Use rhyming words and homophones in Number Stories or other read-aloud opportunities. Ex: Nat the cat bought 2 bats and 3 hats. He thought he ought (should) to give Pat the gnat 1 of each item he bought. How many bats and hats did he have left?

Define the words: "letter," "word," "phrase," "paragraph" and especially "sentence."

Ask scholars to define the words "each" and "a" as the number "1" or "every 1."
Ex: Skip a line.
Ex: Each year ...

Count out the number of words in your verbal response and prepare lines on your paper for that written response.

Get enough sleep, drink lots of water, drink less caffeine, speak less after 9:00pm, use a soft voice and body language to communicate with your scholars.

Practice singing the "abc's" when filling in letters for word families. Ex: "_op" becomes "bop," "cop," "drop" etc...
Reverse the word family. Ex: "bo_" becomes "bob," "bock," "bod" etc...

Explain the rules of the use of proper nouns. Ex: "They stood at the corner of park place and community." vs They stood at the corner of Park Place and Community.

Define abstract words right after reading them and have scholars write the definitions above the words and draw illustrations to understand them. Then provide the sentence starters:


Ex: How does the character change (become different from beginning to end)?
Ex: What is the point of view/opinion (how the author thinks/feels about something)?

Draw stick figures with thought bubbles to illustrate different feelings at the beginning and at the end.

"In the beginning (character/subject) (verb)...and at the end (character/subject) (verb)..."

When responding to a question about the author's purpose, give scholars possible verbs to express their thoughts.

Ex: to tell, to teach, to explain, to question, to convince, to show, to demonstrate, to reveal, to defend

Verbalize when you, the adult, makes a mistake and what you plan on doing to prevent it from happening again. Perhaps they can even help monitor your progress:)

When teaching sound blending, do it in 1 breath on 1 pitch, morphing the mouth into each sound, using your hand to visually illustrate the position of the mouth.

Underline/Circle nouns and verbs in a shared text. Ex: "I saw the saw by the seesaw. I want to saw the seesaw with my saw."

Dramatize, act out the characters' parts with different voices, slow down and paraphrase texts when reading aloud.

When asking scholars for the author's point of view, give scholars a word box with choices of adjectives.

Ex: He/She thinks it's scary, good, bad, sad, amazing, important, interesting etc...

Give directions using a melody.

Ask scholars to highlight/circle word families, vowel teams or words using the silent "e" in roots or shared texts.

Also beware of different fonts that might confuse a scholar's decoding.

When using pronouns (he, she, it, they, him, her, that them etc...), clarify that scholars know to whom or to what you are referring. Ex: "Lisa was very curious about Egyptian history. Her grandmother bought her a set of books entitled 'Links To The Past.' They were filled with pictures and facts about ancient times."

Number the verbs/commands in a written question.

Ex: "Count the number of cookies in the jars and draw a circle around the one with the largest amount. Write the number and units with the greatest amount of cookies in the box."

Use encouraging phrases and a loving smile, even when scholars respond incorrectly.

Prepare students that you are going to purposefully make mistakes while reading a text- either in grammar or context. Give them points for identifying the errors and for correcting them.

"She WALK to the STORED and BUYING the ice cream."

"The BABY was so tired, but rode his motorcycle all the way to Kansas anyway."

When reading longer, more complex words, have scholars underline the vowels or vowel teams to identify the number of syllables in each word.

When flipping the question, model the correct sentence starter and count the number of words expected on your finger and have them underline those number of spaces in their response sheets. Also, explain that the word "What" should not be the first word in the response. Ex: "What is the character's problem in the story?"

---- ----------------- --------------- --- ---- --------
--- ------- he/she (Verb)

Identify the roots in words.

Ex: Energetic-- Energized --Energy
Ex: Guardian--Safeguard--Guard

Reward self-advocacy. When a typically quiet scholar raises his/her hand to ask for clarification, reward the scholar and comment how important it is to ask questions and that even grownups don't know everything!

When scholars are unfocused, play "Simon Says " or blocks with multi-step directions.

Ex: Before touching your head, tap your left knee.
Ex: Make the red square go through the tunnel and over the blue triangle.