Reading Elephant
Helping children reach their reading potential.
Reading Elephant is a very strong proponent of explicit, systematic phonics instruction. Young readers need teachers to clearly introduce new letter-sound correspondences, including th words phonics. …
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Brandon, a first grader, read laboriously and often made mistakes. He added words that weren’t in the story and guessed based on the first letter. At the end of the book, he didn’t understand the …
When kids learn the sh digraph, they learn that chunks of letters can make one sound. This is a big step. Beginning readers focus on letter sounds, with an emphasis on short vowels. They read words …
Jamie was in first grade. She knew some letter sounds, but she wasn’t blending sounds together to read words. Her classmates were reading books with a variety of words, even hard words like “bicycle” …
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I’ve created a free Christmas phonics book for kindergartners. The attached book includes letter sounds, short vowels, consonant digraphs and consonant blends. Kids can read the attached decodable …
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Consonant Digraph Series 2 Now Available! I’m very proud to release my consonant digraph book series. These phonics stories for kindergarten introduce phonics sounds progressively. They are ideal for …
Systematic phonics instruction is a method of teaching reading that introduces sound units and sight words one at a time. What does systematic phonics instruction look like? First, a child might …
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When I get a new student, I immediately assess and start to develop his/her phonemic awareness. As I write about how the student is progressing in phonemic awareness, parents often ask perplexed …
English is a difficult language to learn how to read. Not because it’s more sophisticated than other languages. It’s not. All languages are complex. English is uniquely challenging because it is not …
Do you have a student with attention problems? Sometimes apps are a great way to teach those children how to read. Apps take on the burden of entertainment, while an educator can guide the student …
