In the last few years, it’s become really clear that phonological awareness skills are important for reading success. But if you’re anything like me, you didn’t learn about it in your teacher preparation classes. The importance of phonological awareness really hit home for me in the fall when my daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia and dysgraphia. She could read okay, but she could not spell simple words like “fix” as a 2nd grader. When the neuropsychologist presented the results, we found my … [Read more...]
7 Tools for Teaching the Alphabet
Learning the alphabet is an important step in teaching children to read. Singing the ABCs and reading alphabet books is a good start for this, but there are also some great teaching tools I've used to teach my children the alphabet. Today, I'm sharing with you my favorite tools for teaching the alphabet. This post contains affiliate links. See my disclosure for details. Here are 7 Tools for Teaching the Alphabet 1. Tactile Sandpaper Letters I love using sandpaper letters to introduce … [Read more...]
Teaching Preschoolers How to Pick Out Books Independently
This is an all too familiar scene for us...we are at the library and I tell the kiddos to pick out books. My two preschoolers head over to the book section and grab a handful of 5 books and toss them in a pile and head somewhere else. Great. They hardly looked at them before dumping them in our book pile! Since I'm usually busy keeping my baby happy, I only get a quick glance at what they picked out. We check them out and when we get home to read the books we sometimes find that the books are … [Read more...]
8 Things to Teach After the Alphabet
Have you ever felt stuck on what to teach your child after the alphabet? Your child knows the letters and sounds, but what comes next? How do they go from the ABCs to reading? I get asked this question frequently, so today, I'm sharing 8 things to teach after your child knows the alphabet. To know if your child is ready to move on from the alphabet, you can do a quick assessment. Mix up alphabet letters and point to one. Have your child recite the letter name sound. It's one thing for a … [Read more...]
