Spiral Warmups

Author: Matt

Word Meaning Warm-Ups
We’re finally here! After two years of developing free word fluency and word building warm-ups and working with over 100 classrooms, we’re ready to announce the free word meaning warm-ups! These warm-ups are going to impact vocabulary development in grades 2-6 in just 2-6 minutes of class each day. They are aimed at helping students learn…
August 30, 2019
Teaching Context Clues
Teaching context clues can be fun. It can be frustrating. It can be rewarding, and it can seriously help students develop reading skills and background knowledge. Ultimately, teaching context clues is about vocabulary development. In this post, I’ll share: Word Meaning and Vocabulary Survey Results At the time of writing this article, a teacher survey…
August 27, 2019
Guided Reading, Plus Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping
Guided reading is a powerful and well-researched approach to boosting reading comprehension, reading skills, and reading levels. Phoneme-Grapheme mapping is a lesser-known activity but is equally powerful to help students in their reading skills. What happens when reading teachers combine these two? When combined, these two instructional methods can create amazing reading gains! This is…
October 8, 2018
Literacy Block Schedules
Literacy block schedules are critical, and as a reading teacher, you know that better than anyone! With all the strands of literacy and reading skills that must be addressed, even a good literacy block schedule struggles to fit it all in! That’s why we’re sharing these literacy block schedules with you to use in your…
August 10, 2018
An Awesome Thank You!
We’re coming into the final 3 hours of our Early Adopter sign-up to the new reading comprehension warm-ups, and I’m totally thrilled to say thank you for joining the Awesome Membership!It’s because of you that students will strengthen their reading and writing skills! It’s because of 140 teachers who collaborated over the previous 6 months and…
January 14, 2018
Spiral Review Research: 3 Memory Processes
Memory is made from three processes: encoding, retention, and recall. In this quick spiral review research, we look at these brain processes and see how they relate to learning in your classroom. Your choice of instructional activities in the classroom may or may not have an impact on student learning. Have you ever heard, “We taught that, but…
December 18, 2017
More Spiral Warm-Up Courses [Fall 2017 Update]
More Spiral Warm-Up Courses [Fall 2017 Update] The fall semester is going by so quickly, and I hope your students are enjoying the free word study courses including word fluency and spelling units! We’ve been busy drafting new courses…entirely new courses covering comprehension and vocabulary. And we have new word study units on the way! Spiral…
November 8, 2017
Word Sorts to Build Automaticity
In this research brief, you will discover how word sorts can build automaticity in reading fluency and writing. I’ll present four research studies and quickly highlight how the findings inform research-based word sorts in a word study curriculum. Research-Based Word Sorts Word sorts are word learning activities that require students to use a variety of…
September 12, 2017