In this Reading Rockets article, Daniel Willingham explores the topic of critical thinking and how to foster metacognitive skills in the classroom. Willingham notes that background knowledge plays a role in critical thinking and understanding the surface structure of problems. He provides evidence-based strategies, such as promoting thinking within a particular domain to bring everyday…
Use these materials to introduce parents and caregivers in your community to the science of reading so they can learn along with you. Watch the presentation, then grab the files and make it your own!
Contrary to popular belief, students should not be taught to memorize irregular words by sight. In most irregular words, only one or two letters do not conform to their usual sound correspondence. This means that most irregular words are at least partially decodable. This is a printable collection of irregular word cards.
Often, high-frequency words are called “sight words” with the expectation that these words are irregular and must be memorized. Integrating high-frequency words into phonics lessons allows students to make sense of spelling patterns for these words. To do this, high-frequency words need to be categorized according to whether they are spelled entirely regularly or not….
In this vocabulary and comprehension lesson, Ontario Teacher Kate Winn provides a step-by-step lesson designed to increase and enhance vocabulary and comprehension. Using the picture book Hana’s Hundreds of Hijabs by Razeena Omar Gutta, this lesson plan provides detailed, explicit instruction on using vocabulary from the book and includes the blackline master for a follow-up…
This decodable text passage offers students the opportunity to practice reading words with < s > spelling /z/. This typically happens at the end of a word, when -s follows a voiced sound.
Dr. Tim Shanahan clarifies what we know about rhyming in this blog post. Should rhyming be a key component of early reading instruction?
This is a lesson plan for the explicit instruction of isolating the middle sound in words.
Dr. Susan Brady summarizes what we know about effective phonemic awareness instruction in this webinar.
This is a short assessment to assess students’ mastery of phoneme segmenting and blending.
In this International Dyslexia Association Perspectives article, Dr. Andrew Biemiller summarizes the importance of teaching vocabulary, as well as key principles for vocabulary instruction from early childhood to intermediate/senior grades. He summarizes considerations for selecting words to teach explicitly, and how words and instruction shift as students’ vocabulary skills grow and develop over time.
In this podcast from Amplify, Susan Lambert engages with Dr. Brittney Bills, an educator who moved from school psychology to curriculum coordination at Grand Island Public Schools. Dr. Bills delves into the concept of MTSS, highlighting its focus on prevention over intervention, exploring the link between universal screening data and MTSS, and providing insights into…
