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…
1st Grade
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…
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…
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…
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…
