Life in the Resource Room

Consonant Blends Once students have mastered CVC words (or have at least 85% accuracy), you can move on to consonant blends.  Remember to only focus on 2-3 sounds at a time when starting out. Video Example Example Consonant Blending Chaining Activity: stick flick click slick slack black flack clack clock block flock I have created printables of word-parts tiles.    These include  individual letters ,  digraphs and consonant blends ,  word families  and  ending sounds . These can be printed and cut apart to make manipulatives to aid in phonics instruction.    The tiles are color coded to help you and your student differentiate the different word parts.    It is important to only work with a few at a time.

CVC Words are consonant-vowel-consonant words such as cat and dog.  When working on CVC words with students, I usually do “chaining” activities where I call out words where I am just changing one sound from the previous words.  If a student is still working on vowel sounds, I will usually just use one or two vowel sounds so that they can distinguish between the two.  As they become more proficient, I add another vowel, and so on.  Keep two things in mind when doing phonics practice.  1 st , make sure the student is always working in the reading direction (left to right).  I use an arrow to remind them.  2 nd , it is extremely common for students at this level to mix up the b and d.  They  know  the sounds, but it is really hard to tell the letters apart.  I hold up both thumbs and remind them of /b/ /d/ rule and then they usually figure it out.  Also, don’t allow them to struggl...

Fluency is a term used to describe how well a reader reads.   There are a few different aspects to being a fluent reader.   At the earliest levels, fluency has to do with how smoothly a student reads and how well they use inflection in their reading.   As they become more proficient, generally by about second grade, we start to measure fluency as how many words they can read correctly in one minute. Fluency is important because unless we are reading with fluency, we will not understand what we are reading.   How many times have you been reading something that includes words from a foreign language and you are busy trying to decipher the meaning of the words?   Or perhaps in a textbook in college?   We often have to go back and re-read materials if we were not able to read them fluently, because we missed the meaning of what we just read. In the Resource Room, we typically do not measure “fluency” the same way that the general education teachers do...

Reading Sage :   Free Resources from a Dyslexia Specialist Think Fluency :   Fluency passages you can download and use for free   Florida Center for Reading Research ·          Activities for phonemic awareness and phonics instruction ·          Activities for early readers ·          Activities for intermediate readers ·          Activities for more advanced readers http://www.sarahpowellphd.com/home.html   videos explaining how to teach concepts to struggling mathematicians (struggling in math) Building Math Fluency :   Free Video Series (for the month of April 2020) by Christina Tondevold www.buildmathminds.com  

This past year I have been in a literacy training class and I have learned a lot about helping my struggling readers.   There are many components that work together to create a good reader.   This is going to be a very generic overview of these components.   Being a good reader includes phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and language comprehension.   All of these components happen in different parts of the brain.   Regardless, how these components develop is still a developmental process.   We must help our students develop their brains in the right way in order for them to become good readers. Phonemic awareness has to do with the spoken language.   Phonemes are the individual sounds within our words.   For example, the word cat has 3 phonemes.   We hear a /k/, / ӑ /, and /t/.   One of the things that makes learning to read and write English is that we have many ways to represent some phonemes.   Some are fairly...

There are several pieces to our Guided Reading program in the Resource Classroom.   First, we practice what we call “tricky words.”   There is nothing magical about this, but it is vital.   These are simply high-frequency words.   Everything we read is comprised mostly of high-frequency words, which is why we pay a lot of attention to these in the early stages of reading.   I use the Fry Words Lists to generate my materials.   However, you can use any high-frequency words list.   A great resource is www.sightwords.com which offers several of the most well-known lists and activities. To save you time, however, I am providing links to the specific materials I have created to use in my classroom.   For each hundred words, I have created four sets of flashcards.   The first flashcard in each set has a code on it.   The first number represents the set of hundred (First Hundred, Second Hundred, and Third Hundred).   The second num...

One of the hardest things to “teach” is “comprehension.”  Many of my students get “stuck” on a reading level because they can’t make connections and infer meaning while reading. Some of them can decode really well, but they cannot figure out those implied meanings that they are supposed to magically “know.”   What I have come to realize is that some of these particular students just don’t have the language and/or life experiences to connect to. For these students, I would really like t see them broaden their horizons. With this in mind, I have come up with a list of movies they can watch while stuck at home.  Netflix      Chitty Chitty Bang Bang      Benji       Chicken Little Amazon Prime      The Miracle Worker      Little Princess      Charlotte’s Web      The Borrowers      Chitty Chitty Bang Bang       Disney +     ...

Like many other teachers across the United States, I am now teaching my students “digitally.”  It is interesting, because we teachers have long resisted the idea of having video cameras in our classrooms, but this is now our new “normal.”  The video camera isn’t just inside my classroom, it’s inside my home. I have turned my sewing/crafting area into a “virtual classroom” in order to teach my struggling students. I’ve decided to share my journey in hopes of helping other teachers and parents teach and reinforce skills.