Judicial Branch of California
Defining Civic Duty and Participation
A lesson, geared toward older elementary scholars, combines art with social studies to explain the purpose of civic duty and how to encourage others in the community to participate. Academics create advertising campaigns to promote civic...
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Packing a Sea Chest
Students make a model sea chest, then fill it with provisions for a voyage. They supply a list of the contents of their sea chest, explaining the purpose of each item. The sea chests can be displayed for the school or community.
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The Icky Sticky Frog
Learners practice the strategy of phoneme awareness in order to identify phonemes with vocal gestures in spoken words. They blend letters and sounds together utilizing the phoneme /i/ by symbol and letter representation and listen as the...
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Speed Racers
A review of decoding words is incorporated in a discussion on reading with expression in order to increase fluency. The teacher gives several book options for readers to practice smooth and inflected reading, giving a short book talk on...
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Bounce into Speedy Reading: Growing Fluency and Independence
Increased reading comprehension begins with decoding and automatically recognizing words, which is the focus of this instruction. Using their choice of six different Winnie the Pooh stories, partners practice a variety of strategies...
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Only the Facts
Practice the strategy of summarizing to gain meaning and knowledge from an informational text. Young readers highlight supporting details and main ideas, and then they use this to summarize two articles: "The Great Quake" and "What...
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Get Excited, Get Mad, Show Emotion!
Youngsters explore the importance of becoming fluent, expressive readers by changing their voice when reading a book. They read the book Ella Sarah Gets Dressed, by Margaret Chodos-Irvine, and poems from the book For Laughing Out...
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To Make a Cake you must say /A/
Here is a great way for learners to practice identifying sounds made by both short and long vowels. This lesson stresses the a_e=/A/ correspondence along with letterboxes. They read their spelled words, whole text selection and...
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What Was That All About?
Through direct instruction, the teacher demonstrates how to identify the main idea and supporting details of a text when creating a summary. As a class, read a paragraph, highlighting relevant information and crossing out extraneous...
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Aaaa! It's A!
Exercise phonemic awareness of the vowel /a/ to help children become successful readers. They connect spoken phonemes to written grapheme's and create a relationship between the vocal gesture of /a/ and its grapheme map in text and words.
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Oh Say Can You DDDD!
Young readers see that letters represent phoneme sequences in spoken words. They identify the letter "d," and recognize "d" in spoken words by exploring the meaningful representation and a letter symbol. They practice finding the letter...
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Lee and the Bee Flee to the Tree
Practice the strategy of decoding to become fluent readers with young scholars. They interact with the correspondence ee=/E/ as it deals with speech and text. The tongue twister, "Why did Lee and the bee flee to the tree?," is also...
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Express Yourself
Reading with expression excites listeners of any age. They will discuss different ways to change their reading expression as they listen to the teacher read Froggy Goes to the Doctor. Then in small groups, they'll practice reading...
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Exciting Expressions
Elementary schoolers observe and demonstrate a variety of strategies for reading with expression. They listen to the teacher read A Fine, Fine School with and without expression and discuss the differences. Then in pairs, read the...
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I Feel the Need to Read!: Growing Independence and Fluency
This series of activities lets the class observe and demonstrate a variety of strategies for decoding and reading fluently with expression. They listen to the teacher read passages from If You Give a Pig a Pancake with and...
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What Kind of Ladybug Are You?
As a class, read different sentences prepared by the teacher, identifying the punctuation that is needed for the appropriate expression. In small groups, have each child assume the role of one or more character in The Grouchy Ladybug by...
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Fun With Fluency
Practice reading with fluency by blending words together. To start, prepare flash cards with pseudowords on them (words that can be pronounced but have no real meaning), and work with the class to sound out the words using known...
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It's All About Expression: Growing Independence and Fluency
In an engaging anticipatory set, the teacher uses several different strategies to activate prior knowledge about reading with expression, including using sentence strips (that must be prepped ahead of time) to show different moods. The...
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Don't Be Silly–Expression is Fun!
As children observe the teacher reading Today I Feel Silly and Other Moods That Make My Day, they take note of the role punctuation plays in the emotion or expression used. They then take turns reading a book with a partner so they can...
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Rain Rain Go Away
Complete a variety of activities related to the long /a/ sound with a focus on words containing the ai and ay correspondence with your readers. As a class, they recite a tongue twister, then spell different words containing ay and ai...
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A Speeding Rocket, a Shooting Star... It's a Racing Reader!
Prepare a gameboard and die-cut race cars to play a fun fluency game. Also create several flash cards to review the long /i/ sound. Then, model reading smoothly and with expression, emphasizing the importance of re-reading...
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We love to Express Ourselves: Growing Toward Independence and Fluency
Reading with expression is an important component in developing fluency. Emerging readers learn different strategies for accomplishing this skill through the teacher's model reading of Earrings!. Partner practice is combined with...
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Just the Facts, Ma'am
Elementary learners identify the main elements of story structure and form questions to summarize their reading. They listen as the teacher reads a story and then write questions to determine (1) main characters, (2) setting, (3)...
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Blending Best Buddies
Practice blending letters together to make the words learners are reading. They decode words familiarized with the concept of blending. This instructional activity utilizes the Body-Coda method of blending developed by Lloyd Eldredge....