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Reading Universe: What is the Writing Rope?

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Reading Universe: What is the Writing Rope?

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Reading Universe | What Is the Writing Rope?

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Joan Sedita, the founder and CEO of Keys to Literacy, explains the five strands that make up The Writing Rope, a framework for writing instruction.

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Decodable Text Sources: The Reading League

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Decodable Text Sources: The Reading League

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The Reading League has compiled a list of options, not recommendations, of frequently requested decodable texts.

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Writing Day Supplemental Resource Packet

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This is the opinion teacher checklist that was used for The Penny Debate Practice Activity.

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KBR Handout Packet B Modules 6-9 (3.31.25).pdf

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KBR Handout Packet A Modules 1-5 (3.31.25).pdf

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KBR Handout Packet C Modules 10-11 (3.31.25).docx.pdf

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The word mapping tool lets you type in a word and see its graphemes and phonemes mapped out. It’s great for teaching phonics!

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Reading Universe: All About Reading and Writing

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Explore ready-to-use teaching strategies, resources, and concrete answers to common questions about teaching reading and writing -- developed by experts.

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This video presentation by Joan Sedita is part of a PaTTAN book study series. This five-week series focuses on the components of the Writing Rope and the integration of effective writing instruction into content teaching with the combined goals of improving students' writing ability and content learning. In this first book study session Joan Sedita reviews and elaborates on Chapter 1: Introduction to the Writing Rope and Chapter 2: What Do We Know About Effective Writing Instruction. Link to materials: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1f6xQSsptgpxnRhMDDr37c0Vv87odR0Kx?usp=share_link

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PaTTAN - The Writing Rope - Session 1 | PaTTAN Literacy Book Study

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This video presentation by Joan Sedita is part of a PaTTAN book study series. This five-week series focuses on the components of the Writing Rope and the integration of effective writing instruction into content teaching with the combined goals of improving students' writing ability and content learning.

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edutopia article: 5 High-Impact Writing Strategies for the Elementary Grades

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edutopia article: 5 High-Impact Writing Strategies for the Elementary Grades

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Simple, effective exercises can help elementary students develop the foundational writing skills they need for their academic journey.

When considering writing as part of the instructional day, teachers may think only of the type of writing where students engage in storytelling or informational pieces. While the ability to leverage student choice and produce fiction and nonfiction text is beneficial for all grade levels, it's important to consider how writing can be incorporated and layered across all content areas, as well as develop the deep foundational understanding to prepare young writers for authoring texts.

For us as teachers, it's vital that we share a common language and understanding about the types of high-impact writing strategies that students can engage in and how to effectively implement them in the classroom.

1. Handwriting in the Early Grades

In the digital age, prioritizing handwriting education during phonics instruction remains instrumental in nurturing well-rounded learners and sets them up for success when more stamina is required of them. The tactile experience of handwriting establishes a profound connection between language and sensory perception, contributing increased cognitive development.

Teachers can adopt a common path of movement language (language used to describe how to form the letters) when teaching the letters. In addition to that, providing students with multisensory ways of forming the letters helps create a strong understanding of the letters' features.

A practical example of this type of instruction is having students trace a lowercase a in a tray full of salt, repeating the path of movement language, "over, around, down." Then, students practice writing the letter using a pencil or dry erase marker. As the teacher models the directionality, it's important to ensure that students know what "over," "around," and "down" mean and look like and that the teacher is using on-the-spot intervention for correction.

2. Dictated Sentences

Utilizing dictated sentences in elementary phonics instruction holds profound importance in nurturing early literacy skills. This strategy serves as a powerful bridge between decoding individual phonemes and comprehending them within a meaningful context.

For example, in a phonics lesson where students are practicing decoding and spelling words with a short i vowel and have practiced reading the high-frequency words they and the, the teacher may end the lesson with students writing the dictated sentence, "They will fill the big bin with wigs."

This method encourages the application of phonics knowledge in real-word scenarios, promoting fluency and automaticity. In addition, dictated sentences provide a valuable opportunity for students to hone their listening skills, enhancing their ability to discern and reproduce distinct phonetic elements accurately and to authentically apply irregularly spelled high-frequency words in context. This practice benefits students of any grade level working on phonics skills.

3. Writing to Read

Another foundational type of writing that prepares students for more demanding types of writing in later grades is writing to read. This is an interactive approach to early writing instruction where the teacher models early literacy and print concepts starting as early as prekindergarten through early kindergarten. Through collaboration with the students, the teacher models drawing pictures and sentence creation.

Teachers can start by engaging students in a conversation around an event in a book or nursery rhyme they read together. Then, the teacher offers a prompt: "In the story, the characters went to play at the park. That gives me an idea for a story. What kinds of things do you like to do at the park?" Students can share multiple ideas for the story, and the teacher chooses one to model.

While the teacher explicitly models drawing and develops a sentence about the drawing, the students offer ideas on where to start writing, count the words in the story, identify the sounds they hear as the teacher spells out each word, and notice where spaces will occur. The more that students engage in this type of instruction, the more responsibility we can hand over to them, and they can write the story along with us. As students are given more opportunities to apply early writing principles and rereading strategies, they begin to understand the reciprocal relationship between reading and writing.

4. Reading to Write

When the foundations for early writing have been established, students can quickly move into another layer of high-impact writing, which is writing about the texts that they're reading.

Even starting in kindergarten, encouraging students to write and/or draw in response to reading across multiple content areas is a valuable strategy that helps deepen comprehension and understanding of a particular topic, as explored in Linda J. Dorn and Carla Soffos's book Teaching for Deep Comprehension.

These "writing about the reading" prompts require students to analyze, synthesize, and connect ideas, fostering a deeper understanding of the material. For example, if first-grade students are working on story elements, after reading a story, a student might write, "The character in the story is a bear who lives in the forest. The problem in the story is that he is sad, but he solves his problem when he learns to be happy."

This expression encapsulates comprehension, language reinforcement, and academic vocabulary. As students progress through grade levels upward to 12th grade, the scaffold of giving the students a prompt for writing about the text should decrease as they develop enough self-regulation to write about their own thinking.

5. Writing About Learning

Similar to reading to write, this strategy is solely focused on writing about what the student has learned, why the learning is important, and when to use the learning. This type of writing can happen as early as kindergarten, but in a highly scaffolded manner that mostly focuses on articulating why the learning is important.

Students up to 12th grade can benefit from writing about their learning because it keeps the purpose of what they're learning in various content areas relevant and promotes quick retrieval of the information.

This strategy also promotes metacognition, because it helps learners organize their thoughts and reflect on their learning process. For instance, a second-grade class could collaboratively study the nature of bees in a nonfiction text. Then, because the teacher focuses on the skill of identifying and explaining main ideas and details, a student may write, "I learned the main idea by using headings and key details. Knowing main ideas helps us understand the most important information in a text."

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5 High-Impact Writing Strategies for the Elementary Grades

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Simple, effective exercises can help elementary students develop the foundational writing skills they need for their academic journey.

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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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Suggestions for teaching phonemic awareness and phonics to English learners from Colorin Colorado.

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Supplemental Mod 11 Reading Assessment 3.31.25.pdf

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On Padlet_  Supplemental Mod 11 Reading Assessment 3.13.24.docx.pdf

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Supplemental Mod 10 Reading Difficulties 3.31.25pdf

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Copy On Padlet_  Supplemental Mod 10 Reading Difficulties 3.2.24.docx.pdf

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Digital Magnetic Board- to use this resource, click on this link, then select 'File" and then 'Make a Copy'. 

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Digital Magnetic Board- to use this resource, click on this link, then select 'File" and then 'Make a Copy'. 

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MAKE A COPY of Lower Case Magnetic Letter Board

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Copy of Brent Conway Simple View Tiered System.docx

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Copy of Expanding Sentence Template Slideshow .pptx

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Routine for Using a Word Knowledge Checklist

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Routine for Using a Word Knowledge Checklist

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Text Talk: Capturing the benefits of read-aloud experiences for young children. 

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Text Talk: Capturing the benefits of read-aloud experiences for young children. 

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Beck & McKeown's article in the Reading Teacher, Sept., 2001.

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Links to access this informal phonics assessment.

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Enter names, spin wheel to pick a random winner. Customize look and feel, save and share wheels.

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A list of conjunctions and other words that help students connect parts of sentences.

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A Keys to Literacy recorded webinar.

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Joan Sedita, founder of Keys to Literacy, presents information and instructional strategies for teaching phonemic awareness and phonics to students with dyslexia. This 2020 archived webinar is a follow up companion to a first Understanding Dyslexia webinar.

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A Keys to Literacy recorded webinar.

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This one-hour video provides an overview of dyslexia. It is an archived webinar delivered by Joan Sedita, founder of Keys to Literacy. Topics include dyslexia as one of multiple causes for difficulty with literacy skills, dyslexia defined, dyslexia facts and myths, a summary of how the brain learns to read, and suggestions for providing reading instruction that meets the needs of students with dyslexia.

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Webinar: The Role of Executive Functions in Reading & Writing

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Webinar: The Role of Executive Functions in Reading & Writing

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A Keys to Literacy recorded webinar.

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The Role of Executive Functions in Reading & Writing

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In this 2021 webinar, Joan Sedita, the founder of Keys to Literacy, describes executive function skills (goal setting, organizing, cognitive flexibility, working memory, self-monitoring, inhibition) and how they affect reading and writing ability.

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IES Report Teaching Academic Content & Literacy to English Learners

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IES Report Teaching Academic Content & Literacy to English Learners

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Practice Guide.

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IES Report Teaching Academic Content & Literacy to English Learners

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Considerations for Selecting Vocabulary Words

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Considerations for Selecting Vocabulary Words

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Spelling Bee  and The Longest Word in English

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Etymonline - Online Etymology Dictionary

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The online etymology dictionary (etymonline) is the internet’s go-to source for quick and reliable accounts of the origin and history of English words, phrases, and idioms. It is professional enough to satisfy academic standards, but accessible enough to be used by anyone.

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Freerice is an educational trivia game owned by the UN World Food Programme (WFP). Join our movement to help end global hunger: start playing today!

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This is an example of dictionary that provides user-friendly definitions.