Reading in Elementary: How to help

Teachers often ask me what level elementary teachers expect their first year students to arrive with. In many schools, the elementary teachers are hoping for solid phonetic readers. But from there, their materials often jump straight into sentence (or multi-sentence) level reading. That can be a bit of a stretch for the young child. If you find yourself in that situation, here are some things that might help. These ideas should be effective in English only, ELL, dual language, or immersion classrooms.

Start where they are

First, don't worry that the children are going to fail. They may be struggling to do work at the level you are asking them to, but this can be seen in healthy development. So the first step is to appreciate what they can do and start from there.

Spoken language activities

If your students need support developing their vocabularies, try some of these activities.

3-Period Lessons

You can do these with one or several students. Go around the room (or use vocabulary cards) and touch and name three or four things. Then ask each child to point to, go get the, stand next to, or pick up one of the things you named. This is fun because it involves so much movement. If you have a bossy student, you can eventually ask them to play the role of the teacher so that the children can do this activity without you. This will work even if the bossy student does not have strong vocabulary skills. Instead of asking each child to go to a specific thing, the "teacher" can say, "bring me something you love." Then, the child who brings it will provide the vocabulary to the child who needs it. 

Learn more about 3-period lessons in our other 3-Period Lesson blog post. 

Conversations they care about

Find something, anything, that the children are interested in and have conversations about that topic, even if it's snails! Invite several children to join you and say you're going to have a discussion about [name the topic they love]. Then, start the dialogue but slowly fade away as they are able to take it over. Model a witty repartee where you encourage each speaker to take an interest in what the others are saying and to continue the dialogue with questions. This explicit instruction on how to hold conversations is even more important for the COVID generation. 

Making Vocabulary Cards

Again, starting with their interests, bring in a catalog or magazine that the students can cut up. Guide them to paste the cut-out pictures onto a piece of cardstock (cut one page down into quarters). You or another child can write the name on the back of the cards to create flashcards. Team children up together to flash either the picture or the written word while the other verbalizes the name of the pictured item. You can also purchase vocabulary cards ready-made if that helps.

Letter-Sound Knowledge

If your students need some help learning the sounds each letter/key phonogram of our language makes, try the 3-period lesson with letter cards. You can do this in small groups or play knock-knock games. Have one child knock on the back of the card and then turn it over and say its sound and then think of words that feature that sound. 

You can also try to place those letter cards strategically around the room as a subtle reminder of what makes what sound. You might place the t next to the turtle or the w next to the water faucet. There are loads of other games you can play described in our blog post on Sandpaper Letters. Older children may not be interested in tracing the sandpaper letters, but you can use letter cards to do most of those activities. If it helps, use our digital file to print your own letter cards.

Written word-level activities

If your students know their letter/phonogram sounds and can read at the word level, then focus your work on word-based activities. Here are a few ideas.

Charades

Get some slips of paper and write down a bunch of actions that are spelt phonetically (see our phonetic activity cards for inspiration or buy these ready-made to make your life easier). Gather a small group of children and guide everyone to choose an action. The students each get a turn to act out their verb while the other students guess what they are doing. They show the verb that was written down once the others students guess correctly. 

Labelling the Environment

Get a pad of sticky notes and start writing down the names of things in your room. Guide the students to place the sticky notes on the thing it describes. After you write some, encourage the students to take over and start writing. You can focus on things all around the room, things in one corner, or even the items within one activity. 

When they've finished, collect all the notes and staple them together into a little book that the child can decorate. Pro tip: Get a really brightly colored pad of sticky notes so you can find these all at the end of the activity!

Command Cards

This is just like 3-period lessons and Charades (described above) but this time you have short written phrases that the children act out. You can start with two action phrases like "brush and comb." Then progress to more complex actions like "pick up the book and read." Look at our grammar command cards for ideas on what phrases to include or buy those ready made. 

I hope these ideas have inspired you to have fun while supporting students as they grow in their language abilities. The most important thing is to acknowledge that human development varies from person to person. This is not a problem. Instead, we adapt to meet each student where they are by using their interests and strengths to guide the learning.

I hope this helps!

PS: Thanks to Dominique Mouthon and Jody Ellis at International Montessori School in Durham-Chapel Hill for inspiring me to write this post. They had questions on how to support their elementary learners in their Spanish, French, and Mandarin immersion classrooms. We had a lot of fun talking about these possibilities together. Keep up the great work Dominique and Jody!