance (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Use clear and concise language
This portion of the lesson is the "I do, we do, you do." Teacher starts by providing extensive modeling of the new skill or content (I do), practice with students with frequent opportunities to respond built in (we do) and finally the student practice both guided and independently (you do).
Example:
Use consistent, unambiguous wording and terminology. The complexity of your speech (e.g. vocabulary, sentence structure) should depend on students' receptive vocabulary to reduce possible confusion.
Provide an adequate range of examples and non-examples
When you are teaching a lesson about weather, you wouldn't just refer to clouds as clouds. You would refer to them as cumulonimbus and stratus. Using concise language for the clouds is part of teaching the content. When you are teaching, you keep the same wording and terminology through the lesson and subsequent practice students will do.
Example:
In order to establish the boundaries of when and when not to apply a skill, strategy, concept or rule, provide a wide range of examples and non-examples. A wide range of examples illustrating situations when the skill will be used or applied is necessary so that students do not under use it. Conversely, presenting a wide range of non-examples reduces the possibility that students will use the skill inappropriately (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Provide guided and supported practice
When teaching students about nouns, creating examples and non-examples will help students differentiate nouns from other parts of speech. Here is an example and non-example for noun: example would be "a dog is a noun because a dog is a thing" and the non-example would be "fast is not a noun because it is not a person, place, thing or idea." Providing students with examples and non-examples help students to differentiate between the critical features and variable attributes of content and skills. To learn more about identifying the critical features and variable attributes, click on this link Creating Examples and Non-Examples for Words.
Example:
In order to promote initial success and build confidence, regulate the difficulty of practice opportunities during the lesson, and provide students with guidance in skill performance. When students demonstrate success, you can gradually increase task difficulty as you decrease the level of guidance (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Require frequent responses
Once you have taught a lesson on one digit subtraction without regrouping, you would give your students 100 problems to practice by themselves. Instead, you would provide students with 5 examples to do together with you, then 5 problems to practice with a partner and then 5 problems to practice independently. Doing this allows students to practice with you, practice with another learner and then practice on their own.
Example:
Plan for a high level of student-teacher interaction via the use of questioning. Having the students respond frequently (i.e. oral responses, written responses or action responses) helps them focus on the lesson content, provides opportunities for student elaboration, assists you in checking understanding and keeps students active and attentive (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Monitor student performance carefully
Creating a high level of opportunities to respond during a lesson ensure that students are actively engaged in the learning process and provide frequent opportunities for you as the teacher to monitor student progress during the lesson. Students can offer an action response, a thumbs up or down, a verbal response, plus or minus for the operation needed, or a written response, using a small white board to write their answer. Embedding these into your lesson plan ensures that you know when and in what part of the lesson you will be asking students to respond.
Example:
Carefully watch and listen to students' responses, so that you can verify student mastery as well as make timely adjustments in instruction if students are making errors. Close monitoring also allows you to provide feedback to students about how well they are doing (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Provide immediate affirmative and corrective feedback
If you ask a student is a car is a noun and all the students answer no, then you can monitor the students progress and go back and either reteach the content or provide another round of examples and non-examples. If during guided practice, two students are struggling with identifying nouns on a worksheet, you can pull those two students to reteach or model the content. Monitoring during lesson instruction and practice guarantees that students are not coming to the end of an entire lesson with not knowing the content fully.
Example:
Follow up on students' responses as quickly as you can. Immediate feedback to students about the accuracy of their responses helps ensure high rates of success and reduces the likelihood of practicing errors (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Deliver the lesson at a brisk pace
Feedback has been proven to be a very effective method in increasing student outcomes (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Giving student immediate corrective feedback ensures that they do not come to the end of a lesson not knowing or using skills or strategies incorrectly. Providing immediate and corrective feedback during both instruction and practice increase students positive outcomes for the lesson. Providing affirmative feedback is equally as important. Affirming students learning and providing specific academic and behavioral feedback ensure that students are recognized for their effort and learning during instruction and practice.
Example:
Deliver instruction at an appropriate pace to optimize instructional time, the amount of content that can be presented and on-task behavior. Use a rate of presentation that is brisk but includes a reasonable amount of time for students' thinking/processing, especially when they are learning new material. The desired pace is neither so slow that students get bored nor so quick that they can't keep up (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Help students organize knowledge
Delivering brisk instruction with frequent OTRs (opportunities to respond) increases the likelihood that students will be engaged and on-task during your lesson. Using the modeling practice (I do, we do, you do) along with ensuring wait time for students responses allows students to be presented and learn new material more effectively.
Example:
Because many students have difficulty seeing how some skills and concepts fit together, it is important to use teaching techniques that make these connections more apparent or explicit. Well organized and connected information makes it easier for students to retrieve information and facilitate its integration with new material (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
Provide distributed and cumulative practice
When teaching students about how plants use photosynthesis to feed themselves, connecting the parts of the plant with the function they serve in photosynthesis will help student make the connection that you must have both for a plant to make food. Connecting relevant content and skills together, ensure that students will be able to identify and retrieve content and skills quicker.
Example:
Distributed (vs. massed) practice refers to multiple opportunities to practice a skill over time. Cumulative practice is a method for providing distributed practice by including practice opportunities that address both previously and newly acquired skills. Provide students with multiple practice attempts, in order to address issues of retention as well as automaticity (Archer & Hughes, 2011).
References:
Providing students with multiple opportunities to practice both prerequisite and current skills helps to ensure that students will not "lose" skills already learned and have opportunities to practice new skills. Practice can be distributed before, during or after a lesson and days or weeks after a lesson has been delivered. Not only are you providing students opportunities to practice, but you can also monitor students understanding and use of skills.

Archer, A. L., & Hughes, C. A. (2011). Explicit instruction: Effective and efficient teaching. New York: Guilford Press.

Fletcher, J., Lyon, G. R., Fuchs, L., & Barnes, M. A. (2019). Learning disabilities: from identification to intervention (pg.99). New York: The Guilford Press.

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77, 81-112.

Intensive Intervention Course Content: Features of Explicit Instruction. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2019, from https://intensiveintervention.org/intensive-intervention-features-explicit-instruction.

Rosenshine, B. (1987). Explicit teaching and teacher training. Journal of Teacher Education, 38(3), 34-36

Torgesen, J.K. (2004). Lessons learned from research on interventions for students who have difficulty learning to read. In P. McCardle & V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research (pg. 355-382). Baltimore, Brookes.

Vaughn, S., Wanzek, J., Murray, C. S., & Roberts, G. (2012). Intensive interventions for students struggling in reading and mathematics: A practice guide. Portsmouth, NH: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction

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Explicit instruction is a purposeful way of overtly teaching students. Explicit in this case means a clear-cut and finite way of teaching that includes both instructional and delivery procedures. Torgesen (2004) described explicit instruction as "instruction that does not leave anything to chance and does not make assumptions about skills and knowledge that children will...

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I Do, We Do, You Do model

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The I Do - We Do - You Do model involves you in following a series of steps starting with you leading instruction and finishing with students working independently. In the I Do stage, you explain what students need to understand or model how to do a process. Then, in the We Do stage, you help your students by providing scaffolds such as prompts or partially completed procedures. Finally, in the You Do stage, your students do the procedure or show their understanding on their own.

Why You Should Use the l Do - We Do - You Do Model

When used well, the I Do - We Do - You Do model:

Suits novice learners (which most students are)

Nurtures self-efficacy

Reduces task anxiety

Students feel less anxious due to the clear modelling and the scaffolded opportunities to practice. These same factors help students to experience independent success, which in turn builds their self-efficacy 1.

The I Do We Do You Do model is based upon the gradual release of responsibility from teacher to student.

Next, let's explore each stage in more detail.

This is true whether the procedure involves a younger student writing the letter m in cursive or a senior student keeping an historical research journal. Modelling is a powerful tool that draws on Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory. Modelling involves: If you want to increase students' knowledge and understanding of a topic, you need to explain it. Research on the modality and multimedia effects2 shows that you should explain things both:
Example

I Do Conceptual Learning

Visually

Example

The examples are faded as you start by completing many of the steps yourself and progressively get your students to more steps with each example.

Examples

We Do Conceptual Learning

The key to conceptual learning is getting your students to think about the material they need to understand. This involves helping them encode and retrieve the material in an organised way. Within the We Do stage of the I Do - We Do - You Do model you provide support through prompting comparative and organised thinking. You can make use of partially completed information and have your students fill in the gaps.

You can help your students encode information by getting them to:

You can help your students retrieve information using 2 strategies:

You can also do this:

Example

You Do Procedural Learning

With You Do activities as the procedural level, you simply have your students complete all of the steps involved in the task themselves.

Some people ask if you should get your students to apply what they have learned to solve problems at this stage. The answer depends on whether you showed them how to so and then did so together in earlier stages.

You Do Conceptual Learning

At the conceptual level, You Do activities involve recalling information without prompts. This can involve:

You Do Conceptual Example

More Than Just A Lesson Structure

Many people think of the I Do We Do You Do model as a way of structuring a single lesson, and it can be. Yet, it can also be much more. The structure can also occur:

When you believe your students will find lesson material to be quite challenging, you can break it up into more manageable chunks. You follow the the I Do - We Do - You Do structure for each chunk and may get a few chunks covered within a single lesson.

By contrast, you can also use the structure over several lessons. Especially as students get older, learning doesn't occur over a single lesson, so you follow the structure over a small series of lessons - with each lesson picking up from where the previous lesson finished.

Beyond the I Do We Do Model

The essence of the I Do We Do You Do model is scaffolding tasks as your gradually release responsibility to your students. Yet, many of the strategies listed above are grounded in research that fits nicely with, but is separate from, the I Do We Do You Do model, particularly:

However, there is one potent strategy that wasn't mentioned. It is a simple but powerful strategy - spaced practice (also known as distributed practice). Below, this is shown as a new stage Do Again (and again, and again).

Beware

You can adapt the model but some adaptations fly in the face of strong research. Be particularly wary of:

The rapid release of responsibility model turns the I Do We Do You Do model on its head and starts with the You Do stage. It is a euphemism for inquiry learning (and its cousins discovery learning and problem-based learning). The research is clear that while experts learn well from such approaches, novice learners do not. Most school students are novices in what they are learning, although they build expertise as they progress. As a result, you should not use inquiry learning with novice learners. Experts are competent in both the material and the processes or procedures involved.

You should also be wary of the we do stage being confused with collaborative learning. Collaboration can extend the model in useful ways, but the essence of the we do stage is teacher + student,not student + student. That said, some productive ways to use collaboration within the I Do We Do You Do model are:

Retrieval Pairs

One example of retrieval pairs would be flash card buddies, where one student holds up a card (or paper) with an explanation of a concept on the side facing their buddy and the name of the concept on the side facing them. Next, their student gives their buddy the first sound of the answer or of each word (prompts). The buddy answers and gets told if they were right or wrong, as well as the correct answer. The process repeats with different concepts and with students reversing roles. You could use a similar process with other retrieval exercises, such as prompted concept mapping. The teacher involvement in this stage is largely about preparing cards or other prompts.

Brain Dump 1-2-4

Students write down everything they can remember from a lesson or topic (brain dump 1). Then students pair up (brain dump 2), discuss each others' brain dumps, then make corrections and additions based on that discussion. They agree on a single, merged brain dump. Pairs then join with another pair (brain dump 4) and repeat the discuss and amend process. Note although there are 4 people in the group they are only discussing 2 merged brain dumps from the previous stage.

1 Person per Step

If your students are learning a multi-step procedure such as 2 digit by 2 digit multiplication you can use the one person per step strategy. 2 digit x 2 digit multiplication has 3 steps:

Multiply the top number by the ones

Multiply the top number by the tens

Add the answers from steps 1 and 2 together

Place you students into groups of 3, then have each person complete one step. Give your students at least 3 problems to solve and have them rotate the step they do each time. For uneven groups, one person may do 2 steps (groups of 2 are better than groups of 4). Note, you should use this strategy after your students have done independent practice as it reduces social loafing.

Footnotes

SHAUN KILLIAN
(MEd., MLead.)

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The I Do WE Do YOU Do Model Explained - Evidence-Based Teaching

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