TEACHING TUESDAY [08.22.23]
Welcome to Teaching Tuesday! If you are new here, I’m a former teacher, have a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction and am now a homeschool mom. You can read more about that journey here.
Every Tuesday I’m going to share an at home learning idea for preschool and elementary age kids, new curriculum resources and a freebie or two!
Automaticity is the ability to do something without thinking. For example, typing on a keyboard. As an adult I rarely have to think about the placement of my fingers on a keyboard to spell out words, but I didn’t come out of the womb knowing how to type. I played games on the computer as a child and in upper grades took keyboarding classes that took my typing skills from finger pecking to 70+ words per minute.
The same is with children and reading and this starts at a very young age. When children are able to automatically recall the name of a letter, then the sound of a letter, then the sounds of two letters put together they are going to be able to put all of those functions together more easily to read fluently.
In preschool/prekindergarten this could look like a stack of flash cards with upper case letters that you flip through each night. Start with 5 and add 5 more each week.
Once they’ve mastered the uppercase alphabet, add in the lowercase alphabet.
Once they’ve mastered both, play beat the timer. Set a timer for 2 minutes and see how many cards they say correctly. Keep repeating this game until they get all of the letters correct.
You can also do this practice with numbers, shapes, colors, etc.
As they move into kindergarten, they are beginning to learn sounds of letters and how letters and their sounds work together to make a word. Start back at the beginning with that stack of letter cards, except this time practice their sounds. Again, start with 5. Once they have mastered 5, add 5 more.
Once sounds are mastered, move on to short vowel word families (-at: cat, hat, bat; -an: can, van, man; -ad: dad, lad, mad).
This is also a good time to start adding in high frequency words. High frequency words are words that are most often seen in reading. They are also known to not follow a specific phonetic pattern, therefore are words that should be know automatically.
The photo above is from my son Jack’s “beat the timer” game. Every morning before starting any reading lessons, he plays beat the timer. We have a box set of 10 different levels of sight words and vocabulary. Once he beats the timer with a set consistently for a week or so, we let him move up to the next set. He loves to see how many seconds he can spare! This has made one of the BIGGEST differences in his reading ability. I’m going to link some of our favorite flash cards below!
Here are new resources that I’ve been working on this month!
