Should you teach long vowels in Kindergarten? The short answer—yes, as long as your students are ready! If your students have mastered short vowel CVC words and are confidently blending sounds, many of them are ready to start learning long vowel patterns, especially by spring. In fact, introducing vowel teams
Writing is a fundamental skill that lays the foundation for communication, creativity, and expression. Introducing writing prompts to kindergarten and first-grade students fosters their literacy development and sparks their imagination and critical thinking abilities. However, coming up with creative prompts can sometimes be challenging for educators and parents. To alleviate
When teaching students how to read, the idea of deliberately teaching nonsense words might seem pointless. However, there’s a method to this madness. Teaching nonsense words is pivotal in developing a child’s foundational reading skills. This blog post will explore the importance of why you should teach nonsense words to
How do you start off the year teaching writing in Kindergarten? More than likely, your students will not be ready to be writing full sentences yet. You will have to really start from the basics of writing, with lots of modeling and scaffolding to get them where they need to
Flashcards may seem like the most boring teaching tool. The main way to use phonics flashcards is to practice naming sounds, and I do use them especially during our phonemic awareness daily warm-ups. However, there are many other ways you can use flashcards! Here are a few engaging ways to
Are you looking for some ideas to create engaging phonics lesson activities? With your phonics instruction, you want to first make sure it is systematic and explicit, and done daily. However, this doesn’t mean it needs to be boring! Here are my top 4 simple and engaging phonics lesson activities
My phonics routine used to consist of a 30-minute phonics lesson followed by an independent activity. I quickly found that this was too long for my students and not very effective. Soon, I switched to a quick and simple 15-minute step-by-step phonics lesson plan, which now includes additional independent practice
This post provides a comprehensive overview of the Sweet for Kindergarten Phonics Curriculum for both Kindergarten and First Grade. It covers the curriculum’s contents, sample lesson plans, usage tips, and more. Additionally, you’ll find some free resources from the curriculum, including a free sample week, that you can try out.
Do you wish your students were able to write independently? They can! All they need is a little help getting there. The best independent writing activity for Kindergarten that I’ve used are picture prompts! Picture prompts can help students become more confident in writing independently by giving them a picture
