Alphabet matching is an early literacy activity designed to help young learners recognize the uppercase and lowercase letters of the alphabet — a key skill for learning to read.
This comprehension strategy activates students’ prior knowledge, builds curiosity about a new topic before learning about it, and then checks for understanding after reading.
Audio-assisted reading is an activity where students listen to an audio version of a text while simultaneously following along with the written text in a book or on a screen. This strategy provides students with an auditory model of fluent and expressive reading.
Blending and segmenting games and activities can help students to develop phonemic awareness — the ability to hear the individual sounds in spoken words. Begin with segmenting and blending syllables, and then move to working with individual sounds (phonemes). Learning to blend and segment sounds is key to learning to read.
Choral reading is a teaching strategy that enhances reading skills and promotes fluency. In choral reading, a group of students reads a text together in unison, with the teacher often leading the way.
A concept map is a graphical tool that represents the relationships between concepts. It is a visual representation of knowledge that helps to organize and structure information in a way that makes it easier to understand and remember.
Concept sorts ask students to think about what they know as they compare and contrast it to new information. They are a lively, interactive way to introduce and review vocabulary and concepts across disciplines.
Young children with a concept of word understand that each word is separate, and that words are separated by a space within each sentence. Using strategies to build concept of word in the classroom can also strengthen children’s developing awareness of the individual sounds within words.
The primary purpose of descriptive writing is to describe a person, place or thing in such a way that a picture is formed in the reader’s mind. Capturing an event through descriptive writing involves paying close attention to the details by using all of your five senses.
With young children, dictation offers a way for a parent or a teacher to record a child’s thoughts or ideas when the writing demands surpass writing skills. Dictation provides a chance for an adult to model many writing behaviors including handwriting, matching sounds-to-letters to spell words, and sentence formation.
The Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) approach makes readers stop, think, and respond orally or in written responses as they read a new text. It’s an engaging way to make reading interactive while building students’ awareness of their understanding while reading.
Elkonin boxes are used to build phonological awareness skills by having children segment spoken words into their individual sounds (phonemes). To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme.
Exit slips are written student responses to questions teachers pose at the end of a class or lesson. These quick, informal assessments enable teachers to quickly assess students’ understanding of the material.
First lines is a pre-reading comprehension strategy in which students read the beginning sentences from a book and then make predictions about that book. As students read the text in its entirety they discuss, revisit and/or revise their original predictions.
Framed paragraphs are a structured writing tool that provides a framework or scaffold to help students develop their writing skills by providing a clear structure for organizing sentences and ideas.
Inferential thinking is a key comprehension skill that develops over time through explicit teaching and lots of practice. Find strategies for teaching inferencing, watch a demonstration, and observe a classroom lesson in action.
An Inquiry Chart (I-Chart) is a tool that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their ideas. Students integrate prior knowledge or thoughts about the topic with additional information found in several sources.
Jigsaw is a cooperative learning strategy that asks groups of students to become “experts” on different aspects of a topic and then share what they learn with their classmates.
Listen-read-discuss is a comprehension strategy that builds students’ prior knowledge before they read a text. It supports both listening and reading comprehension and involves three key components: listening to a teacher presentation about a topic, independent reading, and engaging in discussions about the text and the topic.
List-group-label is a vocabulary and comprehension strategy that engages students in a three-step process to actively organize their understanding of content area vocabulary and concepts.
Careful pairing of reading with phonics study gives children a chance to apply what they are learning about letters and sounds to the reading of words and stories.
The term “onset-rime” refers to the division of a syllable into two parts: the onset and the rime. The onset is the initial consonant sound, blend, or digraph, and the rime is the following vowel and all subsequent sounds in the syllable. Understanding onset and rime is fundamental in phonological awareness.
Paired reading is a strategy to help students build fluency by reading aloud to each other. More fluent readers can be paired with less fluent readers, or children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a story.
The “paragraph hamburger” is a writing organizer that visually outlines the key components of a paragraph — topic sentence, detail sentences, and a closing sentence.
Paragraph shrinking is a strategy that makes the process of summarizing explicit. It gives students an easy-to-learn set of steps to find the main idea.
