This is another twist on traditional sound boxes, and it is MAGICAL, folks! All your students have to do is place color-coded Bingo chips onto each circle on the card. They should progress from green to yellow to red…from left to right. I recommend having them use a green Bingo chip for the initial sound, a yellow chip for the… View Post
Snap cubes are the perfect manipulative for segmenting and blending words because you can physically take them apart and put them back together. They make the process concrete and interactive! These CVC mats utilize color-coding to assist students as they build words. The sound boxes are made up of red and blue snap cubes to help students begin to distinguish… View Post
Students use sound boxes, or Elkonin boxes, to segment individual phonemes (sounds) in words by placing tokens into separate boxes. For the sake of directionality, these sound boxes utilize the colors of a stoplight to organize the sound boxes. Essentially, for the word “bat” a student would say /b/ /a/ /t/ as he/she placed a token onto the mat for… View Post
If I were a betting woman, I’d be willing to bet that you didn’t learn the word schema in school, especially as an intermediate student, but that’s exactly what I’m going to be advocating in this post: the explicit teaching of not only the word schema, but also the application of it in the classroom. So, what is it? What… View Post
Teaching students to ask and answer questions can be a daunting process, but it is necessary if we want our students to read proficiently at increasingly more sophisticated levels. I recently released a new edition of Concrete Comprehension: Questioning for Intermediate Learners. In this blog post, we’ll dig deeper into this important reading strategy. We’ll also dive into some concrete, hands-on activities… View Post