Students demonstrate their letter/sound knowledge by working with name cards and sharing observations about their classmates' names, giving teachers an opportunity to assess knowledge in a meaningful context.
Name Talk: Exploring Letter-Sound Knowledge in the Primary Classroom
Awareness of Alliteration: Enhancing Writing Through Mentor Texts
Through this lesson, primary students strengthen their phonemic awareness while using picture books featuring alliteration as models for their own writing.
Going Digital: Using e-Book Readers to Enhance the Reading Experience
Students use various tools and features of digital readers to develop vocabulary, support comprehension, respond to text, improve fluency, and enhance the reading experience.
Shared Poetry Reading: Teaching Print Concepts, Rhyme, and Vocabulary
The rhyme and reason behind this lesson is that students will need to develop important reading skills to increase their reading fluency.
Rooting Out Meaning: Morpheme Match-Ups in the Primary Grades
In this lesson, students use morphemesEnglish words that have been formed by combining common word partsto explore word meanings.
Alphabetizing With Original Stories
Students write original stories using alphabetical order, beginning each page with a new letter, and then illustrate their texts in class or at home with their families.
Learning About Word Families with Click, Clack, Moo
Using text from Doreen Cronin's Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type as shared readings, first-grade students learn word families and how to decode new words in a word family.
Dynamite Diamante Poetry
Introduce gerunds and review nouns, adjectives, and verbs through engaging read-alouds; then apply these concepts through collaborative word-sorting and poetry-writing activities.
The Connection Between Poetry and Music
Students won't miss a beat in this reading fluency lesson that combines music and poetry.
Building Classroom Community Through the Exploration of Acrostic Poetry
What do your students think about each other? Find out as you teach them the concepts of acrostic poems and challenge them to write an uplifting acrostic about a classmate.
Word Study with Henry and Mudge
Henry and Mudge is used in this lesson to build students' word recognition through rereading, high-frequency word banks, word studies, and writing.
Solving Word Meanings: Engaging Strategies for Vocabulary Development
Vocabulary gumshoes use context clues and semantics to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Spelling Patterns "Go Fish" Card Game
Students use sets of words that share a spelling pattern to create a card game like "Go Fish" and then play the game in groups, helping them improve their spelling.
Let's Read It Again: Comprehension Strategies for English-Language Learners
Help Spanish-speaking English-language learners unlock the mysteries of their new language by using a bilingual book to recognize unfamiliar words and construct meaning from the text.
Improve Comprehension: A Word Game Using Root Words and Affixes
Students study common root words and affixes, improve their comprehension and spelling, and make a card game in which they form words with a prefix, root word, and suffix.
Whose Shoes? Using Artifacts to Teach Reading and Rhyming Patterns
If the shoe fits… Actually, any shoe will fit this lesson, and the Artifact Analysis Questions provided will help students see it in a whole new way. Several rhyming texts take the shoe theme a step further, and introduce activities to increase students' awareness of rhyming words.
Phonic Generalizations in Chrysanthemum
Students learn about word families by reading Kevin Henkes's book Chrysanthemum, identifying words with certain vowel pair endings, and reading words with similar endings.
Learning Centers: From Shared to Independent Practice
Seven blind mice—see how they spend each day of the week in this lesson that uses the book Seven Blind Mice to guide students through shared reading, writing, and listening activities.
Phonics Through Literature: Learning About the Letter M
Students learn about phonics by focusing on the letter m and participating in an integrated array of activities, including reading, writing, mathematics, music, art, and technology.
Whole-to-Parts Phonics Instruction: Teaching Letter-Sound Correspondences
Students will find that learning onset and rime is a handy skill when they read the Jack and Jill rhyme.