Transcript

Our brains are not primed to learn to read, simply by being exposed to reading. So it is imperatively important that we do explicit instruction for our students, whether they are struggling or not. In a classroom, especially in the early grades, it's of paramount importance that we look at explicitly teaching decoding skills. The research tells us that there are a group of students who will not learn to read unless we do use explicit instruction. 

So some of the things that need to be explicitly instructed in the classroom are phonological awareness. So some quick phonological awareness tasks would be things like Guess My Word which is a game you can play with students in that you would sound out a word like the word cat and you would say /c/a/t/ what word is that? And that's working on blending.

The next quick game is for students to talk about the number of sounds in words. And this can be done while you're doing attendance, so you can guess the number of sounds in someone's name, or you could do it in gym and you could sound out the actions that the students are supposed to try like /j/u/m/p/. What is it that I want you to do?

So it can be worked in, it doesn't have to be done as a skill and drill type of activity but it can be done across contexts and throughout your day and across subjects.