Phonemic awareness is not only one of the strongest predictors of reading and writing success, but it is also fun to teach. Here are a few ways that educators can work it into kindergarten and primary classrooms.
For over 20 years, research has shown that social-emotional learning should take a more important role in the classroom. Teachers should highlight the emotions felt by the characters in children's literature to promote social-emotional learning and discussions while continuing to meet academic goals.
Mental imagery, or the ability to create a visual representation in your mind, can be used to support visual reading processes in ways that can benefit students who struggle with reading and writing due to their LDs. Creating mental imagery of a word is a strategy that can be used in the classroom to support reading and writing instruction and remediation.
It is now well-known that students’ reading skills have an important role in mathematics, in particular for solving word problems. One reading skill needed to understand and solve written mathematical problems is the ability to make inferences.
Phonological awareness is a crucial foundational skill in the journey of learning to read. Research shows that challenges in phonemic awareness and other phonological skills both predict and cause poor reading and spelling development and that decoding instruction may be ineffective unless children can first hear the sounds in spoken language.
The Writing Circle is an innovative teaching approach used to teach writing at the primary level, which can be adapted to support students with LDs to encourage their enjoyment of writing, activate and increase their knowledge of writing, and enable them to acquire new writing skills, both in planning and revising texts.
Reading is a significant area of need throughout Ontario schools. Too many students have gaps in too many areas of reading, impacting not only the day-to-day instruction in our classrooms, but the face of education as a whole. Direct Instruction is needed to remediate those gaps and build literate children who are equipped with a variety of strategies to decode words and comprehend ideas. In order to provide our students with the quality of reading instruction they need, we as teachers need to better understand the skills that build readers and provide consistent opportunities for practice and application.
When a student refuses to complete homework, the first step to helping is to understand why. If we do not know how the student became “lost” in trying to carry out the task, our guidelines might not be very useful.
Having impaired oral language skills can impact learning in all subject areas and thus have an enormous effect on school success. It is not surprising then, that children with a persistent problem learning language, known as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), are at an increased risk of poorer academic and social performance.
Teachers devote a lot of energy to teaching students to become competent readers, which is even more challenging in the inclusive classroom where some students have reading difficulties. This article examines the efficacy of a teaching activity program designed and tested in the three tiers of the Response to Intervention (RTI) model.
