Literacy Insights - Instruction In Action!

Echo Reading (Whole class Focus) Echo Reading is the process where students read a sentence after hearing a teacher or confident reader read it. This process helps students improve their reading fluency by providing a model for accurate pronunciation, intonation, and pacing.

Echo Reading (One on One Tutoring) ECHO READING involves the teacher reading aloud a sentence, modelling appropriate fluency. The student then echoes back the reading of the sentence with the same rate and prosody.

Phonemic Awareness Drills (Whole Class Example) Oral Phonemic Awareness drills should be done daily. They should be short, sharp drills orally for no more than 5 minutes. Once students have practised phonemic isolation, blending and segmenting orally, these skills should be transferred, and further consolidated, alongside phonics (using the graphemes).

Phonemic Awareness Drills (One on One Tutoring) Phonemic Awareness Drills should be short and sharp, and assist students in tuning into the phonemes that they are about to learn as graphemes. This video will demonstrate some phonemic awareness drills from our Sounds of Reading Toolkits and examples come from our Level 3.

Fluency Pairs Fluency Pairs is a wonderful low variance routine that can be a useful lesson to allow all students the opportunity to read aloud. During this time the teacher can either roam and give feedback to different pairs or take a small targeted group.

Connected Phonation Connected phonation is a decoding, or word reading, strategy that teaches students to stretch out continuous sounds to support their blending. This practice is also referred to as continuous blending. If you have students that sound out every word in a stop-start way, this strategy is extremely useful to help students build automaticity in decoding.

Word Work (whole class differentiated) Ultimately small group word work is great if every group has an adult instructing them but if this is not the case, it is best to do a whole class lesson that is differentiated (so you don't have lost time on busy work and rotations). Doing whole class differentiated instruction allows exposure and consolidation for all learners.

Multisyllabic Words - Teaching beginner readers and spellers multisyllabic words It is important to move beyond single syllable words once students have knowledge of basic code. This video will take you through one-on-one examples as well as class and small group instruction.