Literacy ideas and resources - Tales from Outside the Classroom

Build Oral Language with Morning Meeting & a Question of the Day text next to laptop with a question of the day displayed

Build Oral Language Skills with a Morning Meeting Question of the Day

Oral language is an often forgotten about aspect of our classrooms. Students cannot write what they cannot say. We build strong readers and writers through our oral language work. Dialogues about learning, classroom systems such as think-pair-share, and routines for talking in complete sentences all help students develop the oral language skills they need. At the same time, morning meeting is a routine central to our classroom community. It’s a time to get to know one

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Building Phonemic Awareness through Phonics

Phonics and phonemic awareness are sometimes confused, likely because they are related. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds, phonemes, in words. Phonics is the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language and the letters and groups of letters, graphemes, of the written language. Phonemic awareness is critical for applying phonics skills. Students can learn and memorize graphemes, but if they cannot manipulate phonemes, they will struggle in their reading and spelling

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18 Non-Print Phonemic Awareness Activities for Early Readers

In continuing my posts on phonological awareness, we’re focusing on phonemic awareness activities. If you missed my posts on What is Phonological Awareness and What is Phonemic Awareness, you might find it helpful to begin there. All of the activities in this post are without letters/print. When working on beginning phonemic awareness tasks, it’s critical that this practice does not include work with letters. The cognitive load required to do the phonemic awareness task and

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What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in words. It is the final component of phonological awareness. These two terms are sometimes incorrectly used interchangeably. The important distinction between the two is that phonemic awareness is on the phoneme level. It is under the umbrella of phonological awareness. Thus, a phonemic awareness task is a phonological awareness task but the inverse may not be true. Let’s start with a few key

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What is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds of language. As students begin to understand the connection between speech and print, they are able to segment sentences into words, then syllables, and finally to phonemes, or the sounds in our language. Alliteration and rhyming are also two phonological awareness tasks. Phonological awareness is often referred to as a continuum, however, not all skills are developed sequentially. While students need to be able

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Hi! I’m Tessa!

I’ve spent the last 15 years teaching in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades, and working beside elementary classrooms as an instructional coach and resource support. I’m passionate about math, literacy, and finding ways to make teachers’ days easier. I share from my experiences both in and out of the elementary classroom. Read more About Me.

Build Oral Language Skills with a Morning Meeting Question of the Day

Building Phonemic Awareness through Phonics