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FREE Beginning Sounds Chart

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This free beginning sounds chart is the perfect resource to have when making rhymes or working on word families with young children. If you’ve ever worked on rhyming words with young kids, you know how important beginning sounds are in that process. After all, to create rhyming words, all you do is take the beginning sound {or onset} off the…
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Capital Letters Graphic Organizer for Young Writers

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Capital letters. If you’ve taught young writers for very long, you know that these letters have a way of popping up uninvited, randomly placed in the middle of words or sentences. Sometimes, capital letters are forgotten at the beginning of sentences of people’s names. Not to fret. When kids are using conventions, like capital letters, incorrectly in their writing, I…
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Comprehension Questions: Moving Beyond “Right There” Questions

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Comprehension. It’s the ultimate goal of reading. In order to learn from or enjoy what we’re reading, we have to make meaning first. Comprehension questions are often used to see what kids do or don’t understand about what they read. If you search the internet for very long, you’ll discover loads of “comprehension activities” that ask only literal or “right there” questions. {This means…
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Build a Rhyming Snowman

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The ability to identify and create rhyming words is such an important pre-reading skill. My 3.5 year old LOVES to rhyme. We’ve done rhyming with DUPLO blocks, fished for rhymes, rolled our rhymes and of course, just play with rhymes through songs, books, and various fingerplays. So this winter, we did a little rhyming with a build a rhyming snowman activity. And today,…
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Vowel Teams – Long Vowel Picture Cards

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Working on vowel teams with your learners? These FREE long vowel picture cards can help! *This post contains affiliate links. Learning about vowel teams is a fantastic way to help kids understand phonics and spelling patterns. Instead of teaching unreliable rules such as, “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking,” I prefer to teach young readers/spellers…
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