Today I’ll be sharing 4 tips you can start using right away that will help you plan your literacy small groups in less time.

Organize Small Group Materials

One of the best ways to save time when planning and prepping for small groups is to store all of the materials you frequently use in a central area – I like to keep all of mine right next to my small group table.

I call it the “small group command center,” and it literally holds ALL THE THINGS. On top I keep a bin for each group where I store the manipulatives, activities, and books we’ll be using for the upcoming lesson.

In the drawers I store all the extra activities and manipulatives we aren’t currently using – think magnetic letters, letter stamps and stamp pads, sounds box cards, etc.

Use Observations and Assessments to Guide Planning

During each small group lesson, I jot down observations and notes about specific kids and the group’s progress as a whole. Did they get the goal for the lesson? Do they need extra practice with a phonics pattern or heart word? This is invaluable information for when I set down to plan our next group meeting.

I keep all of this information (plans and notes) in a small group reading binder organized by group so it’s readily available.

Each time I set down to plan small groups, I start off by referring to these observations from previous lessons as well as baseline assessments as needed.

This saves times trying to figure out what to focus on because you’ve already written that information out in your notes during your previous lesson – whether it be reviewing a skill or moving on to something else.

Use Templates for Planning Lessons

Have you ever heard the phrase, “don’t reinvent the wheel”? It applies to planning small group lessons, too!

Using a template that includes the essential components of each small group session, such as your warm-up activities, main instructional tasks, and any assessment saves so much time.

I love using a template like the one on these small group planning pads. It makes planning so much faster, then I just pop them into my small group reading binder.

You can easily customize these templates based on the specific needs of your students and the learning goals for each session, but you don’t have to start from ground zero each time.

Trust me when I say that having a structured framework in place will save you time and mental energy, enabling you to focus on instructional delivery (and your sanity!)

Incorporate Center Rotations

Having students work in small groups at centers is such a powerful way to engage your students in practice with the skills you’ve been teaching in whole group and small group, and it frees up time so you can continue to deliver direct instruction through small groups.

While one group receives direct instruction from you, other groups work either independently or in collaborative tasks, such as word work, reading centers, or hands-on activities.

This saves tons of time when you’re actually teaching small group lessons because you have less interruptions.

As you work with planning small groups you’ll find little tips and tricks that work for you for saving time, but having some ideas to get started can be such a game changer. I hope that these tips help give you back some of your precious time. If you’ve got other strategies for planning small groups quickly, drop them in the comments below!

Throw in having access to limited resources from your school and it quickly starts to feel too overwhelming. Well, friend, today I want to share some ways we can get creative and still be effective with small group literacy even with minimal resources. Truthfully, you don’t all the bells and whistles and tons of STUFF to run them effectively. You really just need some creativity and effective practices.

Start with a diagnostic assessment.

It may seem silly to say, but it’s worth saying anyway! Before starting any small group reading instruction, it’s important to assess your students’ current abilities – phonological awareness, letter knowledge, high-frequency words, and decoding are a few of the things I start with at the B.O.Y. and how far we go depends on how the assessments are going.

These types of assessments will help you identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, which will inform your teaching strategies. This is super important for all teachers, but especially if you have access to limited resources.

Knowing exactly where your students are and what they need will help you pinpoint the exact resources you will need to help them rather than searching for allll the things!

Choose the right books (decodable, leveled or other).

Once you have identified where your students are, you can select books that are appropriate for their reading abilities. And sometimes, it may be no books at all because you are focusing on other pre-reading skills!

My go to for most Kindergarten students are decodable readers. I share more about why decodable readers are the perfect fit on this blog post and also address my thoughts on leveled texts.

I’ve got tons of affordable decodable reader options here – and what is SUPER NICE about these options are you will have books for all of the readers in your class, can send them home for students to read with families because they’re just printables, and you can use them year after year by just printing new books.

When you’ve got limited resources, the last thing you want to do is have to spend time hunting down decodable readers from all over the place of investing tons of money into pre-printed and bound books that limit the number of books you have or what you can do with them.

Bring in shared reading.

Shared reading is a collaborative approach to reading where the teacher and students read together and discuss the text. Shared reading can be particularly effective with limited resources because you can use text book for the entire group.

I love the flexibility that shared reading offers because you can use a text that you print or project and it doesn’t have to be an entire book! In fact, I love building these strong habits with weekly poems that allow students to build these foundational skills in bite-sized chunks!

Shared reading is the perfect time to focus on building reading fluency, decoding skills, and comprehension.

Incorporate word work during groups and as a center.

Last week I shared some simple and effective ideas for word work in the classroom. Word work activities can help students develop phonics and vocabulary skills, and they can be done using a variety of resources, including word sorts, word walls, and word games.

These are perfect for the word work portion of your small group lesson, but can also be used as a center. We are all about activities that have multiple uses around here!

Again, you don’t need all the bells and whistles here. A lot of these activities can be made by just printing them off, using note cards, or laminating games that you use year after year.

Provide independent reading time.

Independent reading is an important part of any reading program, and it can be particularly beneficial for students in small group settings. I know there are those out there that will say this is a waste of time, but I wholeheartedly disagree.

Students need time to interact with books, turn the pages, look at the pictures, find words they know and learn to enjoy books without the context of a lesson format.

I love to incorporate DEAR (drop everything and read) time as a transition back into the classroom after an active time like recess or PE. It only takes a few minutes and allows the students’ bodies to calm while exploring books. It’s a win-win!

One final cheer for you teacher friend! You don’t need lots of THINGS to run effective literacy instruction or small groups. Do the best with what you have and find inexpensive resources that allow for multiple uses. You are doing amazing things!

So often we get caught in this “race to read” which, unfortunately, leads to so many students missing key building blocks for being a skilled reader. So, today lets dive into some of the skills we should be focusing on with students who aren’t reading, YET.

1. Phonological Awareness

I feel like this has been in almost all of my recent posts, but phonological awareness is one of the most important things we can work on with our pre-reading (and even reading) students. If you’ve never seen a visual of the PA continuum before, here’s a brief overview.

Read more about rhyming and alliteration here. Read more about segmenting sentences, syllables and onset-rime here. Read more about phoneme manipulation here.

2. Letter Knowledge

It feels like this one may be a no brainer to even say, but one of the foundations of learning to read is the ability to quickly recognize letters and recall the sound they represent.

Let’s keep this multimodal and engage those senses while we’re at it! I like to focus on 2 to 3 letters per week (goodbye one letter a week – that’ll take you 26 weeks to get through the alphabet)!

Introduce the letter name and sound but also incorporate one of my favorite kinesthetic approaches – sky writing!

Have students use their pointer finger of their dominant hand to sky write each letter, write on their leg, or on a friend’s back. They can make the shape of the letter with their body either standing up or lying down (if you’re in a big enough space — this makes a good outdoor activity!). This engages the brain in solidifying the formation of each letter. Make sure to remind students and have them repeat the letter they’re practicing out loud as they practice.

And to work on that automatic recognition I love having my students work with an alphabet-level decodable reader. They’re written so the student can focus on a single letter, and they also build vocabulary as they name each picture!

These are perfect for helping students associate a sound with the written symbol that represents it, and they feel SO proud of themselves for beginning to read! You can grab a set for yourself right here.

Read more about letter knowledge here.

3. Print Awareness

Print awareness centers on how to interact with books. Things like… where is the front/back cover? Where is the title? Where is the top or bottom of the page? How do you turn the pages?

Even though the students we are focusing on today aren’t ready to read words in a text, they are ready to handle books and to learn how to interact with them. This is a wonderful opportunity to teach them how to “read” pictures and tell the story themselves using illustrations.

Remember those alphabet decodable readers I referred to what I talked about letter knowledge? Your gonna hit a two for one here because they are not only appropriate for building a strong letter knowledge foundation, but they also give students experience with interacting with a book!

4. Vocabulary

A strong vocabulary is essential for reading comprehension. How do we build a robust vocabulary with young students?

Well friend, you probably already guessed that it had to do with lots of exposure to hearing books read aloud! That alone is going to open up the door for young students to hear a vast array of language, but lets take it a step further…

Bring in the nonfiction texts for building vocabulary! Not only do nonfiction texts teach academic vocabulary within context, they are also often supported by engaging illustrations that help our younger readers form meaningful connections to the meaning of the word.

5. Listening Comprehension

This is another area I feel like so many teachers do innately before students are reading on their own, but having some targeted skills you are focusing on his helpful.

We know that the goal of reading is to comprehend or understand what we’ve read, but these skills actually start to develop BEFORE we ever read a text on our own. Comprehension skills start to develop through listening to stories and then having discussions.

What comprehension skills can we work to develop? Things like retelling a story, identifying the beginning/middle/end, asking and answering questions about the text that was read, and making connections to the text and their own experiences or even another text.

And, if you’re looking for a handy guide for reading comprehension skills you can focus on, I’ve got you covered friend!

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When working with my students in small groups, I have found that manipulatives are an essential tool to increase engagement (and heck, even fun) while helping students develop literacy skills. Today I’d love to share my top 5 manipulatives that every Kindergarten teacher should have for small group reading instruction.

Magnetic Letters

Right at the top of my list are magnetic letters. If I had to choose only one manipulative to invest in to get started, this would be it! These are perfect to use for building letter recognition and pair perfectly with an alphabet arc.

For students working on letter recognition, I often use magnetic letters to create a letter matching game where students match uppercase and lowercase letters. For this you can grab a set of uppercase and set of lowercase magnetic letters – or if you’re like me and just have a lowercase set, write the uppercase letters on note cards to have students match lowercase letters to.

There are truly so many possibilities with magnetic letters. I also use them to help students practice building words using the phonics pattern we are focusing on. I like to preplan what words we’ll be building then just put the letters they will need in a small container or baggie to make this practice effective but fast.

Letter Tiles

Similar to magnetic letters, letter tiles are a versatile manipulative that can be used in a ton of ways to help students practice letter recognition, phonics patterns, high frequency words and more.

I love letter tiles for having students map high frequency words in sound boxes. This reinforces what letter/s make each sound which aids in orthographic mapping.

If you happen to have magnetic letter tiles/chips like the ones above you can throw in magnetic wands for students to use when they blend sounds together.

Transparent Chips/Markers

These give me all the nostalgia from my own elementary school days, but that’s not the reason they make my top 5. Transparent chips/markers are fantastic for playing Bingo and other games with students during small groups, but I also love to use them to highlight words since they are transparent!

Try having students hunt for a specific word or phonics pattern on a page and marking it with one of these! They don’t damage books and are easy for students to move if they need to make a correction.

White Boards & Dry Erase Markers

While white boards might seem like an obvious tool, the flexibility they offer gives them a spot in my top 5! I love using these for dictation (whether a list of words or a sentence incorporating specific phonics patterns and high frequency words) because they are still fairly low investment for students, meaning they can easily fix mistakes.

Finger Pointers

Why not add a little whimsy and fun to your small groups? Finger pointers are another inexpensive way to get your students invested during small groups. There are so many options out there, too – witch fingers, google eyes, colorful finger lights, plastic pointers and more!

I have my students who need practice with tracking and one-to-one correspondence pop one of these on before practicing blending drills or diving into a decodable text.

And there you have it! My top 5 recommendations for manipulatives to use during small group instruction that have multiple uses and are generally inexpensive. While you don’t HAVE to have these for successful instruction, they sure do make things a little easier and more engaging for students.

Which is your favorite out of magnetic letters, letter tiles, transparent chips, white boards/markers, and finger pointers? Or… maybe you have a manipulative you’d add to this list. Let me know in the comments!

While we have a dedicated writing block, I like to sneak guided writing instruction into my structured literacy groups! And trust me… it doesn’t take a lot of extra planning or prep and it totally aligns to what you are already doing in your groups.

If you’re an OG follower of the The Teaching Texan, you may have seen this previous post where I share a bit about guided writing, but we’re going to expand on that today. Let me show you how!

On the 2nd day of our small group lesson (I generally split my lessons into 2 days) we end with guided writing.

I’ll select one of the comprehension questions that we dive into together as the frame for our guided writing sentence. For example, if we talked about what a character did in the story then our guided writing prompt will be the same question.

First, I have my kids answer the question in a full sentence (sometimes I’ll help wordsmith so the words are closer to the complexity of words they are currently reading/writing).

Then, we count the number of words in the sentence. When first starting I’ll use manipulatives and work through this similar to how you would use a sound box, but once we’ve got the hang of it we just count the words on our hands.

From there we will either (1) draw lines on our writing paper to place hold for each word we counted OR (2) count out precut sentence strips – one per word.

Students then go to work segmenting words as they write and recording the symbol/s for each sound in each word. If we’re using the writing paper template, I’ll give reminders as needed for proper finger spacing.

This is the perfect time to take notes on letters that students need additional practice with for handwriting formation. This could be incorrect strokes, reversals, or even letters not falling into the correct placement on the writing template.

Lastly, I have my students go back and mark any capital letters in blue (we call these “cool blue capitals) and any punctuation in purple (we call these “purple punctuation.”)

I absolutely love this routine because it’s truly a routine! Students get the hang of it and it becomes a quick check in on writing and an opportunity to practice new strategies (punctuation, different sentence structures, dialogue, etc) as students are ready.

What are word families? A word family is a group of words with a common feature or pattern.

For example… cat, rat, mat, and bat all belong to the -at family because they follow the same pattern.

You’ve likely heard of these before, but if you’re like I was just a few years ago then you’re wondering the best ways to teach word families. Well you’re in luck friend! Today I’m going to share how we work with word families over the course of a week in my Kindergarten classroom!

On Monday of each week I introduce our new word family and have students share what letters make up the pattern we are focusing on. We practice identifying the sounds in the pattern and blending them together.

Some years I have my students share out words they know that fit the pattern of the week and some years (like this year) I display an alphabet strip on our interactive flat panel and pull down letters into sound boxes. We practice identifying the sound that letter spells followed by our word family and then blend them together (think onset rime).

We identify if the word we made is a real word or a “silly” word and add the real words to an anchor chart.

Some years we can get through this routine in a day and some years I break this up into 2 days.

Next up (usually Wednesday) we practice building words with our word family pattern using either magnetic letters or letter cards. I love this because its hands on but also helps to reinforce the pattern and students quickly realize they are using the same ending letters for every word.

Thursdays I love to have them practice writing words from our word family on white boards. I use this time as a quick assessment of how things are going and to reinforce correct letter formation.

After several days diving into our word family, it’s time to release responsibility to the students! Each week during our last 2 days of centers (what my students work on while I pull small groups), I include a word family craft for students to complete.

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE these because they each include cutting (hello fine motor practice!), allow students to either pick words from our anchor chart or challenge students to come up with other words including the pattern that didn’t get added to our chart, and they follow a predictable pattern.

This is super important because I don’t have to spend a ton of time teaching this center each week. I teach my students that the first thing they always do is illustrate and label their words, then they can cut and glue, followed by coloring. Students thrive with routine and that’s part of what makes this center do darn successful!

Another cool feature of these word family crafts is that you can print everything onto colored paper OR use the tracers printed on card stock and reuse these every year. I can prep these so quickly because I just need to pop some colored paper and the tracers at center and students are ready to go!

Imagine how prepared you’d feel to have one center for the entire year at your fingertips! What would you do with that extra time you save from planning and prepping? Grab your set of word family crafts right here.

But, even when we know something is best practice it doesn’t necessarily help us to implement it. That’s the goal of this post, friends!

I’m going to break down a simple to follow small group reading plan that you can use right away so you can stop spending tons of time wondering how to use decodable texts in a small group lesson.

And bonus… you’ll also save time planning! Stay with me until the end because I’ve got a free lesson plan, decodable book, and before/after reading activity for YOU!

So the first thing to consider is what decodable text is right for each of your students – and no, your whole class won’t be reading the same decodable.

You’ll want to look at a few things as a pre-assessment such as…

• Phonetic knowledge (based on what has been taught in class AND what the student may have already learned or picked up on)
• Blending ability
• Heart word knowledge (aka tricky words)

With these 3 things assessed and in mind, you’ll be able to easily select a decodable that aligns right where each student is.

Now lets jump into the lesson routine I like to follow with students who are working in decodable texts.

I like to start each lesson with phonological awareness practice. This can be something super quick and is likely very low prep given the nature of phonological awareness.

Something simple like a thumbs up or down if pairs of words rhyme or thumbs up or down if pairs of words start with the same beginning sound is quick and effective.

You can also have students practice segmenting all of the sounds in a word using a segmenting mat / Elkonin boxes and manipulatives.

After that, we move into our word work portion of the lesson.

I usually cycle between a few activities for this. We will either follow a blending practice page that is directly aligned with the words we’ll be reading in our decodable, segmenting sounds in a word and writing the symbols (letters) that represent each sound OR brainstorming words that fit the phonetic pattern we’ll be focusing on in our decodable.

I think it’s worth noting that aligning word work practice with the words in your text is crucial so that it’s not just isolated practice. Students need to then encounter words just like these in the text they are reading for authentic practice.

Up next is a review OR introduction to high-frequency words we’ll find in the text. I like to read the word to students, segment the sounds together, count the number of sounds we hear, build the word with magnetic letters, write the word on a white board then use it in a sentence.

With our brains primed and ready for our text I then introduce the decodable for the day and give a brief (one sentence) synopsis of what the book is about.

Sometimes we’ll take a look through the text and find the high-frequency words we practiced or some of the words that follow the phonetic pattern we practiced during word work.

Students will read independently while I listen in and offer prompts as needed. If a student finishes early, I have him/her either read today’s text a second time to work on fluency OR read a text from a previous lesson, again to work on fluency.

Our small group lesson wouldn’t be complete without some comprehension questions! Although decodables don’t generally have a very deep story line, we can still focus on comprehension and helping students learn to locate where the answer to a question is in the text.

We wrap up our lesson with guided writing. I like to once again focus on the phonics pattern from the decodable and usually select a sentence that answers one of the comprehension questions I asked.

Students repeat the sentence out loud, count the number of words, build the sentence, then write the sentence and illustrate it.

So there you have it! A lesson plan flow that actually work and is easy to follow. I hope that this overview has been super helpful for you! I’d love to share a FREE lesson plan and full set of lesson activities – including a free decodable reader – with you!

Simply drop your name and email below and we’ll email it right to you! Don’t forget to check SPAM as sometimes our emails end up there.

• Should I use decodable books?
• How do I use decodable readers?
• Where do I find good decodables?
• Does this mean I shouldn’t use leveled texts anymore?

It can be mind boggling and, honestly, completely overwhelming.

So, today I want to share what I’ve learned about using decodables – focusing on why we should be using them (and what this might mean for leveled texts).

What are decodable books?

Decodable books are texts that are written systematically using the sound-symbol knowledge and phonics patterns that students have been explicitly taught.

In other words, these books progressively add more phonetic patterns and focus on one or two phonics skills combined with previously taught skills and high-frequency words.

Why should teachers use decodable books?

So you may be wondering, what’s the point? Why do I need to use decodable texts with my students?

If you’ve taught small group literacy, you’ve probably noticed at some point a student or students who look at the first letter/letters and guess a word without looking at all of the letters in the word.

Or… maybe you have students relying on the picture to read a word without attending to all of the letters in the word (EX: reading “rabbit” as “bunny” because that would make sense with the picture).

Often times this happens because we have not explicitly taught our students to attend to every letter in a word to read, have not spent enough time building a strong decoding foundation of basic phonics patterns, and/or we are selecting texts (often leveled texts) that don’t align with the phonics patterns we’ve taught students and contain a myriad of patterns (IE: long vowel patterns, digraphs, diphthongs, etc)

And this is precisely why decodable texts make sense for students learning how to read. We can actually control the patterns they are working to decode so they align with our instruction.

What are some resources for good decodable texts?

If you’ve been using leveled texts as your go-to for literacy instruction, you might be wondering where to find good decodable texts. I’ve got some favorites, and I’d love to share them with you!

For short vowel (CVC words) focus, I’ve created a bundle of short vowel decodable readers that not only contain 4 decodable books per short vowel sound but also a full lesson plan and pre-reading and post-reading activities.

I also love that after reading these I can send them home with students so they can practice at home and show their family what they’ve been working on during small group literacy time.

For pre-assembled texts that I do not send home with students, I love BOB Books, Flyleaf Emergent Readers, Half Pint Kids, and High Noon Books to name a few.

What about leveled texts?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention leveled texts during our discussion of decodable texts. Do leveled texts still have a place in our instruction?

While I know everyone will have their own opinion on this, my answer is… it depends.

For beginner readers decodable texts will be the hands down winner, but you may have students who are advanced and have very strong decoding ability, strong phonemic awareness and a vast knowledge of phonics patterns. These are students that I believe can benefit from reading a traditional leveled text – however, that’s not the only option for these students!

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Before we dive into some game-changing tips for your small groups with students who are developing as young readers, I want to share a little secret…

All of the “good stuff” we talked about in here and here– you know, all about phonological awareness – that is still going to apply with these lessons! It’s still best practice to continue developing this highly important foundation even though we are moving into appropriate texts.

So let’s say your students are ready for decodable readers. They’re really mastering their sound-symbol knowledge and can sound out unfamiliar words using phonological blending. Where do we start?

Well, if you know me friend, then you know I love to follow a proven blueprint – I’m not about reinventing the wheel every time I plan a small group lesson. Here’s the basic overview of my small group lesson with developing readers:

1. Review sound-symbols
2. Decoding practice
3. Heart word review
4. Introduce and map new heart words
5. Introduce book and read independently
6. Comprehension / dictation

In all this lesson will run 15-20 minutes (yes, we move at a fast pace)! So let’s do a quick overview of each of these steps in the lesson.

I like for my readers to have a fairly strong development of sound-symbol knowledge before we dive into decodable books – so this portion of the lesson is usually just a minute or two.

I like to run through my alphabet book warm-up where I say the letter, target picture, then sound and students repeat. As they get the feel for this I eventually remove my model/prompt and let them do the heavy lifting.

We then move into decoding practice. I love to start with a list of words that follow the pattern in our decodable for the day. For example, if we are reading a short a decodable, we will mainly focus on short a words during this decoding practice.

Early on I will have my students read each sound aloud and then “scoop” the sounds together to read the word. As students are ready, I’ll move into teaching them to read each sound in their mind then just say the “scoop” or word out loud. This really helps to start building fluency as we are reading.

You can check out our short vowel decodable bundle where this work is already done for you!

Next up we review heart words (these are high frequency words that we have previously mapped and practiced). I love to vary this practice with quick games like heart word memory (cards with heart words written on them turned over and students take turns flipping them over, reading them, and seeing if they have a match).

After our review I’ll introduce any new heart words for the lesson and we’ll map them together and build them with magnetic letters. I love prepping these in baggies or small containers with just the letters the kiddos need to keep things moving quickly.

Now that we’re warmed up, we’re ready to dive into our decodable book for the day. I do a very short introduction to let them know what the text is about (I try to keep these to one sentence), and then we are off and reading independently while I listen and guide as needed.

After reading our decodable we move into comprehension questions (day 1 of lesson) or guided writing / dictation (day 2 of lesson). For guided writing / dictation, I ask a guiding question that leads us to our sentence for the day (usually directly from the book we read). Students repeat the sentence, count the number of words, then write the sentence.

And there you have it friends – a proven roadmap for small groups lessons that will help your developing readers blossom!

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Well my friend, if you are in the same boat I used to be in – I’m here to help! Last week I shared some tips for planning small group reading instruction quickly and today I’m going to break down a small group lesson with pre-reading students.

Before we dive into all the juicy details on the lesson, let’s build some background knowledge together.

Following the research in science of reading and approaching small groups with structured literacy in mind can feel a little daunting. But, really we just need to understand the key components of structured literacy – which is a systematic and explicit way of teaching reading (AKA we aren’t just hoping students come to the magical understanding they need for reading).

Really Great Reading shares that there are 6 key elements of structured literacy:

1. Phonological Awareness / Phonemic Awareness
2. Sound-symbol and alphabetic principle
3. Syllables
4. Morphology
5. Syntax
6. Semantics

Today we won’t do a deep dive into all of these because that would be a book rather than a blog post, but I do want to dive into the first 2 components because it’s what I spend a good deal of small group instructional time on with my pre-reading students.

Phonological awareness refers to the continuum of auditory skills that build in complexity from skills like rhyming and alliteration, sentence, syllable, and onset-rime blending and segmentation, and phonemic awareness where students can isolate, blend, segment and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words.

Alright, now that we’ve built some background knowledge together and perhaps you’ve perused some of my other blog posts on these foundational skills, let’s dive into a small group lesson that incorporates these skills.

I’ll start by sharing that meeting with students regularly gives you a strong indicator as to how they are doing and will help you to monitor progress and when they’re ready to jump into decodable readers.

That said, depending on where my students are I may or may not incorporate a decodable reader into my pre-reading lesson.

But, regardless I always start my pre-reader lessons with sound-symbol / letter knowledge activities.

I like to incorporate activities that focus on the letters in my students’ names, linkage charts, and sound match mats. It’s important to note I keep these activities hands on. Students need to be manipulating something – magnetic letters, letter cards, etc.

From there I move into phonological awareness activities. There are a lot of skills under the phonological awareness umbrella, so it’s important to use some sort of continued progress monitoring to know where your students are.

I love pulling from my Exploring Phonological Awareness resource for this portion of my structured literacy / small group lesson because it covers the entire continuum so I always have exactly what I need no matter where my group is.

I also love it because there are pre and post assessments for every skill under the P.A. umbrella so I make sure my students are mastering all of the foundational skills they will need to be skilled readers.

We might spend some time at the word level with rhyming or blending compound words or at the onset-rime level with continuous/stop sounds or blending onset and rime all depending on where they’re at in development.

And truthfully, these two areas can comprise an entire small-group lesson. You can pull several activities for each and double down on building a strong foundation. I’ll also often pull in some handwriting practice – especially when we work on sound-symbol knowledge.

Next week I’ll be back to share a lesson overview for developing readers – so if you’ve got kiddos on the cusp that are ready to dive into decodable books you won’t want to miss that post!