My last article began a discussion on teaching reading fluency to students. At the end of the article I began describing some activities that can be carried out to increase fluency and encourage repeated reading. I have a few ideas left to share. Echo reading: In echo reading the teacher (or other adult) reads a line or a passage from a book. The students echo the teacher. The teacher should read with expression. Most students will echo the text with the same expression. Recorded reading: Many teachers have reading centers set up with headphones and books on tape. The child … Continue reading →

My last article began discussing the importance of reading fluency. In this article I will address some ways in which teachers and parents can increase the reading fluency of children. Thus far research has uncovered two major approaches to reading fluency. The two are described below. Repeated and monitored oral reading approach increases reading fluency and overall reading success. In this approach students are guided in reading and rereading text. They are given discussion and feedback about their reading. The reading should be carried out orally. Students who use repeated oral reading have shown great gains in recognizing words, the … Continue reading →

Many beginning teachers and parents confuse phonemic awareness and phonics. They often feel that they are one in the same. However, while the two are closely connected, they are different. When teaching phonics there are many different programs and approaches that can be used. Several of the approaches overlap and intertwine with one another. During phonics instruction the teacher focuses more on the relationship between written letters and spoken sounds. Some different approaches include: Synthetic Phonics: In this approach the students are instructed how to change written terms into sounds to form words. Analytic Phonics: In this form of phonics … Continue reading →

A previous article discussed phonemic awareness and its importance. This article will take a closer look into how to effectively teach phonemic awareness to children. Phonemic awareness is a concept that can be learned and taught. During phonemic awareness instruction, children learn to recognize, manipulate, work with, and listen to spoken words. There are several activities that can be used to help teach phonemic awareness to children. Primary level teachers may use any or all of the following during their classroom instruction. Phoneme Isolation: During this activity children are instructed on how to find certain sounds in a word. For … Continue reading →

My last discussion about students and the types of teachers that they like best involved middle school students. These students are typically not as interested in their academic career as younger students seem to be. This article will continue to work up the education ladder and address high school and college students along with their preferences in teachers. High School Students By the end the junior and senior year students in high school are usually really beginning to gain a grasp on the reality of life. They are beginning to understand why their parents and teachers pushed them as hard … Continue reading →

Most of us can remember at least a few teachers from our academic career. Some of those teachers have fond memories in our minds and others are the dreaded teachers that we frown upon thoughts of being in their classes. Throughout a school there are teachers who are well known and liked by the students and there are teachers that are not liked so much by the students. So what is about a teacher that gains good comments and gets good scores from a child? Students like teachers for different reasons. The traits that students like about teachers all depends … Continue reading →

While many educators and child psychologist will say that children need to be up and out playing rather than sitting in the house with games, not all games are bad. Some games encourage and require children to think and use academic skills. There are many games out there that were designed to help strengthen certain skills in children. One study proved exactly that point. After one research study it was found that preschool children from low income families greatly benefited from a playing board game. The children made gains in counting skills and other skills after participating in a game … Continue reading →

A few of my past articles have addressed reading and how children learn to read. In those articles I discuss how children learn letter sounds and begin to blend sounds to create words. This is the most basic form of reading and usually takes place in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. Because blending sounds to make words is a very common practice in the early stages of reading, many books are created based around this skill. We call those books phonemic readers. In these phonemic readers the text is specially designed in order to for the children to be able to sound … Continue reading →

In a recent series about how children learn to read, I described the first two main stages and then gave ideas on how to help children better work with words. The first stage of learning to read is learning the letter names and sounds. The second stage involves blending the sounds together to make words. After children learn some simple words they can then begin to learn how to manipulate the words to create new words. Once children have mastered working with words, they are ready to begin putting a series or group of words together to create an idea. … Continue reading →

Recently I began discussing the various stages that children go through in order to learn to read. The simplest of the stages deals with letter recognition and letter sound naming. After children have accomplished this skill, they begin putting sounds together to make words. There are ways that children can learn to work with words. After a child can read a word, that child should learn to manipulate the word in a variety of ways. Simply saying the word does not give enough depth to the concept. Children need to learn to build words from letters and use those letters … Continue reading →