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Calm down strategies for kids (and adults too!)

What To Do When a Student Refuses to Work

What To Do When a Student Refuses to Work Throughout my years teaching middle school, I have had the experience of seeing many "work refusals". These are the situations when kids, for a variety of reasons, just refuse to start the work you give them. They might shut down and rest their head on their desk or lash out in anger, shouting about

Powerful ways to Improve School Performance

Powerful Ways to Improve School Performance You can significantly improve your children's performance in school by following this powerful example

Prime and Composite Numbers

Reading Strategies for Teaching Struggling Readers

✨ Happy Sunday and welcome to part 4️⃣ of my series on supporting adolescent struggling readers! ✨

At grade five and beyond, students encounter 10,000 or more NEW words a year in their grade-level and content-area texts, and most of these words are multi-syllabic. 🤯 Adolescents with weak phonics skills lack effective strategies for decoding these longer words.

Struggling readers must be explicitly taught strategies on how to decode multi-syllabic words no matter what grade they’re in or how old they are. 🔡 They require instruction that includes👇

1️⃣ Phonological awareness - Very poor readers must have their phonological skills strengthened to the point of automaticity, most importantly to the advanced levels, such as manipulating phonemes.

2️⃣ Sound-symbol relationships - The English language contains 44 speech sounds, created from 26 letters. Readers must learn the sound(s) associated with each letter and letter combinations.

3️⃣ Syllabication - Most words adolescents come across when they read contain more than one syllable. Struggling readers need to learn about syllable division and determining syllable types. Many students learn how to break a word into syllables orally, but not how to divide the printed word.

4️⃣ Morphology - The ability to identify and understand meaningful units -base words, prefixes, suffixes, and roots is a critical part of reading and spelling complicated words. Using the meanings of word parts to determine the meaning of a multisyllabic word can open the doors to thousands of new words.

5️⃣ Etymology - Understanding the origin of a word is a very powerful aid to reading, shedding light on a word’s pronunciation, spelling, and its meaning. For example, knowing the Latin root script, meaning to write, can be helpful in dividing words like manuscript and transcript and in knowing that each has to do with writing. More than 60 percent of words in an English dictionary stem from Greek and Latin roots, and in science and technology, it is more like 90 percent!

6️⃣ Practice - Provide students many opportunities to practice using new or difficult words and reinforce correct pronunciation and usage.