In this post, I share my favorite phonological and phonemic awareness strategies and activities for struggling readers. Phonological awareness is the first step in learning how to read and spell. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate sounds (can be syllables, onset, rime, or phonemes), while phonemic awareness refers to the ability…
If you’ve read my blog before you have seen me mention multisensory learning. It’s something I came across years into teaching that I wish I had learned about from the beginning. Multi sensory learning has been the most effective way to teach my struggling learners, especially those with dyslexia. There are a number of successful…
Teaching students with dyslexia to read involves very different methods than the traditional reading programs used in most classrooms. Effective phonics instruction is key to remediating reading difficulties and using a systematic synthetic phonics program is best. But first I’ll go over each type of phonics method to help you see why they are inadequate…
In this post, I share my favorite multi-sensory learning activities for L blends, along with a set of multi-sensory L blend worksheets and activities. It’s no surprise that I love to use a variety of multi-sensory activities when teaching letter blends. Multi-sensory learning is the cornerstone of the Orton-Gillingham method. Struggling learners simply learn best…
Digraphs are another area many of my students struggle in. They either have trouble pronouncing them or they struggle to see the digraph as one sound and continue to verbalize both letter sounds when reading. Some students really struggle to visualize digraphs as one sound and will continue to sound out each letter in a…