How to…teach heart words

How to...

In our ‘how to…’ series we are going to delve into all things phonics instruction and give you our expert advice on developing confident readers. *** Heart words is another term for common words with tricky spellings, or high-frequency words with “irregular” spellings. The term “irregular” is a bit misleading because while beginner readers might…

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What’s Meaning Got To Do With It?

Do you have students who persistently misread small, high-frequency words such as: “he,” “I,” “of,” “gave,” “a,” “the,” “she,” “her,” “on” or “was”? This is quite common even if older students have had remediation for decoding difficulties and have improved their phonics knowledge and word reading skills. We could speculate about why. Maybe teachers do…

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How we can help kids to self-teach themselves to read

Have you ever wondered how kids can read words they haven’t been taught to read?  I recently came across the ‘Self Teaching Hypothesis’ Share,1955.  This hypothesis explains how kids use the sounds/spellings they have been taught and apply them to figure out new words.  What does this theory say? “According to this hypothesis, beginning readers…

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