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Picture of a printable Short A Word ladder on a clipboard resting a top a colorful set of papers. To the right is the text "What are Word Ladders"

Using Word Ladders for Practicing Phonics Skills During Whole Group and Small Group Instruction

Research tells us that instruction is most impactful when phonemic awareness and phonics are done together. While previously it was suggested that phonemic awareness can be done in the dark, we now know how powerful it is to focus our phonemic awareness practice with letters. How do we do that? By giving students practice activities that focus on phoneme segmenting, blending, and manipulating while they’re working on reading and writing words. Word ladders are a great

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letter tiles on left with "What are Word Chains" text on right

Word Chains: What are They & How to Use Them to Practice Phonics Skills

Word chains are a powerful instructional tool to help reinforce sound-symbol (phoneme-grapheme) relationships. Word chaining strengthens both phonics and phonemic awareness skills as students identify the placement of the sound change and the spelling of that change. What are word chains? A word chain is a sequence of words that each differ by one phoneme, or sound. To complete the word chain, students build, or write, each of the target words changing one sound at

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Getting Started with the Science of Reading: Effective Vocabulary instruction is written in text on the left. On the right is a child holding a ring with a set of cards. The word "Abrupt" is displayed on the shown card.

Vocabulary Instruction & Teaching Strategies – Getting Started with SoR

Vocabulary is a significant predictor of overall reading comprehension and student performance, even as young as kindergarten. Vocabulary instruction often has taken a backseat to phonics/decoding or comprehension. But, it is an important component of literacy and should have its place in our classrooms. A lot of our students’ word knowledge and vocabulary is learned without our explicit instruction. They’re learned implicitly through incidental learning. They learn words from oral language, media, and reading and

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Getting started with the Science of Reading: The 3 Tiers of Vocabulary on the left. On the right is a colorful triangle divided into 3 areas labeled tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 from bottom to top.

The 3 Tiers Of Vocabulary: Choosing Words for Instruction – Getting Started with SoR

Vocabulary is the knowledge of words and the meaning of those words. There is a strong connection between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. You have to understand the words you’re reading, in order to understand the text as a whole. The words we teach our students explicitly is based on the 3 tiers of vocabulary. But, a lot of our students’ word knowledge and vocabulary is learned without our explicit instruction; it’s learned implicitly. They

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Oral Reading Fluency: Getting Started with SoR

Reading fluency is efficient and effective reading of a text that supports a reader in constructing meaning. It’s displayed through accurate, rapid, and expressive oral reading. Comprehension is the end goal of our reading instruction. But in order to get there, reading cannot be disfluent. If the cognitive load is focused on decoding, there’s not much remaining for building a deep understanding of a text. Or, if expression and phrasing don’t match the syntax, it

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