How to Use 1 Reading Activity to Target 5 Literacy Skills

Have you ever felt overwhelmed when looking for activities to support ALL of the different literacy skills? 

With so many factors contributing to effective reading and writing, it can be a challenge to add activities to support each skill individually. 

Luckily - planning literacy lessons that support ALL of the necessary skills doesn’t have to be hard!

Instead of pulling different activities for every skill, we like to maximize the use we get out of each activity!

Today, we want to share with you how you can use one reading activity to support multiple literacy skills. 

In our lessons, we often use a word list or a game to practice word reading. We can use these same words to support many skills in addition to decoding. As you read through the following activity ideas, know that we don't complete ALL of the additional activities with every student or group. Instead, we pick the ones that align with the areas where students need the most support so that we can target our instruction to best fit their needs. 

1. Orthography 

Orthography refers to the "visual" component of our language. Students must be able to look at letters and understand what they represent. This is something that comes easily for some, and not so easily for others. 

When introducing a new phonics pattern, we like to have students highlight the pattern in their words. This helps draw their eye to it and supports their orthographic recognition. If your students struggle with specific patterns (like b/d/p/q) you can have them identify these as well. You might say "Bump your Bs," or "Highlight the words with the letter b."

2. Phonological Awareness

There are a few ways you can target PA within a word list. We want students to blend their syllables and sounds as a part of their decoding process. Additional PA skills you can target include…

• Rhyme Discrimination - Find all of the words that rhyme with _________. 

• Rhyme Production - Pick a word from the list. Can you tell me a new word that rhymes with that word?

• Phoneme Manipulation - If we change the first sound of this word to ___, what new word does it make? 

• Phoneme Deletion - If we delete the ____ sound from this word, what do we get?

3. Vocabulary 

One of the easiest ways to incorporate vocabulary instruction into your lessons is to use the words your students are decoding! Some questions you can ask are…

• Find me all of the nouns/verbs/adjectives.

• Box the words with a prefix/suffix.

• Can you find me the word on this list that means ___________?

• Which word from this list is a synonym/antonym of _____________?

• Which words are nonsense words?

• Do any of these words have more than one meaning?

• Can you use two of these words in a sentence?

You can also turn this into a game! Pick a word from your list and define it for your student. Have them guess which word you were describing. Then, have them pick a word and define it for you. You have to guess which word they picked. 

4. Executive Functioning 

To support students' executive functioning and overall metacognitive abilities, have them identify any words they don't know (either how to read or what they mean). This allows you to support their decoding and vocabulary as well. 

5. Writing 

After reading the words, you can target writing by having students…

• Spell the words (you can read them to the students, they shouldn't see the words when spelling)

• Use their words in sentences 

• Pick a word to write a paragraph about

• Complete a writing game! One student picks a word from the list and uses it in a sentence. The next student has to continue the story using the next word in another sentence. Keep working through this pattern until all students have gone (or go back and forth if there are only two students) or until you can’t continue the story.

The bottom line -

By using one activity in multiple ways, we can better target our instruction without needing to find hundreds of different activities to support all of these different skills. This allows our instruction to be more effective while also saving time. Talk about a win-win!  

For more tips & tricks that you can use in your literacy instruction, grab our FREE Science of Reading Blueprint Bundle below!