Is there anything better than a great read-aloud when developing early literacy skills?

We think not!

One of the questions we get often is, “How do I align my read-aloud with the Science of Reading?”

Keep reading to learn more!

Hi friends,

It’s that time of year again! The time of year where people are looking to show appreciation to the teachers in their lives. Instead of yet another gift card, get them something they really need this year!

This blog breaks down our TOP TEN teacher gifts your child’s teachers or your colleagues are SURE to love.

Have you ever thought to yourself - how in the world can I make this more engaging for my students?

If so, you are definitely not alone. Reading intervention is HARD for our students. We are asking them to complete tasks that have always felt difficult for them.

The good news - it’s easier than you might think to make lessons engaging for your students. Plus - when students are engaged, it’s more likely that they will learn the material. It’s a win-win!

Games are a great way to differentiate your lessons to target specific skills with your students. Every week, we take data to see where our students are growing, where they consistently do well, and where they need extra support. When we find these holes and gaps, we supplement with a review game to target tricky skills.

Today - we wanted to share some of the physical materials we’re finding helpful in keeping our online sessions engaging. Now, most of our students are doing AMAZINGLY well at adapting to the online space.

In online sessions, it is even more essential to review previously learned concepts in case any of the skills weren’t cemented completely. Week to week, we continue to track errors and look for error patterns. If specific skills need to be worked on, we note them and include them in upcoming lessons. One of our favorite ways to do this is playing games. Open to grab one of our free digital games!

How are your online lessons going? When we realized we would be seeing students exclusively online for the time being, we became determined to make our games digitally compatible. This week, we are bringing you one of our favorites and talking about how we can use screen control to keep students engaged in their sessions!

So we are bringing back the holiday phonological awareness cards because we LOVE the holidays. Hopefully, you can incorporate some holiday fun into your week leading up to the Winter Break.

This fun activity is meant to support syllable segmenting, phoneme segmenting, spelling, and written work.

We’ve learned that by turning simple reading tasks into games it will provide students with the repetition they need to see success. We try to turn EVERYTHING into games and you’d be surprised because even those of you with older students will see that they enjoy this “gamification” of instruction as well.

One of our favorite things to do with our students is to create interactive notebooks. We absolutely love it because it is a really great way to start off your systematic, structured, reading intervention. It's also a great way to keep students engaged!

If you have been keeping up with our blogs, you will know that all this month we are talking about ways we can help cement strategies for our students who just aren't getting it.  If you are new to our blog, welcome! You can catch up on our last two posts here: 3 Ways to Generalize Skills Learned in Isolation and Is it Just My Kids, Or...

Our students often need a lot of practice with welded sounds. So we created this fun game to practice with them. Typically when we play, we set a timer for 3-5 minutes (depending on how much time we have allotted for review).

Uncover the crucial components of effective literacy instruction. Discover how weaving authentic literature into lessons enhances decoding skills. Learn to balance decoding work and text application in small groups, adapting to each group's unique needs. Foster daily exposure to real books, promoting silent reading and read-aloud sessions for a comprehensive literacy approach.

So here at Ascend, we LOVE all things fall. As you can probably guess we were so excited to be able to throw some Halloween activities into our mix. Most of the students we work with really struggle with phonological awareness and while we have phonological awareness built into our lessons we know that some of our students need extra practice with it. So we have some fun phonological awareness practice activities for you.

The wonderful thing about this very simple game is that you can use it in so many different ways depending on the skill you are trying to target. It's also truly NO PREP. If you don't have this grid it's so easy to just write out the tic-tac-toe lines on a whiteboard or piece of paper and students love this game.

Discover the key to unlocking consistent growth in reading intervention: engagement. Dive into creative strategies to make learning exciting, turning dry material into dynamic games. Move beyond traditional worksheets and explore interactive methods that keep students connected and excited about learning!