Making Inferences: A Step-by-Step Approach to Teaching Early Students

Making Inferences seems to be a tall task for kindergartners, but it isn't really that hard...if you step it out correctly. AND I mean step it out. Students CAN make inferences as long as you start at an easily understood level. Shoes are the perfect example. I first spoke about inferences 

Not the Puzzle, Just the Piece: A Lesson for Narrative Writing and Small Moments

When we first teach about Narrative Writing, we focus on something we've done...usually a whole event: Our Pumpkin Patch Field Trip or Going to the Post Office. We help students craft sentences that start with predictable text or repeated sentence stems. Early narratives might sound like: "I went to the zoo. I saw a lion. I saw a giraffe. I saw a tiger. It was fun." Introduction sentence: check. 3 details: check. An emotion sentence: check. I wrote about Narratives at the beginner level in the post: Let's Got to the Zoo: Narrative Writing with Emergent Writers. 

4 Ways to Teach Fix-up Monitoring to Kindergartners: Fix Up the Mix Up

Fix-Up Monitoring can be tricky for kindergartners and you may be thinking why should I do it at all. BUT, if we introduce the ideas of fix-up monitoring to students early, they will be able to apply the skills independently. Here are 4 ideas for introducing this reading strategy to our earliest students. We chant, "We can FIX UP the MIX UP."

Phonemic Awareness: Step 6 Phonological Awareness Ends with Manipulating Phonemes

As mentioned before, Phonological Awareness is oral and students need to understand letters and sounds before the symbols are added. Previously, we have looked at matching beginning (alliteration) and ending (rhyming) sounds...moved to identifying words in a sentence...syllables in the words...and breaking words into onset and rime. We are at the phonemics level now. We are focusing on the individual sounds in a word (and it has nothing to do with letters). 

Mentor Text: The Gingerbread Man Runs Away with Reading Comprehension

Mrs. Nelson was my kindergarten teacher. We read The Gingerbread Man Monday, went to lunch, and he was gone. I remember running around the school in kindergarten chasing The Gingerbread Man. Each day we'd find him somewhere in the building and bring him back to our classroom and he'd be gone again the next day. We met everyone in the school and went all over the building. I think that began my love affair with The Gingerbread Man.