It’s important for teachers to know the current levels of their students in order to enhance effective literacy instruction. There are many screening tools provided by the school system as well as informal assessment that teachers purchase for additional information about the student. Although my school system provided me with
Having students set goals is a powerful way to help them create a purpose for their learning. Students also create a learning identity that enables them to have agency and productive power. Each year, I have my students set goals for themselves and at the end of the quarter, we
As I prepare my students for advanced decoding, one of the lessons that I had to teach was accented syllables. Teaching accented syllables is a hard skill for me because I don’t always here where the syllable is accented. I explained to my students that an “accented syllable is pronounced as
As we get closer to the summer break, I want to get my students hooked on a couple of books that I expect them to read over the summer. I have a few reluctant readers who would prefer doing anything else rather than reading. Still, I would like to capture
Questions are a powerful source for building a word conscious classroom. And, Queries are even more powerful because they create the surge that promotes deeper thinking by students. Many teachers use questions to help guide students through strategy usage and problem solving. While questions can be used to assess student
While at The George Washington University working on my Master’s Degree, I got the privilege to take a course with Dr. Anna Uhl Chamot. After learning about her passing, I wanted to contribute one of my podcast episodes to her magnificent work. Dr. Chamot, along with Dr. O’Malley, created the
When I was learning how to read, I can recall my First Grade teacher using diacritical marks that indicated how to call the target words. My First Grade teacher may have taught me the names of those diacritical marks, but it was not until I was in my thirties, that
We write learning objectives every day. But our learning objectives are mostly linked to content learning and not language learning. Not only do students striving to learn English need language learning objectives, but any student that is learning how to use the functions of our English language need language learning
“Andrew Biemiller (2004) believes that the inability to readily assess vocabulary growth has been a major reason for lack of attention to vocabulary in the primary grades” (Diamond & Gutlohn, 2006, p. 31). Hence, we use running records and other informal reading inventories while assessing our students present levels in
We can’t assume that students know how to break a multisyllabic word into a prefix, a suffix, and a root. As words become more complex, knowledge of roots becomes more essential for students. “Words, like stories, have structure. …Like the parts of a story, the parts of a word also