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 […]
Continue readingSpelling, Predictor of Reading Comprehension
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 […]
Continue readingWhy is Grammar Important?
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, […]
Continue readingDeveloping New Reading Resources for All Members
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 […]
Continue readingSpiral 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, […]
Continue readingSpiral Review, Long-Term Retention
How will spiral review impact long-term retention for your students’ learning?Spiral review can have a major impact on long-term retention. Cognitive scientist Jerome Bruner wrote decades ago (1960), “Even the most complex material, if properly structured and presented, can be understood.” You can take a basic skill such as spelling the long A sound with the […]
Continue readingWord Sorts to Build Automaticity [Research Base]
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 […]
Continue readingComprehension Killer and 8 Ways to Use Word Study
Word study kills reading comprehension. Plain and simple. But there are ways to use word study to save reading comprehension…and that’s what I’m going to show you in this post. Plus there are a few teaching bonuses along the way! If you teach in upper elementary or middle school, you know you don’t have time […]
Continue readingResearch-Based Word Study
Did you know research-based word study is not just about spelling? Did you know word study is not just for primary grades? Are you prepared to use word study to transform your students’ reading level growth and reading comprehension growth using daily spiral review? Word study can do that! In this post, I’m going to share with you […]
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