EVERYONE'S A WINNER WEEK! {Day 1}

Over 2 months in the making and it's finally here!

All 20 blog authors want to invite you 

to follow our literacy journey on 

This week, Jan. 6th - 10th EVERY follower is a WINNER!

EVERY follower who leaves their email in the rafflecopter below, 

will be emailed our Blog Launch Exclusive Freebie Prize Pack at the end of the week!

Each day this week there is a different literacy focus.  Five talented bloggers will share their tips for...

Welcome!  Welcome!  It is absolutely thrilling to me to be a part of this wonderful literacy community!  I am Em from Curious Firsties.  My teaching started in Knoxville, TN where I taught second grade.  When I moved back to Cincinnati, OH I taught first and second grade (including a looping year).  About five years ago, I requested to be a Title I teacher (my dream job).  Currently, I work with only first grade students.  My school is departmentalized and leveled; therefore, I push into the classroom and provide small group instruction with my co-teachers.  I absolutely love my job and the challenges that it can pose.  

 

My FREEBIE product is a vowel-consonant-e word ladder packet.  Word ladders are a great way to engage our students in word study.  They have to analyze the clues to uncover the next word.  My ladders differ from traditional ones because I focus them on one specific pattern.  They provide support to students that have decoding difficulties and would benefit from practice with specific patterns.  I’m happy to share it with you!  The blogging world is such a great place to learn and grow.  I am excited to be a part of it!

   

Welcome Friends!  We are the blogging team of Colleen and Stacy from The Rungs of Reading.  We are so excited to be a part of this new collaborative blog to bring you best practices in the field of literacy.  Today we would like to talk a little about the importance of phonics/decoding strategies.  Teaching children proven decoding strategies provides them with a strong foundation to ensure reading success.  Decoding is the process of translating print into speech by rapidly matching letters (graphemes) to their sounds (phonemes) and recognizing the patterns and rules that make syllables and words.  Although there is a part of our brain that deals with language processing, about 30 percent of children do not access this part of their brain automatically and therefore must be taught decoding principles using explicit, systematic, and multisensory approaches and strategies. 

One decoding principle that can be tricky for children to master is learning the r-controlled vowel sounds ar, er, ir, or, and ur.  When a vowel is followed by an "r", the "r" changes the sound that the vowel makes.  Sometimes teachers refer to the "r" as "Bossy-r" as the "r" bosses the vowel to make a different sound. We hope you enjoy our Roll the Die game from our Wonderful Wizard of Oz bundle that reinforces this important decoding rule.  This game can be used as an ELA center, small group RTI intervention, or informal assessment. 

Hello there!  My name is Jessica and I am coming to you from Hanging Out in First!  I am so excited to be a part of this blog and to share with you so many wonderful reading resources.  The freebie that I am sharing with you is part of my phoneme segmentation pack.  Phonemic awareness is crucial for beginning readers.  It is the ability to manipulate phonemes, or sounds.  As a student learns to manipulate phonemes, they are then able to begin blending and encoding sounds as they read and write.  It helps students to see patterns within words and recognize chunks of sound. 

My phoneme segmentation pack is just one aspect of phonemic awareness.  In this pack, students will learn to segment sounds.  This means that they will begin taking the sounds apart, thus laying the groundwork for future writers!  This pack is just a sample of my larger phoneme segmentation packs in my TPT store. It includes Elkonin boxes for a push, say, sort activity, a graphing for sounds activity, some coloring for sounds pages, and a fluency page to help progress monitor phoneme segmentation fluency.  I hope that you can use this freebie and keep in touch with us as we share so many more valuable resources with you!!

Hi everyone! I am so delighted to be part of this wonderful collaborative group!

My freebie for you today is related to initial phonemes, or sounds. Research has shown that children learning to read must be able to manipulate phonemes in order to advance in their reading skills. Yes, first they must be able to identify those sound units, but manipulating them is important because readers need to remember them and compare those phonemes and the letter(s) that represent them. A reader needs to be able to pull out a single phoneme from a word they read and to compare and contrast  it with different letter sequences. For example, a child learning to read needs to be able to figure out that the initial phoneme in fall and phone is the same but they are represented by different letters.

With that being said, my freebie will have your students working on adding initial phonemes (sometimes we call these onsets) to word families (rimes). For example, a student will take the phoneme c and match it with ake to make cake. However, matching it to ack will not make a word. I am excited for your students to give it a try and I hope that the practice is fun for them and doesn't feel much like work! Thanks for stopping by our blog today!

We hope these ideas are useful in your classroom.

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