What is Phonics and Why do we Teach It?

Hopefully today's video revive you for effectively teaching phonics in your classroom. We go through a few of the most common questions of phonics. This video will remind you of the importance of teaching explicit phonics instruction everyday - in every grade! Enjoy!

How to Teach Consonant Spellings

Today's Video is all about how to effectively teach consonant spellings!

If you missed our video about WHAT are the Sound-Spelling patterns and WHY we teach them, check out the video.

Breaking the English language into the most common spelling patterns is an effective way to teach the connection of the sounds and the spellings to children while learning to read.  This relationship between the sounds and the spellings of language is also called decoding.  Decoding our language is critical to being an adept reader.  Breaking the English language into the most common spelling patterns and teaching them explicitly in a clear scope and sequence is recommended.  You can follow our pattern or break this up to follow your Core Reading Program's scope and sequence.

In our Sound-Spelling Posters and Reference Sheets, we include the spelling patterns:

short vowels in cvc  consonants and blends  soft c and g  silent and double consonants  schwa  digraphs and trigraph  r-controlled vowels  long vowels: final silent e (vce)  long vowels: vowel teams  other long vowels  closed syllables  open syllables  variant vowels consonant-le

Sound-Spelling Patterns 

Sound-Spelling Posters and Reference Sheets
Reading A to Z Phonics Lessons Bundle

How to Teach Short Vowel CVC

Today's Video is all about how to effectively teach short vowels CVC!

If you missed our video about WHAT are the Sound-Spelling patterns and WHY we teach them, check out the video.

Breaking the English language into the most common spelling patterns is an effective way to teach the connection of the sounds and the spellings to children while learning to read.  This relationship between the sounds and the spellings of language is also called decoding.  Decoding our language is critical to being an adept reader.  Breaking the English language into the most common spelling patterns and teaching them explicitly in a clear scope and sequence is recommended.  You can follow our pattern or break this up to follow your Core Reading Program's scope and sequence.

In our Sound-Spelling Posters and Reference Sheets, we include the spelling patterns:

short vowels in cvc  consonants and blends  soft c and g  silent and double consonants  schwa  digraphs and trigraph  r-controlled vowels  long vowels: final silent e (vce)  long vowels: vowel teams  other long vowels  closed syllables  open syllables  variant vowels consonant-le

Sound-Spelling Patterns 

Sound-Spelling Posters and Reference Sheets
Reading A to Z Phonics Lessons Bundle

What and Why of Sound-Spelling Patterns

Today's video is all about the English language! 

What are sound-spelling patterns and why do we teach them?

The English language is a phonetically based language.  It includes many words (50% wholly decodable and additional 37% within one sound) that are decodable.  That is great news for those of us teaching kids to learn to read!  This means we have a fairly reliable code we can teach them to use.  This code is made up of spellings that link to sounds and these blend together to form the words in our language.  We call the key to this code sound-spelling patterns.  We as teachers must teach these sound-spelling patterns to our students, and teach them to be flexible in their use of those sound-spelling patterns (to account for the "within one sound" parts).

We cover more information about what and why we need to teach these sound-spelling patterns in our classrooms, yes, even upper grades!  Big words are all made of sound-spelling patterns too!

We have an awesome resource for you to help you teach the sound-spelling patterns. 

Check it out HERE!

We also have a Sound-Spelling Patterns FREE Document 

How to Use Our Digital Phonics Lessons

Our Digital Phonics Lessons will be a great addition to your daily teaching routine. 

We have beginner phonics lessons ready for K, 1, or intervention in 2nd!

View our entire scope and sequence HERE!  

Currently, we have "beginner" digital phonics lessons ready for:

• FREE Sample (1 lesson from short a)
• Short a cvc (5 lessons)
• Short e cvc (5 lessons)
• Short i cvc (5 lessons)
• Short o cvc (5 lessons)
• Short u cvc (5 lessons)
• Mixed Vowel cvc (5 lessons)
• Consonant Blends with short vowels (10 lessons)

What grades are our "beginner" phonics lessons for?

Whether you teach Kindergarten, First grade or need these beginner lessons for Intervention in Second grade, these lessons can help save you time and effort and keep your students engaged in their learning!

What will you receive in the download of the digital phonics lessons?

In each download, you'll received a PDF with the lessons, student text, and dictation sheet. In the PDF you purchase, you will be given a link to the digital lessons through Google Slides. You can run the digital lessons through your computer or any device that can download Google Slides app! Don't forget to watch our video to see how they work!  If technology goes down, have no fear! You can use the printable lesson card and student text to teach any lesson without technology.

We have taken the time to include all the important components of an effective phonics lesson in every lesson with some animations and cool features:

1. phonemic awareness warm-up
2. sound-spelling review
3. blending words
4. sight word review
5. text reading
6. word work through dictation

These beginning lessons start with the most basic sound-spelling patterns, short vowels, and build until all the vowels have been taught.  We then add consonant blends, giving more blending practice with larger words and mixed short vowels. 

These lessons give you engaging and motivating classroom practice in all of the components of the lessons, ending with the most important thing, text reading!

Download our FREE sample today to check it out!

Don't forget to watch the video so you don't miss a beat when you download the files!  A review of the sound-spelling patterns might be useful also, we have a resource for those, too.

5 Lesson Tips and Reminders for Teaching Comprehension Strategies

Today's video is all about 5 simple tips to remember while teaching reading comprehension strategies!

These five things are not a complete list of all that you need to have a flawless lesson, but they are a great start when planning for success!  Angie calls them non-negotiables!

These tips can apply to other teaching too!  Not just comprehension instruction!  So pay close attention and maybe they can help you in other areas of instruction also.

Comprehension Resources Handout

How to Choose Comprehension Strategies Using our Flow Chart

Today is all about CHOOSING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES made simple!  We have done the hard thinking for you and made a simple flow chart for your use for free.  Watch our video and use these easy steps in the flowchart to determine your reading strategies. Then, follow the tips and reminders for lesson plans that will help your students deeply comprehend their text. We even give you explicit language for each strategy!

Here is our “Choosing Comprehension Strategies” flow chart to use as a way to quickly choose your strategy(ies) for instruction.  This is something we both use as we plan our own comprehension strategy instruction.  I, Angie, use it to plan lessons for my pre-service students when I model comprehension lessons and Whitney uses it for her daily comprehension instruction as a classroom teacher.  We have found it to be a valuable tool for our planning. 

We have also provided some teacher language for the strategies.  The teacher language will help you introduce the strategies and give you a starting point for your modeling.  Don’t forget that you have to include a think-aloud of how you used the strategy! The teacher language will guide you but is not a think-aloud during your modeling of strategy use. If you still need more help on what to do next, see one of our comprehension lessons with the teacher talk already filled in. We also have posters of the strategies and graphic organizers ready for your use in your classroom.  These can help keep you on track with your strategy instruction and use.

Most importantly, don’t give up!  Keep trying to use comprehension strategies in your instruction.  Students need these strategies so when they read on their own they have the thinking to be able to comprehend difficult and complex text without the support of a teacher to guide them. 

Good luck in your future comprehension planning!

FREE Comprehension Resources Handout (Flow Chart, Teacher Language, and More!)
Comprehension Graphic Organizers and Posters
Comprehension Lessons

NEW Graphic Organizers for Comprehension Strategy Lessons!

Download the preview today HERE to see what is all inside this 150+ page download! 

Stay tuned for videos that we will reference to these graphic organizers. 

Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel today to not miss out! 

Comprehension Strategies

Strategies that we use to understand text are done primarily during reading. They occur in our heads as we read. Good readers are able to use strategies. Novice readers, on the other hand, often need to be taught how, when, and why we use strategies. 

The best way to ensure that a reader learns to use a strategy is first, one at a time and then, combining strategies into multiple strategy lessons.  

All of these variations of strategy lessons need to follow the Gradual Release model; I do with teacher modeling and think-aloud (page 4-5), We do, You do together, and You do alone. Click here for comprehension strategy posters!

Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers are exactly what they say, they are graphic representation that organize our thinking and keep track of information found within the text. Use these graphic organizers with the comprehension strategies you choose for the texts you are teaching.  Use our flow chart (page 3) to help choose your strategy(ies)! 

When planning a comprehension strategy lesson, it is important that you completely read, select stopping points, and fill in a graphic organizer during your lesson creation so when you turn the kids out for the You do together and You do alone portion of the lesson you already have your thinking down on your own graphic organizer.  

Being prepared allows you to engage in conversation, discussion, and generate elaborative responses from your students as another means of assessing their comprehension of the text. After all, discussion is still one of the very best assessments of comprehension we can use. A graphic organizer can assist in that assessment. The graphic organizer is not the focus of the comprehension strategy lesson, but is the keeper of our thoughts until we can get to the time for discussion.

Freebie! Phonics Lesson Card

This is our free and blank Phonics Lesson Card.  It provides you with all the steps of the simple effective phonics lesson, ready for you to write your own lesson!  You can use this blank card to write the lesson for the decodable texts you have in your own classroom for your phonics lessons.

You'll want to make sure to subscribe to us on YouTube because we have a video coming out soon that will walk you through how to plan a phonics lesson using this card. Coming Soon!

Click here for the free card!

What, Why, and When of Beginner Phonics Lessons

New YouTube Video!

Throughout the early grades there are a few major components that are critical when learning to read: phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle, and text reading. When these components are linked together, taught explicitly, applied to word blending and text reading, they create powerful weapons in the fight against illiteracy! In this short video, we discuss the importance of these components in the early grades, and provide some understanding that is necessary for explicit phonics instruction to young children.

Zeno Words
Phonics Resources

What and Why of Comprehension Strategies

In this video we teach you what the comprehension strategies are and why we teach them. Comprehending what we read is the GOAL of reading instruction.  It is why we do everything else!  Comprehension strategy instruction is one way to aide comprehension.

Strategies are "ways of thinking" made clear through modeling and thinking aloud.  These strategies happen in our heads mostly during reading so we have to stop during our lessons and talk about our thinking as we go or we have missed the opportunities to teach about the thinking that is occurring.

There are many strategies,but we have chosen to narrow our list down to a few that are most common.

Visualize

Question

Connection

Evaluate & Comment

Monitor & Clarify

Summarize

Predict
Infer 

As you pay attention to your own strategy use as a reader, you will find it easier to teach these strategies to your students.  We give many tips and helps for you to rely on our thinking until you are able to pay attention to your own thinking. It is our goal for you to be deep thinkers and to then get your students to be deep thinkers, using strategies when they are appropriate and helpful to understand the text they are reading!

FREE Comprehension Resources Handout
Comprehension Posters 

Sound-Spelling Cards and Posters!

In our sound-spellings download you will receive:

• A master list of all the sound-spellings
• Reference lists for each sound-spelling with sound pictures, spelling, and word examples
• Posters for each sound spelling! Headings included!

These posters provide a visual of all the sound-spelling patterns along with the teacher talk to teach them. The teacher talk is found in the teacher card which could also be used as a student reference sheet. We have also provided you with a colorful poster for your students to look at as a reminder of the sound each spelling makes.

This is great for whole class teaching of your phonics scope and sequence as well as intervention group instruction.  Hang them on your wall for reminders or print them for your intervention table as help for struggling students during targeted intervention.

Download the files HERE! 

Also, stay tuned for YouTube Videos to come about sound-spellings! Subscribe today, so you don't miss out :).

Sound-spelling patterns covered:

• short vowels in cvc 
• consonants and blends 
• soft c and g 
• silent and double consonants 
• schwa 
• digraphs and trigraph 
• r-controlled vowels 
• long vowels: final silent e (vce) 
• long vowels: vowel teams 
• other long vowels 
• closed syllables 
• open syllables 
• variant vowels
• consonant-le