The OTHER end of the Reading Rope - science of reading

  Just like phonics, direct, explicit instruction is the best way to teach vocabulary.  Explicitly teach a New Word -  pronounce, write and read the word tell students what it means - using student friendly definition, props or actions say the words multiple times while giving examples, sentences, or asking questions using it ask yes or no questions ask students to use the words during the day How to Practice Vocabulary Words dimensions of word knowledge - look at synonyms, antonyms, categories of examples, multiple meanings, etc..  Four Squares are great graphic organizers for analyzing words in depth.  Multiple Meanings - one of the biggest confusions with students are words that have more than one meaning.  As you get into the Upper Grades, there becomes more and more examples in grade level text.  One way to practice, is by taking the word and using a web to show the various meanings.  Classification into Categories - sometimes we spend more time looking at the meaning of words th

  Winter Read Aloud I found this book recently and fell in love with it for many reasons -  family relationships diverse family (from Lebanon) sensory details - which connects to onomatopoeias character traits and points of view and most of all SNOW...       In switching from the old idea of reading multiple books for exposure to isolated skills, I designed this mini-unit around the fundamentals of the comprehension side of the Science of Reading.   Verbal reasoning  is woven into the unit in several ways. T his unit includes opportunities for inferencing as well as Visible Thinking Routines like  See, Think, Wonder , and the  Circle of Viewpoints.  Some are used to build background knowledge and some are used to reflect on the learning.   The lessons are broken into three parts -  Before Reading Background Knowledge - this book can be read in isolation or with other winter read-aloud books to build knowledge about a snowy day.  You could read this before a big snowstorm, as part of

  We are coming off about ten years of teaching skills in isolation.  At the time, it seemed like a sound idea. Struggling with the main idea? Spend more time on the main idea. We spent a lot of time focused on three-week units around one skill. But what teachers noticed was, it didn't work! They still didn't get the main idea!!!        Fast forward to 2019 and the Science of Reading movement....the first book I read that changed my thinking was Natalie Wexler's the Knowledge Gap.    I will spend another blog post synthesizing takeaways from this later.  In all honesty, this book made sense to me. Why weren't the kids getting these skills in isolation? We had taught many, many lessons on them!  Wexler says it's not because of the skill, it has more to do with the information in the text they are reading. If you have no background knowledge, then you can't decipher the meaning of the text.         Students need to be exposed to multiple skills in a passage or st