Teaching Reading

One of the best resources I’ve found for beginning readers, especially older beginning readers, is environmental print. Look around your home or place of business, or your neighborhood or on your commute and you will see loads of letters and words. If you can make the connection in your reader’s mind between the [...]

Have you tried cloze technique to build reading comprehension?  The idea is simple: Efficient readers actually don’t read every word in a passage.  They make predictions and then check their expectations against the text that is actually there.  The more effective the predictions, the less frequently the reader needs to stop and actually decode the [...]

Phonics instruction, especially, lends itself to practice using the Bingo format.  Make a blank Bingo board, and then duplicate it to your heart’s content.  When you want to make a new Bingo game, just grab the blanks and start creating.  I’ve made Bingo boards to review sight words, to practice vowel sounds, go over letter [...]

If you teach in an elementary classroom or run a summer or after school program that teaches reading, you’ll want to listen up!  I’ve got a nine-issue series of a duplicate-able newsletter designed to help parents understand how to support teachers as they teach reading.  It’s called “The Parents’ Guide to Reading,” and it makes [...]

We don’t often think of it, but the season of caroling is wonderful for beginning readers.  Singing the familiar songs while looking at the words is a great way to reinforce early reading skills.  The words are often even broken up into syllables, since we sing one syllable for each note in general.  What a [...]