Pair Sharing: A Best Practice Pair Sharing is generally acknowledged as a best practice in education. In classrooms I visit, however, I rarely see it used, let alone integrated into lessons as a regular practice. Reducing the amount of teacher talk and getting students to talk to each other is one of the cheapest and …
Category: Fluency
Reading Remedies for iPhone and iPad
This week I released my first iPhone/iPad app, Reading Remedies, which helps to diagnose reading difficulties and support beginning readers. I hope it will be of use to teachers and especially parents. The app gives assessments in each of six reading areas (rhyming, blending, segmenting, sight words, fluency, and word attack) and then provides follow-up …
Increase Reading Fluency with Fluency Timer
I’m excited to announce that I’ve developed and released my very first software application, Fluency Timer, available now in the new Mac App Store or via my own site at: http://www.fluencytimer.net. Fluency Timer is both a timer and a recorder that records students’ one minute fluency readings. Research has shown that having students listen to …
Reading Intervention Resources
I’m halfway through my second year of providing intervention services on a pullout basis to struggling readers. I thought I would share the materials I’m using with my students to increase comprehension in the hopes that this might help someone else and that you might have additional resources you might recommend. About My Intervention As …
Digital Storytelling Educational Technology Fluency Independent Work Time Reading Comprehension Reading Fluency Video in the Classroom Workshops Upcoming
RTI (Response to Intervention) A Complete Apple Workflow
Thank you to those of you who attended my workshop, “RTI: A Complete Apple Workflow” at the CUE conference this weekend. I spoke about using Apple Software to address your Response to Intervention program. This post contains the links, resources, and ideas that I shared. Rather than simply posting the keynote file (which is …
Down and Dirty Data Analysis
Green is good. Red is bad. Here’s what they taught me in “coaching college” about how to read data. Reading vertically indicates the teacher’s problem. Reading horizontally indicates a student’s problem. So, Harpo needs some additional help in all language arts areas. However, in the vocabulary category, it appears that the teacher needs to examine …
Beginning of the Year Pre-Assessments
Here are a few tools to use when assessing students at the beginning of the year: The Basic Phonics Skills Test (BPST) This is helpful in identifying specific areas of phonics need (short vowels, long vowels, digraphs, etc.) San Diego Quick Assessment It’s also important to know students’ knowledge of sight words which is an …
An Ideal Language Arts Curriculum
Kevin Hodgson lays out what he considers to be an ideal language arts curriculum. Please read the entire post. However, the tenets he puts forth are: Writing to Learn Including listening and speaking (as well as reading and writing) A “Stakes Approach” (Moving from low-stakes like journal writing to high stakes like publishing and performance) …
Riddle Me This: Activity for Sound Spelling Cards
a guest post on using the Sound Spelling Cards by Ann Miani Dear Teachers, I wanted to share a life changing teaching strategy for OCR phonics. You can print out the Sound Spelling Card mats (see links): Link #1 Link #2 There are some cool new versions of the large long vowel cards to print …
Educational Technology Fluency Independent Work Time Macintosh Tips Open Court Reading Reading Fluency
What To Do With Student Data
To paraphrase Chris Lehman in his five minute Ignite Philly speech on the Schools We Need: Good data costs more than we want to spend in this country and the best data is the data that teachers collect every day. The best data is the work kids do every single day. I agree with this …