I am a first grade teacher. I am currently implementing leveled reading groups in my room. I have one group of students that are efficient first grade readers. The second group still cannot identify all their alphabet and sounds associated. I am prepared to advance my proficient students but I am having trouble finding strategies and activities that interest and educate my “lower” students properly. Any suggestions?
Teaching first graders to read.
Teaching phonics through spelling works extremely well for these lower students — and it doesn’t hurt the strong ones either. As a former first grade teacher, I learned to focus on the slow students and, by teaching spelling to the whole class, the top ones just soared. Please go to http://www.spellangtree.org/PerformanceData.htm and study the chart, particularly the lower section and the last two columns. Going from having 38 percent of students below grade level to having less that 10 percent below testifies to the effectiveness of spelling instruction on reading. :D
Re: Teaching Reading in First Grade
I have just posted
Beginning the alphabet and reading — long long how-to
here on the Teaching Reading page,
This is a detailed step-by-step teaching guide to getting a grip on helping the problem of the student who doesn’t know the alphabet.
The detailed guide is described for one-to-one tutoring, but it is easy to adapt to a small group.
Re: Teaching Reading in First Grade
I would use some method like Phonographix (or I would most likely recommend it’s offshoots) where you can use them in a small group. I think Janis uses an approach called ABeCeDeran, don’t think the guy has a website just yet. Victoria’s approach would also work nicely, prob. requires a bit more prep time than something that was already boxed up or any a book already. For young kids there is a nice uk book called Jolly Phonics. All pretty inexpensive. Most of these approaches, like Victoria’s, do not try and introduce all the sounds at a time.
I am really happy you want those kids to read!!!!!
—des
Yes! Tons of suggestions.
First of all, on the top of this page there is a section titled LD In Depth. Click on this button, then on Reading, and wallow in all sorts of fascinating stuff — I just got lost in there for three hours yesterday while looking up something for a friend …
The place to start that explains the background of *what works* is the National Reading Panel report titled Teaching Children to Read. If you haven’t yet read this, please, please for your students’ sake take the time and get into it seriously!
Second, I have saved up a bunch of posts I’ve made to this board answering questions like yours, answers to letters, and other thoughts, and I’m willing to share my how-to-teach/tutor-reading outline with anyone who asks. Recently I’ve included an outline of how I did this with a Grade 1 and 2 class, as well as other things. Please email a request to [email protected]
Thirdly, there are a lot of good people on this board and most people who ask get flooded with answers. Enjoy. Get back to me if you get confused and need help sorting through all of it.