In this ongoing class, learners already strong in decoding basic words will be introduced to more complex phonics skills. These 25-minute phonics lessons are designed to provide twice-weekly instruction and practice of the most critical phonics and foundational reading skills. 

Your learner will engage in fun, multisensory, encouraging and energetic lessons, which aim to increase his/her accuracy and fluency, taught by an experienced, patient, engaging, positive, and creative educator. I am energized by teaching and it truly is my passion. Each class will consist of an introduction to a new sound, including common spellings for that sound. The rest of class will be spent in a variety of games and activities with targeted practice for the new sound in words. This class would be best suited for learners that are reading and/ or spelling at approximately a 2nd grade level, especially students who have not completely mastered all phonics skills and still need explicit, systematic instruction in the more difficult decoding and encoding (spelling) skills such as vowel teams, diphthongs, r-controlled vowels, consonant +le, multisyllabic words, etc. 

I am a current 2nd grade teacher and have been teaching elementary at a public school in Nebraska for 13 years. I've tutored online and in-person most summers. I have experience with neurodivergent learners (including my oldest son). I have thirteen years of experience with differentiating reading lessons for students who are above grade level and ready for a challenge in the same classroom with students with attention/focus struggles where gaps in learning have occurred, students with dyslexia, and students experiencing other situations where reading seems to be tricky to understand. 

My favorite part of teaching is creating and delivering engaging, meaningful, and research-backed lessons that make learning fun and reach all learning styles. I use structures and strategies that are backed by Science of Reading research for delivering structured, phonics-based instruction and to determine how, and in which order, to explicitly teach skills and sound spelling/ phonics rules/decoding. My goal, after each session, is that learners increase their confidence in reading and improve their ability to manipulate sounds within words (phonemic awareness), word reading accuracy, and fluency, all of which will increase their overall academic success. We will also aim to apply the skill we are learning by spelling and writing words and sentences each class.  We will use orthographic mapping, kinesthetic segmentation of sounds and syllables, syllable mapping when applicable, decodable text based on our skill, and explicit instruction of phonics patterns. 

Each week, learners will participate in:
1. A phonemic awareness warm-up (rhyming, blending, sound isolation, sound substitution, breaking words into their individual sounds and syllables)
2. Explicit phonics instruction, practice, and games based on patterns. 
3. High frequency words 
4. Application of phonics patterns through decodable sentences that follow the phonics pattern to practice fluency. 
5. Applying our phonics patterns by spelling/ writing. 

I promise to make this a fun, hands-on, and engaging class with plenty of modeled excitement for learning! See below for the phonics skills that we will be focusing on each week. Strong relationships, both with the learner and their family, are very important to me and I strive to know each learner as an individual, recognizing and praising their strengths and efforts, while working to improve their areas that need more focus. I'd love to have your learner join me in this class. 

Classes meet Monday and Wednesday evenings as I teach 2nd grade in-person during the day. Monday will be mostly decoding/reading and Wednesday, we will begin working on spelling and word-mapping using Monday's phonics skill. 

Week of Sept. 2: Soft C/ Soft G Sounds 
Week of Sept. 9: Long A Vowel Teams & Sounds (ai, ay, ey, a, a_e) 
Week of Sept. 16 Long O Sound Spellings (oa, o_e, oe, ow, o)
Week of Sept. 23: Long I Sound Spellings (i_e, i, y, igh, ie)
Week of Sept. 30- Long E Sound Spellings (ee, ea, y, e_e, e)
Week of Oct. 7: R-controlled vowels (ar, er, ir, ur, ear, or, ore)
Week of Oct. 14: /ow/ sound (ow, ou)
Week of Oct. 21: /oo/ 2 sounds of /oo/
Week of Oct. 28: /aw/ (au, aw, ough, al, augh)
Week of Nov. 4: /oy/ (oi, oy)
Week of Nov. 11: Consonant -le (ple, kle, tle, zle, etc.) 
Week of Nov. 18: Words with Silent Letters 
Week of Nov. 25: Long U vowel teams (ui, ue, oo, ew) 
Week of Dec. 2: Doubling rule when adding vowel suffixes (swimming, hugged)
Week of Dec. 9: Drop "e" rule when adding vowel suffixes (hoped, baking) 
Week of Dec. 16: Reading and spelling words with common suffixes