Open Court Reading

Teaching Kindergarten Predecodables

submitted by Mayrene:

To make teaching the pre-decodables easier, I teach them for 3 days.

First Day – I read book, but children practice choral reading from a poster of the story. The poster includes the rebus pictures. You can copy them from book and use black & white pics OR you can get similar pics from Google images

Second Day – the children form the sentences from the poster story. This was very time consuming to make as I made 7 sets of all the words and pics that a child would need to make the sentences. They make one sentence at a time. Then they read it before going on to the next sentence. This is probably THE most important activity they do. Word matching, one to one correspondance , etc. This is obviously done in small groups of no more than 7 students.

Third Day – each child reads from their own copy of book. I underline or highlight tricky words. Then they take it home to read. Since this is the 3rd exposure of the story, they are fairly fluent by the time they take the story home.

5 thoughts on “Teaching Kindergarten Predecodables”

  1. I made the posters myself from the pre- decodables. I used my own rebus pictures that I got from Google images.
    Sometimes I didn’t write EVERY sentence from the stories if they didn’t fit. I think only one time did I extend the story using the standard poster size
    lined tag from LAUSD.

  2. I made some similar posters. They are a great teaching tool. If you have an extra predecodable, you can cut it up and use the actual pictures for your poster rebus pictures.

    I love the idea of the “forming the sentences” activity. I think I will adapt it in the following way” I will make a reproducible worksheet with all the voc. words for the book on it. The students can cut out the words, and each have a copy that can be used to form sentences. This way, I don’t have to make 7 more sets of flashcards, and I can do the activity whole group if I choose to.

  3. I have the children spell the new high frequency words with magnets on cookie trays. We use sentence strips to spell sentences out also. I like the idea of having them cut out their own words and form the sentences. Keeping sets for workshop with the sentence programmed on an envelope and the cut out words inside would be great review.

    I do make a sheet of the words for each book and send them home for parents to review. The children cut out the words and keep them in a shoe box at home along with the blackline master copy of the book. We keep all of the color version in school to review during workshop or use for choral or partner reading.

    Kathy, MA

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