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Essential Reading Tools for Beginning Teachers |
 Over the years, I have been asked multiple times what I consider essential tools to teach reading. Usually, when you are a beginning teacher or a home school parent, you have limited resources for purchasing supplies. In this article, I will share with you my all time favorite indispensable reading tool.
No reading program would be complete without a one or two sets of magnetic
letters and a metal pizza pan or jelly roll pan (make sure magnets stick to
it!). My favorite brand is Quercetti and they sell for around $6-$8 a set. They can be used to teach sorting, classification
of shape, letter identification, and spelling. I recommend both the capital and lowercase sets. One of the first uses is to teach a child their name. Then we find all the little words that are hiding inside
their name and start with those as our first words to learn how to read and
write. If your name is Christopher, you can make - Chris, is, to, her, top,
stop. You can rearrange the letters to make even more, but it is always best
to start with words that are not mixed up. It helps develop more generalizations
and helps children learn to spell and write their name more quickly. Magnet
letters are also great for practicing spelling words. |
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How to Create Jeopardy Games |
 If I have been asked once, I have been asked a hundred times "How do you make these Jeopardy Games?. They are just too tricky for me to make."
I decided to post step by step directions, so everyone will have the confidence to try to make their own version of the Jeopardy Games that I have posted online.
The Jeopardy Games I make are always something that I can use multiple times with a variety of grade levels and classes. I create questions that are multi-leveled with the easiest questions being worth 10 or 100 points and the trickest being worth 50 or 500 points. I have changed the value on some templates in order for the students to keep track of the points. Each time we play, I remind students that the questions with the most points are the trickest to answer. Doing so allows the lowest achieving students in the class to participate and be successful, and provides an additional challenge for the higher achieving students to master the tricker questions with more complex vocabulary. |
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Wiggle, Giggle or Gross Them Out |
 If you are interested in learning while being entertained, Donna Whyte would be the presenter of choice. The IRC featured Donna Whyte in three different sessions. Shana and I were able to attend two of the three and found her ideas to be quite innovative and inspirational. I will attempt to point out a few of my favorites.
"Wiggle Them, Giggle Them, or Gross Them Out" is a favorite quote from Donna. She started one of her sessions with some statistics about the attention span of the children in our classrooms. The standard is to add their age to 3, which then indicates the number of minutes equal to their attention span. For most of us primary teachers, that is a very small time span and we then need to make some serious adjustments to our expectations. Keep things moving. Keep things changing. They need to “wiggle” or redirect their focus.
“Can’t teach a class that you can’t manage.” Work on fun management skills. |
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