This article explains how to create and use a daybook in the literacy classroom. Readers learn what a daybook is, how the daybook in one fourth and fifth grade classroom is structured, and how students in this classroom use that daybook during reading instruction to engage, record important information, and discuss a text.
Many of the adults in your child’s life are unfamiliar with learning disorders in general, or your child’s unique pattern of strengths and limitations. Developing a one- to three-page dossier that provides useful information about your child can help their babysitters, coaches, teachers, bus drivers, school support staff, neighbors, and relatives understand their limitations.
This teaching tip highlights a strategy that assists teachers in structuring classroom discussions about texts. Specifically, this conversational technique helps students think and talk about a text beyond its literal meaning. Students learn to make decisions about why a particular phrase is the Most Valuable Phrase (MVP) within a text as a whole.
Use Curriculum-Based Measurement to make sure students are on track for academic success by charting their trajectory of improvement all the way through the school year. CBM calculates rate of improvement during the first month of school and determines how much a student will need to improve each month to reach benchmark goals.
Concerns about how to build academic vocabulary and weave its instruction into curricula are common among classroom teachers. This article reviews the research and offers some practical suggestions for teachers.
Introducing elementary-aged students to local and community news through the newspaper can help them strengthen comprehension and research skills. Community news keeps it relevant to the kids, enhancing motivation to discuss and learn more about what they are reading. Classroom activities are included in this article.
What should fluency instruction look like? And what can teachers do to help students whose fluency is far behind their peers’? This article can help practitioners effectively use fluency-based assessments and select instructional practices.
Explore two ways you can help your child begin to develop information literacy: learning to tell the difference between fact and opinion, and figuring out if a source of information is reliable.
Combined-text books integrate a story format and an expository or informational format within one book. When used for instruction, combined-text books are best read in layers: illustrations; informational text; narrative text; and additional details, such as sketches and page borders. Addressing various layers individually during read-alouds provides a perfect opportunity to model revisiting text for various purposes.
Writing is a terrific way for children to express their thoughts, creativity, and uniqueness. It is also a fundamental way in which children learn to organize ideas and helps them to be better readers.
When engaging in writing, young children are observing the way writing is used in our everyday lives. Here are some simple things families can do to support young children’s writing.
Get an overview of developmentally appropriate teaching practices recommended by the International Literacy Association (ILA) and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).
Learn more about where to find help if you suspect that your child may have a developmental delay. A developmental evaluation will be used to decide if your child needs early intervention services and/or a treatment plan specifically tailored to meet a child’s individual needs.
Concepts of print need to be expanded to include graphics, with instruction in how to read and analyze graphical devices such as diagrams, timelines, and tables. Learn more about how to teach young students to read and understand visual information.
Dialogic reading works. Children who have been read to dialogically are substantially ahead of children who have been read to traditionally on tests of language development. Children can jump ahead by several months in just a few weeks of dialogic reading.
Dialogic reading involves an adult and child having a dialogue around the text they are reading aloud together. Learn how to use this strategy effectively to help kids build vocabulary and verbal fluency skills and understand story structure and meaning. Downloadable handouts to help guide parents in using dialogic reading are available in English and 17 other languages.
What’s it really like to be a teacher in your very first year? Listen in as one first-grade teacher reflects on the joys and challenges of her year in the classroom.
Dictation is an assistive technology (AT) tool that can help kids who struggle with writing. Kids can use dictation to write with their voices, instead of writing by hand or with a keyboard — helpful for kids with dysgraphia, dyslexia and other learning and attention issues that impact writing.
Differentiating instruction is more complex than just providing different students with different learning experiences. Learn about this distinction by reading classroom examples that contrast differentiated literacy instruction with simply different instruction.
Differentiated instruction is based on the premise that instructional approaches should vary and be adapted in relation to individual and diverse students. This brief looks at how differentiation strategies applied to reading can be designed to help students learn a range of skills including, phonics, comprehension, fluency, word prediction, and story prediction.
Differentiated instruction, also called differentiation, is a process through which teachers enhance learning by matching student characteristics to instruction and assessment. Writing instruction can be differentiated to allow students varying amounts of time to complete assignments, to give students different writing product options, and to teach skills related to the writing process.
Invariably, it is difficulty linking letters with sounds that is the source of reading problems, and children who have difficulties learning to read can be readily observed.
