How to Teach Kindergarten Reading Lessons Online (in a way that aligns with the Science of Reading)

This week - we want to be honest about transitioning students from in-person lessons to online lessons. 

We have seen students online for several years now (since we started in this field). When COVID-19 forced us to transition to fully remote intervention, we were already pretty comfortable with it, and we were lucky to say that for some of our students, the transition to online learning was easy. 

However, we had always set an age recommendation for online sessions. NEVER did we think that we would be transitioning our Kindergarten intervention students into online sessions, but, as we are sure many of you can relate to, we needed to make the transition and it needed to happen quickly.

This week, we wanted to talk about some of our tips for teaching Kindergarten reading lessons online and walk you through how we have been making it work.

1. Split the lesson into pieces.

We usually see our students for an hour at a time in our clinic. When we work with our young kiddos in person, this is typically an acceptable amount of time as we can have them stand at the whiteboard or play games to keep them engaged.  However, in an online session, an hour was simply way too long to ask our Kindergarten students to pay attention. Instead, we have broken the lesson into two, half-hour sessions. Depending on if you are in a 1:1, small group, or full-class setting, this may need to look different. Use your judgment as the instructor to determine what is best for your students.

In every lesson we complete, we want to make sure we are targeting phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, comprehension, and writing. Our online kindergarten sessions are no different, though we may need to split these components into multiple sessions.

2. Make it interactive

The more interactive you can make your lessons, the more engaged your students will be.  We love using interactive games and lesson pieces that can move to keep their attention. 

Check out the video below to see how we make our virtual phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, comprehension, writing, and sight word instruction interactive for our youngest students.

3. Be honest with families

Online learning can be difficult for our kindergarten students. These suggestions and supports can help make it easier, but be honest with families and let them know if things are not working. It may be that the student needs additional home practice to make skills stick from week to week, or, it may be that they need more frequent (but shorter in length) sessions.  Again, use your judgment to see what is or is not working and be open with the families about it.

So…how do I get started with Science of Reading-based online Kindergarten reading instruction?

If you are looking to learn more about implementing effective, SOR-aligned reading instruction for your Kindergarteners (whether you’re seeing them online or in person!) there are a few key components that you’ll need to include in your lessons. We’ve put these into our Science of Reading Blueprint so that you can be confident your instruction aligns with the research and includes all of the necessary pieces.