As a reading interventionist at my school, this is a really magical time of year.  My kindergarten students have been learning letter sounds all year so far and now, they are starting to put those sounds together to read actual WORDS!  This is called blending.  Blending is the fundamental skill that helps us read, especially...Read More

Sharing a meal with our families is not only a time to fuel our bodies and connect with our loved ones…it can also be a time for learning!  In this blog, I will share a few games you and your children can play together at dinner. Don’t worry, no pencil or paper is required!  The...Read More

I absolutely LOVE being the children’s librarian at my school…especially when my kindergarteners come to check out books.  They are SO EXCITED to look at the books and to take one home.  Many of our kindergarteners do not know how to read yet, so they “picture read”.  This is a wonderful “prequel” to reading.  However,...Read More

Have you ever heard of a “wordless picture book”?  Wordless picture books are books without words or very few words, but they are a great way to build critical literacy, listening vocabulary, and comprehension skills.  They also help increase a child’s awareness of how stories are structured. As the school librarian in my district, I...Read More

If you have been following the blog for the past several weeks, you have learned A LOT  about phonemic awareness.  So far, in this phonemic awareness skills series, we have discussed rhyming, syllables, onset and rime, sound isolation, phonemic blending, and phonemic segmentation.  This final blog is about phoneme manipulation, the most sophisticated of all...Read More

Children who are able to segment and blend sounds will be able to apply this knowledge to spelling and reading more easily than those that have not yet mastered these skills. First, let’s define the two processes.  Phoneme segmentation is the process of breaking a word up into its individual sounds.  For example, saying the...Read More

Sound isolation is the ability to isolate a single sound from within a word.  Children usually master initial sound isolation in the middle of kindergarten, and final and medial sound isolation at the end of kindergarten or early first grade.  Phoneme (sound) isolation is a very important step in early literacy development. Kids that have...Read More

Strong Foundational Skills If you have ever seen a child struggle when sounding out a word, chances are there are gaps in their phonological awareness skills. The great news is that getting a head start on building this foundational skill is easy to do and is most impactful if done early. I often think about...Read More

The Importance of Conversation Babies are born wired to pay attention to sound and language. Starting from a very young age it is important to engage in meaningful conversations with children. This could be as simple as talking to your child about the world around them – describing people, events, and places to them in...Read More

Does anyone else get nervous before parent-teacher conferences? Is it just me? Walking into a parent-teacher conference feels a little bit like walking into the lion’s den. Here’s the thing…I’m the teacher. Yea…it’s hard on all of us. I am the teacher, but I am also a parent. And I know the stress from both...Read More