Learning With Our Littles

02/04/2023

TPT is hosting a February sale and my whole shop will be on sale at 20% from Feb. 7-8! Use code FEBSALE23 for an extra 5% off at checkout! What’s on your wishlist?!

                                           

10/28/2022

For my intermediate teacher friends - this is FREE! 🤯

Free, research based intervention materials targeting upper elementary multi-syllable word decoding and fluency!

Dr. Jessica Toste is a researcher at the University of Texas and studies reading intervention for kids in grades 3-5. She and her team use a researcher-created sequence of 40 lessons on big word decoding and fluency and just made them publicly available and user friendly!

The program, Word Connections, is already in the What Works Clearinghouse too!

- Program overview, scope and sequence, and evidence of effectiveness: https://www.jessicatoste.com/wordconnections

- What Works Clearinghouse page: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/study/89568

- Teacher manual, student materials, and appendices: https://figshare.com/collections/Word_Connections_A_Multisyllabic_Word_Reading_Program/6259368

Additional Study 1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222194211048405

Additional Study 2: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691684?casa_token=YJo047x6FUIAAAAA%3AvGr4XR495audboSJt9ecZyPJzBM6_lUjAv0bUyyffdfUsaSg-almy-EOMbtUr1W-qN9oHDWR0t0

08/28/2022

Last year I spent a good chunk of my time working with small groups of students. Quite a few of my groups were made up of struggling readers in 1st-3rd grade. I wanted to have a sound wall in my room, and created one using one of our students as our model. I can’t believe how much having out sound wall helped my students. They referenced it constantly and loved being able to “unlock” a new sound-spelling! I don’t know how I ever taught without one.

This year, I’m pulling fewer groups and spending most of my time in classrooms with teachers. I wanted to come up with a creative solution so that I could take my sound wall with me. Here’s what I came up with… a sound wall “mini wall”! I reduced the size of my sound wall to about 25% of the original size and it fit beautifully on a trifold 48x36” trifold! It looks a bit busy when it’s complete, but the beauty of this is the velcro dots on the back of each card, so I can customize the display for each class depending on what we’re targeting.

You know I'm a BIG fan of sound walls, but, a sound wall is only effective if it can be utilized by students. So many traditional sound walls take up a great amount of space so that students can use the resource from a distance. Sure, a large sound wall is ideal and worth every inch of wall space. However, there are so many teachers who want to have a sound wall, but it’s just not logistically possible for them. They’re intermediate teachers teaching intervention groups, teachers with limited wall space, traveling educators, teachers with other bulletin board requirements, etc. Here’s an option for those teachers!

This is going to be a great option for me for visiting classrooms and for professional learning sessions!

08/28/2022

Did you know?! TPT is hosting a bonus Back to School sale! My whole shop will be on sale at 20% off August 30-31! Use code BTSBONUS22 for an extra 5% off at checkout!

                                           

08/01/2022

Happy Back To School Sale time!!! My whole shop will be on sale at 20% off August 2-3! Use code BTS22 for an extra 5% off at checkout! What’s in your cart?!

                                           

07/31/2022

I am beyond thrilled to share this with you... this has been a labor of love over the last year and it's ready, just in time for long term planning for this school year! (And it's free!)

I know as you're beginning to dive deep into morphology, you want to know where to begin, especially as it's such a broad area of study and often not a strong focus in core curriculum. In this scope and sequence, I’ve done my best to answer those questions by referencing the recommendations given by experts on this topic.

I’ve identified the standards in the CCSS that relate to morphology instruction in two ways: (1) determining meaning of morphemes (2) decoding, encoding, and use of morphemes

I’ve broken everything into 3 levels: Level 1 (Kinder – 2nd grade), Level 2 (late 2nd – 3rd grade), and Level 3 (late 3rd – 5th grade). Each level provides:

💡 a description and examples of prefixes, suffixes, bases/roots
💡 grammar connections, spelling and phonics patterns, structures and trends that should be addressed within each level
💡 knowledge and performance targets students should be able to achieve by the end of each level to give you an idea of what to expect

I’m a total believer that the teacher in the classroom is the single most important factor in a child’s education, far more important than the curriculum placed in our hands! That’s why I’m so passionate about *investing in teachers*. While this scope and sequence is aligned to the Common Core State Standards, knowing your students will help you determine the best starting place for their instructional needs!

Check it out in my TPT!
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Morphology-K-5-Scope-and-Sequence-aligned-to-CCSS-8362454

                                             

07/26/2022

Are you gearing up for back to school?! (I know, touchy subject…)

Last year, improving my morphology instruction was a personal goal, and along the way I created a ton of supports that complemented the resources I use. I’ve been hard at work getting them updated and improving them for this next school year!

🍏Build Your Own Interactive Morphology Wall: This is a program-agnostic supplement meant to help you create a living document of your study of word parts (morphemes) and the relationships between words! It includes posters, terminology cards, and morpheme cards for prefixes, suffixes, free bases, Latin bases, and Greek bases.

🍏Morphology Notebook: You’ll find templates and terminology cards to add to your own notebooks to help your students organize their morphology study!

🍏Morpheme Word Lists: These lists were built for students to use to investigate the meaning of a morpheme by considering words containing that morpheme. For this reason, the meaning of each morpheme is *not* included on the list, but a teacher reference page is included that lists the morphemes and their meanings.

🍏Morpheme Card Game: This game is designed to allow your students to apply their learning by building words with morphemes they've studied. Game directions included as well as suggestions for differentiating for beginners and more advanced players.

🍏All of these resources are sold separately as well as in the Morphology Bundle!
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03/24/2022

When we teach the alphabet and the most common sound-spelling correspondences of each letter, students are most often introduced to the letter Y as representing the sound /y/. This is true, but soon after, students begin running into many words with the letter Y that do not follow this rule, leading to tons of unnecessary “exceptions”.

To compensate for it, we sometimes teach students that our vowels are “a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes Y”. Again, true. But‼️ Y acts as a vowel far more often than it acts as a consonant! Let's do the math… 🤓

In a 1966 study conducted by Hanna et. al, 17,310 of the words in the Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words were studied for phoneme-grapheme frequency. Check this out:

🧮 The grapheme Y appeared in these words 2188 times, and appeared in a vowel team an additional 258 times. Y appeared in 2,446 total of the 17,310 words studied.
🧮 Y represented a consonant sound in 53 of the 2,446 words, around 2.5%
🧮 Y represented a vowel (or was part of a vowel team) in 2,393 of those words, around 97.5% of those words!

Y acts as a the consonant sound /y/ only when it is the first letter in a word or syllable. Funny enough, the letter I (as in onion) represents the sound /y/ more often than Y does (about 55% of the time)!

In all other places within a word, Y acts as a vowel! Really makes me reconsider my use of the word “sometimes”!

03/23/2022

… and the winner of the 2022 SOR Book Bracket Challenge is…
🏆 “Uncovering the Logic of English” by Denise Eide!

Such a tight race, LOE just barely beat out Equipped! The two were neck-and-neck at nearly a 50/50 split until just before the end. I think that goes to show that it’s nearly impossible to pick the best one! There are so many incredible books to support your SOR journey!

This was a ton of fun, thanks for playing along! 🤓

03/22/2022

📘The FINAL 2 of the BOOK BRACKET CHALLENGE - SOR-Edition is posted! 📗

Head over to my story to vote for your favorite! The fan favorite will be announced tomorrow!! Such a hard choice!!

Let’s have a little March Madness fun… SOR-style!! 🤓