Strategies for Teaching and Learning
The essential guide below provides you with effective techniques to help your learner develop automaticity, fluency, and confidence in their reading abilities. Discover the power of highlighting, the benefits of flashcards, and the pros and cons of timing students. Explore scientifically-backed study practices, quick strategies for breaking down unknown words, and the importance of maintaining 95% accuracy. Equip yourself with the tools and strategies to support your learner’s journey to reading success.
Directions for resources
From slideshows to assembling small books these directions will help you unlock the full potential of our teaching aids.
Customizable Resources
Customize these resources to focus on exactly what your learner needs!
Reference Posters and Visuals
These unique visuals go along with our stories and teaching materials. They help learners organize, understand and remember essential reading skills.
Boost Motivation with the Power of 'Yet'
We tend to believe what we tell ourselves, so encourage your learners to use positive phrasing. Instead of “I am dumb,” or “I can’t do this” say “I can’t do this yet.” Yet is a powerful word as it acknowledges the current situation while at the same time opens the idea that this can and will change.
Highlighting Wordlists
Highlighting helps our brains recognize, identify and remember unique letter combinations. As we build reading skills we need to take the time to become automatic with these skills and highlighting helps.
Automaticity – Flashing Words
Using this Flashing technique on shorter words helps strengthen visualization and improve automaticity. It is especially helpful in moving learners from sounding out letter by letter to making mental images of words in their minds and being able to say whole words together. Being automatic with the skills within reading is critical to becoming a fluent reader.
Working on New Words (or Sounds) With Flashcards
It is important to continue to practice known words occasionally, and only introduce a few new words or chunks at a time. It is also most effective to space practice out, practicing multiple times each day for just a few minutes at a time.
Timing Students: including using Word and Phrase Lists with numbers down the side.
Timing for speed is not effective with every student, but is very effective for some. Read for directions and for the pros and cons of timing students.
Effective Study Practices
Learn the most effective research backed study practices to learn these skills!
Map Sounds to Words
Map the sounds in the word to the letter(s) representing the sounds, even if it is not a letter combination that has been taught yet. Only an unusual sound/letter combination needs to be remembered “by heart ♥️.” Mapping the sounds to the letters is how we remember what words look like. See example below:
Be sure to reinforce what you know and are learning about words, for example:
Schwa Sound (Ə): Any vowel might say /ŭ/. Point out that this happens in many common words like: the, of, was, some, from…
Quick Strategy for Breaking Up Unknown Words
A good strategy to begin with when working on a long word!
General Syllabication Guidelines
The guidelines for breaking words into syllables.
95% Accuracy.
Learners who are 95 percent accurate with what they are working on learn more quickly, are more engaged, and build automaticity. Use this site (or other resources) to work with materials that your learner is 95% accurate with, or use more difficult materials and support to where your learner is 95% accurate. By giving the necessary support your learner can focus on the things they are 95% accurate with. This might look like having your learner read a more challenging book to you and you whisper the difficult words when they come up.