How do you learn to read? When I asked my small group of first grade students, “How do you learn to read?” Olivia was the first to answer, “You have to sound it out.” Then Ella answered, “First, they have to look at sight words. That’s the first thing.” She turned to include Olivia, “And they have to sound it out, that’s important.” Olivia agreed, “They need to practice their sight words.” Both sounding out words and memorizing words in …
Author: Leslie Marks
Children become engaged when learning is fun. Here are 3 simple games that can be used for learning the alphabet letters and sounds or words to be learned by sight. By the end of first grade, students usually learn the first 100 words that are used the most, which make up 50% of what we read! These are words such as “the, of, saw, was,” etc. You can look up “high frequency words” on the computer and find the first, …
Writing comes from your brain. Writing comes from your ear. Writing comes from your mouth. You hear something. You say something. You know something. You write something. ~ Daniel, age 9 Around the world there is a natural impulse for children about three or four years old to mimic writing by scribbling. In Kindergarten, they sing the alphabet song and begin learning the names of the letters and their sounds. As they learn to read, they are also learning …
WORD BINGO AND WORD CONCENTRATION Word BINGO and Word “Concentration” are two easy games that will be fun for your child as he encounters words he’s learning to spell. (See my website article, “Fun with Words & Phonics” for more details.) FLIP BOOKS Making “flip” books together helps with learning “word families” that end with the same spelling. WORD SORTS Sorting words according to their spelling pattern helps reading as well as writing. For example, if your child is learning …
If you think that your child may have a special challenge, talk to his teacher and pediatrician. It can take some time to determine what the challenge actually is. There is usually some extra support at school for reading, such as reading with a Literacy Volunteer, small group support with an Intervention teacher like myself, and computer programs like Lexia and Text to Speech. After these interventions have been tried, your child may be assessed to see if he qualifies …