Teaching beginning reading

3 Replies

Here’s another video demonstration, this time of strategies to help a child successfully read a short, simple book.

The book contains only little words this child can sound out, plus a few common words of which he already has mental images, like “I” and “you” and “see”.

There are many simple, decodable books like the one in this video available, if you know where to look. Click here for a list. Many are also quickly (and often very affordably) available for iPad/tablet or other computers, as apps or electronic books.

Profuse thanks once again to this delightful student and his parents for allowing me to record and share this video.

Of course, as soon as I watched this video I started thinking of all the things I should/could have done better in this session.

Oh well, nobody’s perfect, and I hope it’s still useful.

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3 responses to “Teaching beginning reading”

  1. Miriam Fein says:

    Thank you Allison! Your website is full of wonderful resources and I have learned so much looking through and reading your blogs. I agree that we really need more authentic videos of lessons, oral reading, etc. They can be a terrific learning tool. The ones you posted are very helpful. The text pointing out specific aspects of the lesson and of your feedback is particularly useful. I was just reading some advice for error correction from Michael Bend (author of the ABeCeDarian synthetic phonics program here in the US). He recommends always echoing back the student and directing him to compare what he read with what is on the page. For example if her reads “tap” for “top”, point and say “You said, ‘tap’, but this is /o/” Curious to know what you think of this.
    Happy New Year!
    Miriam

    • alison says:

      Dear Miriam, thanks for the nice feedback. Also thanks for telling me the author name and correct spelling of the ABeCeDarian program, someone asked me about it but I hadn’t heard of it and had no luck finding it via google. It looks pretty good, though I’ve given up using American English programs here because the Australian English vowel system is so very different.

      I often do echo what children read and then give them the correct sound if they are fairly fluent and have moved on to the next word(s), just to bring their focus back on the target word. But if I’m correcting them as soon as they make the error, while their focus is still on the word in question, I think I usually just give them the correct sound or sounds. However I haven’t really thought about this a lot, and now you’ve asked, I will be thinking about it more. Alison

  2. Miriam Fein says:

    Sorry….just realized your name is Alison with only one “l”

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