When Heidi and I were both teaching 2nd grade, we had a dream. We had a dream of THE IDEAL WORD STUDY PROGRAM. We both feel like we had some really solid practices in place for teaching phonics and spelling. But we had complaints about our cobbled together word study program: It never quite seemed…
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The First Day of School in 2nd Grade
Back-to-school is the worst of times. It’s so stressful and exhausting (seriously it’s so, so tiring!). But it’s also the best of times! The feeling of a new beginning is absolutely exhilarating. I love that fresh start, where everything is possible and I haven’t screwed up…yet! I may be in the minority (okay, I’m definitely…
Unlocking the Power of Fluency Webinar
Hi teacher friends! We wanted to alert you of some upcoming free professional development opportunities that we’re hosting in the coming weeks. You’re invited to join us to learn about Unlocking the Power of Fluency for your students. This is a free, live training we will be offering on a couple of different days. Click…
Teacher Summer Book Club 2017
What’s better than relaxing with a great book in the summer? How about THREE great books?! Join us for our Summer Book Club! We’ll doing a little light reading, some thoughtful thinking, and a lot of fun discussion. After some suggestions, we’ve selected three great reads that we can’t wait to dive into. Will you join us?…
The End of Year Tradition It’s Time to Abandon
“Mom wants answers after child with ADHD receives ‘Least Likely to Pay Attention’ award.” That was in my news feed the other day. It’s easy to look at a story like that and think the teacher is incredibly cruel. And though it seems so obvious that this was a terrible, terrible idea, I know exactly how…
10 Teacher Truths I Learned from Anne of Green Gables
I first saw Anne of Green Gables when I was 8. You know the 80s mini-series from Canada with Megan Follows and (the all-time best TV crush) Jonathan Crombie??? I fell in love from the first scene with Anne reciting poetry to herself as she walks through the woods. Tell me you loved it, too!…
How To Avoid These 6 Common Fluency Instruction Mistakes
There are some common mistakes that teachers make when they embark on teaching oral reading fluency. I’ve made some of these mistakes myself. But we hope to save you from making the same mistakes and have some idea for you of what to do instead. Mistake #1: Using ONLY 1 minute timed readings to assess fluency If…
Top 5 Twelve Days of Christmas Reads
Around here at Second Story Window, there’s not much we love more than Christmas picture books! Today we’re sharing some of our favorite versions of the 12 days of Christmas. Our other Christmas books posts have narrowed our recommendations down to our top 5, but there are just too many good ones for the…
Christmas Consonant Blends
We’re back again with some adorable Christmas literacy centers. This time we’re tackling consonant blends : s blends, l blends, and r blends. These centers are a fun and seasonal compliment to our phonics program. Word Play Phonics for 1st and 2nd grade is a differentiated word study program that incorporates weekly word sorting, chunk spelling, phonics…
Turkey Digraphs
Isn’t practicing an important concept so much more fun when you can do it with an engaging, seasonal activity? We created this free beginning digraph turkey center as a companion to the phonics program we’ve been working on and we want to share it with all of you! Speaking of our phonics program, we have been…
