Students increase their reading fluency through rereading selected text. They review the rule for a vowel-consonant-e spellings which are used during the fluency assessment. Given a grade level appropriate text multiple times, they...

It's the classic scene: Tom Sawyer is whitewashing a fence. Expose your learners to Mark Twain's humor while reinforcing reading comprehension. Eighth graders are encouraged to read and reread, achieving as much exposure to the text...

Pupils, over an extended time, read and explain the nonsense words of Lewis Carroll's poem, "Jabberwocky". They infer the meaning of the poem using visualizing as well as decoding skills. While written for first graders, this is easily...

Turn young scholars into detectives as they decipher encrypted messages.  Introduce your class to modular arithmetic and have a little fun encrypting and decoding secret messages. The activity does not hit many content standards,...

Being able to distinguish between short and long vowel /a/ sounds is an important skill for young readers. They are introduced to the vowel-consonant-e pattern that changes short vowel sounds into long vowel sounds. They practice reading...

Your kindergarten or first grade class works on recognizing the /a/ sound in spoken words. Use the fun tongue twister to help remember the target sound, and practice writing the letter a. Then have them write words that use this target...

Students role-play as soldiers rescuing lost mountain climbers. Working in teams, they interpret maps to locate the climbers and use flashlights to send and receive coded messages about the rescue. Their goal is to complete the task in...

First graders decode Thanksgiving vocabulary while learning about the history of this holiday.  In this Thanksgiving history lesson, 1st graders listen to a story, trace their hands to make turkey feathers and listen to a turkey...

Third graders spell words and define homophone.  In this making words activity, 3rd graders decipher words from letter strips in an effort to identify the "secret word". Students use a set of letters to spell different words. 

Students listen to books and answer questions using reading skills. In this reading lesson, students develop reading strategies such as decoding, understanding characters, and comprehension. Students relate characters and events in the...

Third graders complete their KWL charts from the first lesson of the unit as a review for the summative. Then they decode a secret message using the four basic components of DNA, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.

Students complete multiple activities to help them hear sounds, syllables, and spell words with vowel patterns, digraphs, or blends. In this word sounds lesson, students use letter tiles, sort words cards, analyze poems, and play a bingo...

Wait, what am I supposed to affix? Explore the concept of roots/affixes with your class. They use discussion questions to discover the meaning and usage of specific roots and affixes. They watch a video explaining Latin and Greek roots...

Readers decode and deconstruct political cartoons to heighten critical thinking, extra-textual literacy, and making meaning from symbolism and metaphor. A compatible activity to use in English class when your 8th or 11th graders are...

Students create three letter words and decode for fluency and accuracy.  In this fluency lesson, students use alphabet tiles to build words with the CVC pattern and read the word aloud.  Students alternate turns by stacking one...

In these three multiple-meaning words recognition worksheets, students review meanings, examples, and decoding strategies, choose sentences with words that have same meanings, choose words whose meanings best fit pairs of sentences,...

Student practice decoding skills and phonological awareness. In this vocabulary development lesson, student identifies new vocabulary through word association and flash cards. Student also reads How he Chick Tricked the Fox making...

Students recite Willie Nelson's lyrics in one voice and then analyze their tone and vocabulary usage. They research Willie Nelson's history and dramatize the song: "On the Road Again."

Students practice their fluency skills. In this fluency instructional activity, students read aloud stories to their peers and they help to coach one another on their fluency, pronunciation, phrasing, and inflection. They discuss what...

Students identify how they themselves use movement and dance and the many ways that people move and dance in various contexts. They observe and imitate folk movement and dance while decoding their skills and kinesthetic abilities. ...

First graders, in pairs, use spinners to experiment with different combinations of letters. They combine letters and determine whether they have produced a word or not. They construct and record words choosing letters from designated tiles.

Young scholars form words using prefixes.  In this prefix lesson, students compete in a "prefix challenge" to see which team can combine a set of twelve prefixes with a set of twelve words fastest.  Young scholars enter...

First graders identify words with the "sh" pattern. They participate in phonemic awareness, decoding, blending, spelling patterns, and dictation exercises. As the assessment portion of the lesson, they may write a story using words...

Students develop literacy skills by exploring street signs, cereal boxes, and billboards. In this writing with environmental print lesson, students build word recognition in every day print. Students decode words and discover new words.