Your One Stop Shop for Beginning or Struggling Readers: Back to School Boot Camp

Get ready for back to school by refreshing your little learner's memory on all things literacy. In this class, learners will get to interact with the teacher and each other through discussion, games, slides, Q&A, video clips (and more!) in a safe and engaging environment! In our classroom, fun is a priority and a growth mindset is shared between students and teacher alike. I set clear expectations and use proven instructional strategies to help move students from beginner or struggling readers to more fluent, confident readers. 

Each class will cover these fundamentals for literacy in a fun and engaging way :

Sight words 
Tricky sounds
Blending 
Fluency
Phonemic Awareness 

 Each week of this 2-week course will be centered around focus words (words that are high frequency-- in other words, they often appear in text) and tricky sounds. We will use stories that incorporate these words and sounds (as homework and in small groups) to practice these skills in context. We will play games to make the learning more fun and we will dictate sentences using the sight words and sounds we are practicing to access a deeper level of knowledge on those skills! Throughout the class, we will have incentives and prizes to keep us motivated! While we will be practicing phonics, learners will find this class the most beneficial if they come knowing at least MOST of the basic sounds of the alphabet.

In this class, my teaching style is very interactive-- students will be asked to be responsive. Research shows "whole brain teaching" is most effective for beginning or struggling learners to gain and master new skills so learners should expect to be responding to cues (mostly as a group), moving their bodies, and practicing skills aloud. To make learners feel safe in this environment, the class will be kicked off with a respect mini lesson-- ie: mistakes are magic because they help us learn, what respect looks like/sounds like with examples and non-examples. 

At the end of this course, students should be able to read more sight words, have improved blending skills, better strategies for reading tricky sounds, more phonemic awareness, and overall better reading fluency. Perhaps most importantly, this course will be wrapped up with a class reading party to celebrate all of our hard work and a certificate of achievement for each learner.