In this International Dyslexia Association Perspectives article, Kate Cain explores the topic of reading comprehension and how language skills develop. The article explains how vocabulary acquisition, understanding of sentence structure and how sentences work together, the ability to infer and integrate information, and building a mental model of the text’s meaning while you are reading…
In this International Dyslexia Association Perspectives article, authors Jane Oakhill and Kate Cain explore the factors supporting reading comprehension beyond basic decoding and suggest critical skills that should form the core of literacy instruction and interventions to support poor reading comprehension. The article outlines which skills are critical, such as teaching specific vocabulary words, how to…
Curious about how sounds are represented in print? Not sure about what the most common spelling is for a phoneme? This handout provides the most frequent spellings for the vowel phonemes in English.
Wanting to up your read aloud game? This lesson plan from Dr. Stephanie Stollar will support you in maximizing vocabulary and comprehension in your read alouds.
Contrary to popular belief, students should not be taught to memorize irregular words by sight. In most irregular words, only one or two letters do not conform to their usual sound correspondence. This means that most irregular words are at least partially decodable. This is a printable collection of irregular word cards.
What if you only had to teach 20 sight words from the Dolch list? Guess what? You can–because the other 200 words are completely decodable.
Often, high-frequency words are called “sight words” with the expectation that these words are irregular and must be memorized. Integrating high-frequency words into phonics lessons allows students to make sense of spelling patterns for these words. To do this, high-frequency words need to be categorized according to whether they are spelled entirely regularly or not….
Elkonin boxes build phonemic awareness skills by segmenting words into individual sounds, or phonemes. To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme. In some cases different colored tokens may be used for consonants and vowels or just for each phoneme in…
In this PaTTAN webinar, Michael Hunter outlines a flexible strategy for reading and spelling multisyllabic words. Students identify the vowels in words to determine the number of syllables and where to break the word.
In this video, Linda Farrell demonstrates a lesson focused on teaching a flexible strategy for decoding multisyllabic words.
Linda Farrell explains the process readers go through when they decode new multisyllabic reading. In the video, she highlights set for variability, where a reader flexes sounds to adjust close approximations.
Linda Farrell highlights an instructional approach to teaching multisyllable words with silent “e” and vowel teams in this brief video.
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