My son, AJ, is still learning his letters and and a great way to do this is to have him do a scavenger hunt when we are out driving around during the day.
Before you head out, make up a long list of various things your children are likely to see from the car (or bus or train) window. For example: a license plate beginning with the letter C, an old tire, a tow truck, an overpass, a city that is named after a woman, a McDonalds restaurant, a silo, and so on.
Give the children the long list to …read more

A blend, or a consonant cluster, is a group of consonants that stand together in a word such as cl, br, or st; there are no vowels between the two consonants.
Words, Words, Words- Consonant Blends and Digraphs, Triple Consonant Blends, Short Vowels, Long Vowels
Consonant Cluster Word Lists and worksheets

Supplementing reading at home is one of the most important things you can do as a parent. Here are 6 tips to help you supplement reading with your child.

Have your child read aloud every night.
When you are finished reading point out how to spell and sound out words and patterns.
Stop often while reading and ask your child to retell you what they read in their own words.
You can also ask your child to predict what will happen next.
Pause and ask questions to check for understanding.
If your child misses a word pause and help him or her through sounding it out.

Never heard of a phoneme, have you?
In the human language, a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound and is one of the MOST important aspects of learning to read because without learning how to isolate individual sounds a child can not learn to connect units of sound or isolate units within larger groups of sounds.
For example, isolated sounds are connected to written letter forms and children can easily match the same beginning or ending sounds (unless there are some learning disabilities like auditory processing).
Cat, bat, mat,
Note that phonemic awareness is auditory and does not involve words in print …read more

Why are Syllables important? Well, pronunciation. If you can’t properly divide the word into the correct syllables then you can’t pronounce the word correctly.
Take for example the word marry (as in, to marry someone).
1. ma-rry
2. mar-ry
In the first example the pronunciation is May-re but in the second it is mar-ee, which is correct.
Now, to learn how to find the number of syllables and to count them please head to this site on Syllable Rules (because I can’t summarize the entire thing without copyright issues).

Decoding is the ability to apply your knowledge of letter-sound relationships, including knowledge of letter patterns, to correctly pronounce written words. Understanding these relationships gives children the ability to recognize familiar words quickly and to figure out words they haven’t seen before. – Reading Rockets

If children can’t decode words then they can’t work their way effectively through increasingly harder texts. What happens then is that their frustration level rises and teachers and parents start seeing them struggle and fall behind. Comments like “I hate this” or “I can’t do this” start to become common place.
Decoding is the ability to read …read more

Making predictions does not come naturally to all of us but it is a necessary step to becoming a good and successful reader. To be able to predict means being able to use cause and effect and cognitive thinking skills.
When I was teaching middle school I would incorporate predictions into every reading log and students would predict at the end of each chapter or reading session, even if it was as simple as “the girl will go into the house”.
Another activity you can do is make predictions on what will happen in the story based just upon the title. This …read more

The technical definition of phonics refers to the instructional method of teaching kids to read because Phonics means teaching kids to connect the sounds of the language with letters or groups of letters. It also teaches them to blend the sounds of letters together.
So, when you hear the infamous term “Hooked on Phonics” it means that someone is hooked onto learning the connection of sounds.

A Cloze Worksheet is a fill in the blank reading passage that requires the reader to “cloze the gaps” where words have been taken out of the reading passages.
The learner/reader must use context clues to help him find the missing word in the reading passage. The cloze works not only on reading comprehension but also sight words and language mastery.
Cloze activities are used as testing and as daily activities.
It is used:

to …read more

Word Walls can be a wonderful in any classroom but they are extremely effective in lower elementary classrooms, especially when the word walls are interactive.
A Word Wall, by definition is a wall of working words within the classroom and all of the words are related in some way (sight words, action words, animals, etc).They are used to teach a language concept. A teacher may choose to have one large word wall and several smaller word walls which concentrate on different concepts (ie: history, geography, math).
Example of word wall cards from ABC Teach
Word Wall Resource Page including Activities, guidelines, and …read more