Literacy ideas and resources - Tales from Outside the Classroom

What is successive blending text next to student tapping an ipad with cvc word web

Successive Blending: A Phoneme Blending Strategy

Successive Blending is a decoding strategy for students that struggle to blend more than two sounds when reading words. It’s really a blending strategy to support readers that are struggling with decoding. Many of these students add and omit sounds when blending. Some students even blend words that seem disconnected from their sounds. These are those students that say /m/ /a/ /p/ and then say “fat?”. It’s also a great instructional strategy for those students

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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: Phoneme-Grapheme Activities

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. You can read all about phonemic awareness in a dedicated post. 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

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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, I believe it’s beneficial to do some practice without letters. The cognitive load required to do the phonemic awareness task and connect

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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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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.

Successive Blending: A Phoneme Blending Strategy

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

Building Phonemic Awareness through Phonics: Phoneme-Grapheme Activities