Category: Language Arts

12 Ways to Help Struggling Readers

So, you have some kiddos that read effortlessly and a couple that just can’t “take off”. What to do? In this post, I’ve listed 12 steps to help striving (struggling) readers make progress. Read on. First of all, you have to figure out what your student already knows and doesn’t

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Teach Phonemic Awareness With No Teacher Tears

What is Phonemic Awareness? You may have heard that phonemic awareness is an essential building block for reading, but aren’t sure why. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes (the smallest units of spoken language).  It is the primary predictor of early reading and spelling skills

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Boom Cards Digital Resouces are Easy to Master

You may have already jumped on the digital resources bandwagon and used Google Classroom? Maybe you’ve also heard of a digital resource called Boom Cards?  Well, Boom Cards are digital task cards in an educational game format. Along with being no prep for teachers and self-checking, they are also FUN

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Tech Increases Student Engagement

It is a fact. When learning is turned into a game format, students learn more. One of the reason is student engagement. Oddly enough, failure in the classroom is often seen as failure. Right? Still, many experts estimate that gamers spend up to 80% of their time failing…. yet they

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Use Word Study to Teach Reading

Okay, full disclosure, I’m kind of a word geek. Not the kind of geek that knows every definition of rarely heard words. I’m a word study geek. First of all, I love spelling generalizations! I’m not referring to spelling “RULES”. You and I both know that many English rules are

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Progress Monitoring and Digital Data Collection

If you haven’t utilized Boom Cards for data collection and progress monitoring, you need to! There are so many digital apps you can use with your students, but most don’t keep records for formative assessment and data collection. My suggestion-  do what so many teachers are doing (including myself) –

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Boom Cards Make Life Easy!

[social_warfare]Boom Cards. Ever heard of them? Maybe you’ve heard of them and have no clue what all of the fuss is about. Well, let me tell you! They are the BEST. What if you had No Prep to do? What if all of you student’s work checked itself? What if

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1 Easy Way To Rock Phonics and Reading Skills

As a teacher, you already know that the primary focus of phonics instruction is to help readers understand how letters are linked to sounds (called phonemes). Pretty easy on a basic level, right? We need to build strong phonics skills in order to create strong reading skills.   As a

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Have you heard about BOOM Cards?

Task cards have been around for quite some time, but there is a new twist on task cards that have people all abuzz. They are called Boom Cards, and some might say they are the greatest thing since sliced bread! Boom Cards are paperless, digital task cards ranging from elementary to

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How to turn Reading Struggles into Reading Success

This 4 page Reading Strategies: Context Clues Guide will save you time and stress.