Happy Terrific Tuesday, everyone! Here’s a quick Tuesday’s Tip for your struggling readers. I’m always looking for an easy, quick way to help kiddles take their new learning from isolated skills to applying it in real text or across the text. With our sweet kiddles that struggle, it can be frustrating. It seems like such an easy thing to do, but alas it eludes so many. So I thought I’d share an easy thing that works like magic for me. Maybe it will help you too?
We all know that if they sing it, chant it, repeat it, etc., then they will learn it. So I use that trick when I am trying to help kids see that they can use one word or chunk to read another word. Nothing’s more frustrating than seeing a kiddle read “cat” on one page and struggle like mad to read “bat” on another page (or for the olders…..poisonous and boisterous), but it happens all the time. So Kristin…..you say….what’s the chant? It goes like this (in a sing-song voice)…..”If you can read at, you can read cat. If you can read cat, you can read mat. If you can read mat, you can read sat.”This week we were working on that very thing with the firsties and fifths. Dr. Seuss is such a help for the littles and he so kindly put the word lists in front of the Hop on Pop book so we could practice. Here we are practicing that chant as we read the word lists in Hop on Pop.
The olders were working on the same thing this week, but with chunks. The fifths were having such a hard time transferring the oi and ous chunks to new, longer words, even though they know the chunks well. So we pulled out the old chant and ta-da…..they were reading them like crazy. If they struggle with this in the future, I know all I have to do now is say to them….”If you can read……” and they will finish the chant and read the words correctly.
We all do these word family lessons all the time, and they work well for most of the kiddles. But if you’ve got some that just aren’t getting it, give the chant a try. Our brains just love songs and chants, don’t they? This one seems to do the trick. Hope it works for you, too!
Happy Reading everyone and have a wonderful (hopefully sunny) week!
Smiles,
Kristin
