This Give It A Shot article was updated June 2019 along with the newly updated free word study warm-ups. Give It A Shot is one of the first activities students do in the Word Fluency 1 unit, which focuses on basic word decoding practice for grades 2-3 and intervention in grades 3-6. It’s a straight-forward activity […]
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Daily Spiral Review, Reading ComprehensionBest Strategy for Reading ComprehensionThis is not just any strategy. This is the single best strategy you can use to increase reading comprehension! And that’s a hard claim to make, I know.(I welcome your thoughts in the comments at the bottom of this post!) You use engaging instruction, interactive tasks, anchor charts, mentor […]
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UPDATE 1/8/2019: Here is our newly updated reading comprehension strategy pack for 2019. This reading comprehension strategy pack is our short set of instructional strategies that build reading comprehension strategies. It’s recently updated from the comprehension strategies that we sent in January 2018. This pack (downloadable PDF is at the end of this post) includes […]
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Loading… Thanks for sharing your thoughts with use! Take a look at the feedback from other teachers by clicking the link below. Tailoring the Warm-Ups for You! Read More.
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We have a few upgrades coming this month, and we’d like to get your input before we finalize. Please take a moment to answer one question. One Question: Give Your Input! Loading… Your feedback from the 2017-18 school continues to be invaluable as we build Spiral Warm-Ups together! We began last August with just a […]
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Your Spiral WarmUps Awesome Membership is receiving a major upgrade for the 2018-19 school year! The upgrades include: The Fluency Builder Package Student Accounts Differentiation Pathways Progress Monitoring Assessments Our 2017-18 school year focused on developing, revising, and rolling out the free word study warm-ups and the reading comprehension warm-ups, and now we’re adding more […]
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The warm-ups in Fluency Builder Level 2 are designed to increase reading fluency: speed, accuracy, and working memory. Students will read at a forced rate and maintain meaning across a paragraph. Then they answer basic comprehension questions. Everything is based on leveled texts, repeated reading, forced fluency, and timing.Fluency Builder Level 2, What?Level two is […]
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Please take a moment to complete the three question survey below. Loading… During the month of April, we had our initial pilots of the new reading fluency warm-ups – there were so many kinks to work out! However, we used student and teacher feedback to tune up the fluency warm-ups, and now we’re ready for […]
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Spelling is an important skill for writing, but did you know it is a powerful way to quickly measure student growth? A spelling assessment that is properly designed for progress monitoring can be used periodically to gauge overall student growth in reading and writing skills. We’re designing spelling assessments for this purpose – more on […]
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We are doing a major upgrade of our servers to increase video speed and provide the power for our new comprehension and fluency warm-up pilot starting in May. The site should be back to normal function…except much faster…starting Monday morning 4/9/2018. Cheers!
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If you recently applied for the new fluency pilot, we are excited to say you will be notified in the coming days, and we are going to start the pilot earlier than expected! We had such an overwhelming response that we’ll only be able to accept the first 40 applicants. What’s in the pilot? There will […]
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Last week, we announced three new weeks of word sorts for affixes (including both prefixes and suffixes)…but that wasn’t enough! We just released another week of affix word sorts with advanced upper elementary suffixes. These suffixes word sorts increase the complexity of word knowledge beyond the basic words in Word Sort Spiral Reviews 1-15: ness, […]
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New release for all members! Free word study warm-ups and more extended word sorts for Awesome Members! These warm-ups were among the highest requested from our recent member survey…we’re also developing a fluency pilot and grammar warm-ups. These warm-ups are all animated word sorts, which are an essential word learning strategy, according to research. Categorizing […]
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Why isn’t there much time, if any, devoted to grammar these days? Should there be? Why is grammar important? Grammar has a bad rep because back in the 1980s many classrooms taught grammar – and that’s all. That was the course Language Arts. And boy was it horrid. It was one rule after another without any purpose, […]
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We’re happy to announce that teachers are guiding the next phase of SpiralWarmUps.com! In our recent survey, it became clear that affixes, assessments, fluency, and grammar are needed next. We are already piloting the assessments and the affix warm-ups, but now we are taking applications for fluency warm-ups. If you’d like to participate in a […]
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I hope you are excited to hear that we are currently in the research and development stage of the newest reading and word study resources – including, pre-post-assessments, fluency warm-ups, and affixes. In our most recent research, we discovered teachers would like to see the following resources added to the warm-up memberships: Affixes Pre- and Post-Assessments […]
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At some point, you might find problems with video streaming. Video playback problems are often due to internet bandwidth, filters, firewalls, or browsers. While there may be bandwidth issues, usually, the problem lies in the filtering and firewalls from school districts. Here are a few quick fixes that work on most systems: Restart the computer […]
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If you’re an Awesome Member, you’ll be glad to know we’re developing activity-based word study warm-ups. We’re starting with Word Sorts and expanding from there. This week, we pushed out a new week of Word Sort Warm-Up Videos covering five types of consonant blends: Initial 2-letter blends Initial 3-letter blends Medial blends Final blends Blends […]
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Great news for members – we just finalized the release of 3 more weeks of warm-ups! Fluency 2 Advanced Days 1-5 Fluency 2 Advanced Days 6-10 Basic Inferences 3 Fluency 2 Advanced takes students beyond the word fluency skills taught and practiced in Fluency 2, which focused on vowel digraphs. You can read more about the warm-ups […]
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Fluency 2 is a spiral warm-up unit in the free Word Fluency course. But what skills are in these warm-ups? Who are they for? What will students do during these 10 days? Let’s answer these questions as we walk through Fluency 2 Days 1-10. If you’re not a member, you can review our free membership […]
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