The science of reading has been ALL the buzz lately but, if you’re secretly scratching your head and thinking that you don’t REALLY understand what it means yet, don’t worry. You’re not alone! And I promise this rundown will help break it all down for you. ![]() Whole Language vs. PhonicsBefore we dive into the science of reading, it’s important that we have a quick chat about the reading wars – a long standing debate about the best way to teach reading. You can imagine a line with whole language on one side and phonics on the other… Whole language fans believe that children will naturally learn how to read just like they learn to speak. They encourage reading good books so students fall in love with literature and teaching new readers to sound out unknown words with cues like the context of other words around it. True whole language fans only teach phonics when it is relevant to a specific word they’re focusing on so, for instance, a whole language teacher might talk about the SH digraph if students were reading the word ship but the digraph lesson would not stretch far beyond that single word. Phonics fans, on the other hand, believe that children learn to read best when they are taught how to sound out specific letter combinations and blend them together to make words. In the example above, a phonics-based teacher would purposefully lead a lesson on the SH digraph. She might teach students a helpful SH poem and then have them read a variety of SH words like ship, shut, shin, she, etc. The focus would be on the letter sounds, not the words. If you or someone you know has been teaching for a while, you’ve seen the reading wars in action. A lot of teachers refer to it as a pendulum that’s swung back and forth from one end of the spectrum to the other. And that brings us to modern day… ![]() What is the Science of Reading?Scientists have been studying how students learn to read for decades and the findings of their research is called “the science of reading”. Based on those findings, back in 2018, a journalist named Emily Hanford argued that reading was being taught the wrong way – teachers were using curriculum that didn’t take into account how brains work. Instead, they should be relying on proven, research-based strategies. And the reading wars were ignited again! The science of reading is not a curriculum or a book or a specific teaching strategy… It’s a very WIDE body of knowledge that covers everything from how students first learn to sound out words to how they become fluent readers, understand what they are reading, make connections to their own life…. the list is long. Imagine ALL of the science journal articles that have been published on reading over the years and you’ll start to wrap your brain around just how broad the science of reading really is. And that brings me to an important point… If you watch TikTok videos or Instagram reels, you’ve probably seen a lot of science of reading fans focusing on phonics and phonological awareness. While that is definitely one critical piece of the puzzle, it’s important to note that there are also other parts too. For instance, without teaching students what words mean, they’ll never be able to understand and analyze the stories they sound out. And if students learn the sounds letters make but don’t also have the working memory they need to keep those sounds in their head long enough to be able to blend them together and read the word, they’ll always struggle with fluency. So, Where Do We Go from Here?First, don’t panic! If you are worried that you’re not incorporating research-based strategies into your lesson plans yet, don’t worry – following along with me is a great place to start. It’s likely that you are already doing many science-backed things already and now you can make tweaks and updates as needed. I’ll continue sharing tons of helpful tips and strategies right here on the blog and over on Instagram and Facebook. And if you want a research-based, easy-to-follow system for helping EVERY reader get bigger results, join The Reading Roadmap! It’s where I go all in and give you the proven tools and strategies that are helping thousands of students learn to read. You’ll get absolutely everything you need in one go-to spot. The post What is the Science of Reading? appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/what-is-the-science-of-reading/
0 Comments
What better way to practice the alphabet than through a fun game!? These alphabet bingo games will be a huge hit in your classroom as an entire class game, center or morning work! These fun alphabet bingo games are yours when become a VIP Plato Pack Member! ![]() Getting ReadyFirst up is our single-player beginning sound bingo! It’s perfect for kindergarteners and beginning first graders. Prep is simple and easy. Print the cards and bingo board on cardstock and laminate for extra durability. Cut apart the cards and grab a basket of cover ups (mini erasers, LEGOS, unifix cubes, etc.) That’s it – you’re done! Beginning Sound Bingo GameTo play this alphabet game, students flip over one apple at a time. They say the word out loud and then cover up the beginning sound on their bingo board. Play continues until all of the spots on their bingo board are filled! ![]() Letter Matching Bingo GameThis alphabet game is perfect for pre-K and kindergarten! And, as always, prep is simple. Print the cards and bingo board on cardstock and laminate for extra durability. Cut apart the cards and grab a basket of cover ups (mini erasers, LEGOS, unifix cubes, etc.) Students will flip over one apple at at time. They read the letter and then cover up the matching lowercase letter on their bingo board. Play continues until all of the spots on their board have been filled. These alphabet bingo games will bring both fun and learning to your classroom this year! As a bonus, it’s always fun to find new alphabet and phonics activities all kids (and teachers!) can enjoy. ![]() Join The Plato PackExcited to get your hands on these fun bingo games?! Hop over to become a Plato Pack member and join THE most valuable membership for pre-K, kindergarten and first grade teachers! The post Alphabet Bingo Games appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/alphabet-bingo-games/ Do you have any students who know ALL of the letter sounds but, when it comes time to blend those sounds together to read a word, they STILL struggle? This will help! A lot of times readers just need to practice something called phonemic awareness and this playful pop it center is a super fun way to practice it. Snag your set below and then join the waitlist for my 4-week teacher training called The Reading Roadmap so you can get my easy-to-use system for reaching EVERY reader in class. ![]() What is Phonemic Awareness?Phonemic awareness is just a fancy way of saying “HEARING the sounds in words”. For instance, the word dog has three sounds: /d/ /o/ /g/ And so does the word rain: /r/ /ai/ /n/. Notice that the word rain has THREE sounds but FOUR letters. When you’re practicing phonemic awareness, you’re only focusing on the sounds in words – NOT the spelling. Let’s try a couple just for fun! How many sounds are in the word pie? ![]() ANSWER: Two! Even though we know that pie has three letters when we spell it, the word only has two sounds: /p/ /ie/ Let’s do one more! How many sounds are in the word robot? ANSWER: Five! In this case, the number of sounds matches the number of letters: /r/ /o/ /b/ /o/ /t/ Phonemic Awareness Pop ItsIf students are struggling to take the individual letter sounds they read and blend them together to make words, it’s likely that their phonemic awareness is weak. And you know the best way to strengthen a skill is to practice it so I pulled together a batch of these motivating phonemic awareness pop its for you! ![]() Just print the cards, slide them through the laminator for extra durability, and cut along the lines to separate the pieces. Then grab your stash of pop its. (Some Dollar Stores even have enough to make a class set!) Students will grab one card at a time, say the word out loud, and then pop each sound they hear. Remember, they are listening for the sounds, not focusing on the spelling quite yet. Being able to hear SOUNDS now will help them read and spell WORDS later. Snag Your SetClick the blue download button below and then hop over and request an invite to my 4 week course, The Reading Roadmap, so you can get everything you need to reach ALL of the readers in your class. The post Phonemic Awareness Pop Its appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/phonemic-awareness-pop-its/ We love sight word games and these printable sight word targets rank at the top of our must-try list. Kids love aiming, hitting, reading and writing their word lists. The activity is great to use as a literacy center, word work practice or homeschool activity. Grab your free copy below and, if you need an editable version you can tweak to practice your own word list, hop over and snag all of our Editable Sight Words Games all in one spot! Getting ReadyTo prep, I printed the targets (below) on cardstock to give them extra durability. I cut along the grey lines to separate the squares and then taped them up on the wall. (Note: If you’ll be using the game in a classroom, you may want to laminate the cards for reuse.) I grabbed my boys’ plastic bow and arrow and a couple of pencils they could use to write their words on the record sheet. We were all set for this super fun sight word game! Sight Word TargetsThe boys couldn’t wait to play the sight word game. Big Brother (age 6) went first. He picked a target, read the word out loud and then launched his arrow to try and shoot it. “This,” Big Brother read. He pulled back his bowstring and shot the arrow straight ahead. Direct hit! He grabbed his pencil and spelled “this” next to number one on his record sheet. Then, it was Middle Brother’s turn to read, launch and record. The boys loved the challenge of trying to shoot the targets and I loved that they were having fun reading and writing sight words. The set included the following 18 words: are, can, the, this, and, how, to, you, like, be, see, me, my, our, no, yes, for, from Grab Your CopyReady to play?! Click the blue button below to grab your free Sight Word Targets. (You can pick up an editable version of the game in our mega pack of EDITABLE Sight Word Games!) The post Sight Word Targets appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/sight-word-targets/ LEGO fans will love these playful addition and subtraction game boards. They’re a motivating way to work on addition to five, subtraction within five and practicing addition and subtraction at the same time. Grab your free set (below) and then hop over to join The Plato Pack so you can get instant access to ALL of our LEGO centers!
To prep this fun addition and subtraction game, I printed the LEGO game boards on cardstock to give them extra durability. Then, I grabbed a die and our stash of LEGO bricks. (Each child needed at least 30 LEGO bricks and a LEGO person to use as her playing piece.) Three VersionsThere are three versions of the game to make it easy for kids to practice a variety of skills: addition to five, subtraction within five and both. Addition to Five GameTo practice addition to five, each player starts with zero bricks. He rolls the die and moves his game piece that many spaces on his board. Then, he reads the addition problem he lands on and adds that many bricks to his tower. The player with the most bricks in her stack at the end is the winner! Subtraction within Five GameIf you’re in more of a take away kind of mood, kids can work on subtraction within five instead. To play, each player starts with a tower of 25 bricks. The first player rolls the die, moves his game piece that many spaces and takes off the number of bricks written on the space. The player with the fewest bricks when all players have reached the end wins. Addition and Subtraction GameAnd finally, to work on both operations at once, players start with a tower of 10 bricks. Player One rolls the die, moves her game piece and either adds or subtracts the number of LEGOs written on the space from her stack. The player with the most bricks when all players have reached the end wins the game. Grab Your DownloadReady to play?! Click the blue download button below to grab your free LEGO games and then hop over to join The Plato Pack so you can get ALL of our LEGO centers in one spot! The post LEGO Addition and Subtraction appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/lego-addition-and-subtraction/ Learning letter sounds is important for both reading and writing, but some letters of the alphabet are trickier than others and make not one but TWO sounds! G is one of those letters. These free little reader books and rhyme help kids learn more about soft G sounds (as in giraffe) and hard G sounds (as in goat). For more little reader books, try our Emergent Readers Bundle in our shop! Getting ReadyWe downloaded the hard and soft G printable (below). Then, we printed off the color rhyme page, laminated it and attached it to the front door of a cupboard where it could be clearly seen. The children wanted to color their own books so we printed off black and white versions and the children folded them carefully into books. They just needed a little help to cut one slit in the middle of the paper. (The instructions included in the download show you the step-by-step of assembly.) Learning the Hard and Soft GTo start off, we read a children’s book together that contained soft and hard G’s and discussed the two sounds. Then, we learned the rhyme and looked through some favorite books together to see if the rhyme was true and how often it was not. In front of y or i or e, g is soft like energy.* In front of a or u or o (or other letters, so you know), G is hard like grin and go. *There are exceptions to the soft rule, for example: gecko, gift, girl, give, gnome, tiger … After finding the word “girl” a few times, the children realized that the rhyme was more like a general guide rather than a hard and fast rule. So when they found a G followed by Y, I or E, they’d sound the word out both ways to decide which one sounded correct as a double check! Reading the Hard and Soft GEach child then colored either the soft G or hard G little book and read through it to check the words. They used different colored pencils to circle the letter following each G and referred back to the poster to double check whether it fit into the rules of the rhyme correctly. They then swapped books so they’d read through both. The following day they colored the third little book containing hard and soft G sentences and used highlighters to mark the letter after each G before they read through the book. It was a great way to help children become aware of how letters work together to influence sounds. After reading through the book they went through it again underlining all the words with hard G’s and circling all the words with soft G’s. They also paired up and read through all the books again with their reading partner. Grab Your DownloadReady to practice hard and soft G too?! Click the blue download button below to grab your little reader books and poster and then hope over to our shop and check out our Emergent Readers Bundle! The post Hard and Soft G Little Reader Books appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/hard-and-soft-g-letter-sounds/ Sight word games are a fun way to help kids memorize the most common words in written text. Cookie Word Bake takes the fun to a whole new level of sugary awesomeness. Kids love “baking” sight word cookies so much that they don’t even realize they’re learning the the first 48 kindergarten Dolch words. Snag your free game below and then hop over and grab 14 more board games for your collection in our shop! This post contains Amazon affiliate links. Getting ReadyTo prep, I printed each of the four game boards and the cookie sight words on cardstock paper to give them extra strength. Then, I cut out each cookie sight word and laminated the set so it would hold up to plenty of play. A little bit of prep work was worth it to have a game that could be played over and over again as we practiced learning these important words. I placed a game board in front of each chair where the players would be sitting and placed a cup in the middle to hold the individual cookie cards the kids would be drawing from. I made sure to select a cup that wasn’t clear so that players could not see through it. I mixed up the cookie cards and placed them upside down in the cup so that players were drawing cards from the pile randomly. Cookie Sight Word GameTo play this sight word game, the players took turns drawing one cookie sight word card, reading the word aloud and looking for a match on their baking sheet game board. If they had a match, they got to keep the cookie and the game went on to the next player’s turn. If they didn’t have a match, they returned the cookie to the center cup and it became the next player’s turn. The game continued until one player had filled their entire cookie baking sheet with matching words. Additional TipsThere are four separate baking sheet game boards each with 12 unique sight words. Between all four boards, there are a total of 48 cookie cards. I would suggest removing cookie cards from the cup that match unused baking sheet game boards if you are playing with fewer than four players. Additionally, if you want to speed up game play, you can allow the players to draw three cookie cards during their turn, instead of one. Oh, and eating real baked cookies for dessert after game play are optional but highly recommended. Grab Your CopyReady to play?! Snag your free game below and then hop over and grab 14 more board games for your collection in our shop! The post Cookie Sight Word Game appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/cookie-sight-word-game/ Will the red, green, or yellow apple reach the top first?! This playful apple race math game has kids graphing, counting and comparing – important early math skills. It’s perfect to use as a math station, homeschool activity or morning work. If you’re looking for more ideas to add to your math station, check out our Number Formation Pack in our shop! Getting ReadyTo prepare this math game, I first printed the game board (found at the end of this post) on cardstock. I chose to laminate the game board for durability and easy reuse, however I could have also put the game board in a plastic page protector. Then, I grabbed a pencil and paper clip to use for our apple spinner and red, green and yellow pom poms to use as manipulatives. A dry erase marker, dry erase crayon or other math manipulative are a great alternative. Apple Race Math GameTo play Apple Race, kids placed a paper clip on the inside of the apple spinner and put the point of their pencil on the center of the spinner. They flicked the clip with their fingers to make it spin and marked the corresponding apple color on their graph. Kids continued spinning until one color reached the top of their graph first. I just loved that there were so many opportunities for kids to talk about math while playing this game. Some of the ways students discussed math while playing Apple Race included:
Cleaning up this game was super easy because we just cleared the pom poms off the game board and played again! Grab Your DownloadReady to have some Apple Race Math Game fun?! Just click the blue button to grab your free copy of the game and then hop over and snag our Number Formation Pack, too! The post Apple Race Math Game appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/apple-race-math-game/ Catch some waves with this fun sight words matching activity! These sight word cards are a great way to add some fun to your literacy centers and word work time. They’re the perfect addition to our Editable Word Work Board Games! Getting ReadyThis activity was super quick and easy to prep! I just printed the five pages on cardstock and cut along the black lines. I used a paper cutter to cut them out super quickly and, to make the cards more durable, I laminated them, too. Surfing for Sight WordsTo start the sight words activity, we spread the cards out on a table, separating the surfer guy cards from the surfboard cards. I gave Middle Sister (preschool) a stack of three surfers to start. She is just beginning to memorize the words, so we focused on just a few so it wouldn’t be overwhelming. For Big Sister (first grade), on the other hand, I gave her a bigger pile with all ten words since she has most of them down already. Each girl chose one of her surfer cards and put it on the left-hand side of her work space. Then, she went through the surf board cards and read each one out loud. Each time she came across a surfboard that matched the surfer, she moved it next to him. The girls read their way through the surfboard cards until they’d found all three boards and completed their set. Then, they grabbed the next surfer in their stack and started again! The simple sight word activity was such a fun way to practice reading sight words. Grab Your SetWant to add the match up to your word work center or sight word game stash?! Click the blue download button to grab your free set and then hop over and snag our best-selling Editable Board Games too! The post Surfing For Sight Words Activity appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/surfing-sight-words/ If your kids are learning about the magic e, you’ll love this game and bonus worksheet! As kids race to find their magic treasure, they practice reading ordinary CVC words plus their magical pairs – words that have a silent e at the end that makes the vowel say its name. These magic e activities are sure to be a hit. And for more word practice, check out our Vowel Team Centers in our shop! This post contains Amazon affiliate links. Teaching the Magic EI like tuning kids into the magic e concept with You Tube songs. “The Magic e Song” is useful for teaching kids how the e makes the short sounds long. The “Silent e Song” provides a great visual of how magic e works, too. After that, it’s time for the magic e activities! We use a magic E wand to change words like “can” into “cane” and play rounds of bingo to practice reading them. Magic E Treasure HuntTo prep the game, I print the gameboard on cardstock to make it extra durable and laminated it for easy reuse. It’s a two player game, so all the kids needed was a game board, counters (dried beans or coins work well) and a die. The magic e game contains CVC words that change into new words when the magic e is added. We played it two ways. The first way involved the kids rolling the die, moving their counter and using a game recording to sheet to write the words they landed on. To play the other way, kids said the word they landed on and stated if it had a short or long vowel sound. For instance, when one child landed on the word “rat”, she read the word and then excitedly announced, “That has a short vowel sound because it doesn’t say its name!” Magic E WorksheetsAfter the class played the game, kids had a go at writing the magic e words using a batch of kid-friendly worksheets. They focused on applying the magic e rule by looking at the picture and writing the missing long vowel sound a-e, i-e, o-e or u-e. Grab Your CopyReady to play these magic e activities?! Click the blue button below to grab your free copy and then hop over and snag our Vowel Team Centers, too! The post Magic E Activities appeared first on Playdough To Plato. via Playdough To Plato https://www.playdoughtoplato.com/magic-e-activities/ |
ABOUT MEHi, I am Aida Turner from Brampton. I am 30 years old and I am a school teacher by profession. I love my profession. I spend mostly free time in searching different teaching methods for kids. Archives
February 2023
Categories |