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playdough2plato

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F-R-E-E-B-I-E alert! 🚨 Did you know that the 26 letters in English actually make FORTY-FIVE different sounds?! It’s enough to make our fluent reader brains spin so imagine how brand new readers must feel.😵‍💫 To help you keep all of the letter-sound combinations straight so you can confidently help your students learn them, we pulled together a batch of sanity saving phonogram charts that break it all down in one go-to spot... PHON means “sound” in Greek and GRAM means “letter” so these charts connect the sounds to the letters we use to spell them. 👉 Comment CHARTS below and our friendly Plato-Bot will send you the link! #phonics #phonemicawareness #scienceofreading #iteachprek #iteachk #iteachfirst
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Research has shown that multi-sensory learning helps brains make connections more quickly. It's kind of like turning the power on in MULTIPLE parts of the brain instead of just one. 💡 And the great news is that it can be *really* quick and simple to add into your phonics lesson plans! Case in point: When it comes to teaching students digraphs (two letters that make just one sound), these simple, multi-sensory chants have a HUGE impact. 👉 Be sure to save this so you can quickly find the chants the next time you're teaching digraphs! #phonicsfun #phonicsforkids #phonics
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I know, I know... You’re just wrapping up THIS school year, and I’m popping into your feed to talk about NEXT year. 😲 Before you plug your ears and run the other way, hear me out - I promise there’s a method to my madness! Every spring, I make an editable lesson planner to help you stay organized all year long. And since many of you have been asking for the annual update, I moved it to the top of our to do list. That’s where this post comes in… Today’s the big day! Your 2023-24 planner is hot off the press and ready to grab. 👉 Just comment PLANNER below and our friendly Plato-Bot will send you the link! #teachertreats #teachergram #elementaryteacher #prekteacher #kindergartenteacher #firstgradeteacher
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This phonics hack is a keeper! 🏆 When the letters C & G come before the letters E, I or Y, they change to their soft /s/ & /j/ sound. 👉 Follow @playdough2plato for more helpful teaching tips! #phonicsfun #phonics #scienceofreading #scienceofreadinginaction #iteachfirst #firstgradeteacher
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playdough2plato

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This is surprising! 🤯 When we think of the sound S makes, /s/ usually comes to mind. But 60% of the time it actually says /z/! Here’s why… S says /s/ at the start of a word and after an unvoiced sound. But most of the time it actually says /z/ instead because it’s following a voiced sound including m, n, ng, l, b, d, g, v, voiced th, and r. It helps to remember it this way… The difference between saying /s/ and /z/ is simply turning on your voice box. If your voice box is already working for the sound that comes right before it, your voice box might as well stay on to pronounce the S too! For instance, listen for the /z/ sound in these words: Beds Logs His As Is The S follows a voiced sound in every example so the S is also voiced and sounds like /z/. 💡 👉 Be sure to save this, so you remember how to teach it to students later. 👉 And tag a teacher friend who would love it too! #phonicsfun #scienceofreading #iteachprek #iteachk #iteachfirst
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playdough2plato

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What’s the difference between phonological and phonemic awareness?🤔 Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that includes five different skills: 1️⃣ Sentence segmenting 2️⃣ Syllable segmenting 3️⃣ Rhyming 4️⃣ Alliteration 5️⃣ Phonemic awareness The last skill on that list, phonemic awareness, is the superstar in the bunch because it includes SIX skills all on its own! Research has also shown that it’s the most important for students’ reading success because it focuses on individual sounds in words. Phonemic awareness includes: 1️⃣ Blending individual sounds called phonemes 2️⃣ Isolating phonemes 3️⃣ Segmenting phonemes 4️⃣ Adding phonemes 5️⃣ Deleting phonemes 6️⃣ Substituting phonemes 👉 Comment WARM UPS below if you’d like a sample of the no prep warm ups that make it quick and easy to practice everything on this list! 👉 And save this post so you can refer back to it later. #phonemicawareness #scienceofreadinginaction #kindergartenteacher #prekteacher #elementaryteacher #instateacher #phonologicalawareness #scienceofreading
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playdough2plato

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Learning to read is a lot like building a house – if students’ foundation is shaky, there’s no way their walls and roof can be steady and strong. And when it comes to reading, the foundation kids need to build is filled with phonological and phonemic awareness skills! They’re the key to unlocking students’ reading because they help kids hear and move around the SOUNDS in words. (Being able to HEAR the sounds makes it *so much* easier for students to connect those sounds to the letters used to read and spell them later.) Phonological awareness includes 5 different skills: 1️⃣ Sentence segmenting 2️⃣ Syllable segmenting 3️⃣ Rhyming 4️⃣ Alliteration 5️⃣ Phonemic awareness And the last skill on that list, phonemic awareness, includes SIX different skills all on its own!🤯 Research has shown it’s the most important for students’ reading success because it focuses on individual sounds. (Cat has three: C-A-T and frog has four: F-R-O-G.) Phonemic awareness includes: 1️⃣ Blending individual sounds called phonemes 2️⃣ Isolating phonemes 3️⃣ Segmenting phonemes 4️⃣ Adding phonemes 5️⃣ Deleting phonemes 6️⃣ Substituting phonemes Whew! That’s a lot of skills in one foundation. But the great news is that there are lots of simple, fun ways to build them. 👉 Comment WARM UPS below if you’d like a sample of our no prep warm ups. 👉 And save this so you have a go-to list of foundational reading skills to practice. #kindergartenteacher #prekteacher #elementaryteacher #instateacher #phonologicalawareness #scienceofreading
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It’s important to know the best order for teaching phonics skills so you don’t accidentally skip 3 steps ahead… Plus, knowing the step-by-step sequence makes it *so much* easier to help kids because you can quickly pinpoint where they are and jump right into teaching them the next skill on the list. 💪 NOTE: Researchers are still debating about the ideal order so sometimes you might see digraphs listed before blends and other times you’ll see blends before digraphs, for example… That said, this is the recommended sequence I rely on: 1 Letter sounds 2 CVC short vowel word families 3 Digraphs 4 Blends 5 Magic E 6 Vowel teams 7 Diphthongs 8 R-influenced vowels 9 Word endings 10 Contractions 11 Homophones My team and I wanted to make it *really easy* for you to teach all of these skills so we created a batch of print-and-go phonics lessons that walk you through the whole sequence from start to finish. When you want to teach the TH digraph, you’ll flip to that page. When it’s time to work on the FR blend, you’ll open up that one pager… It takes the guesswork out of the entire process!😅 And that’s just ONE of the teaching tools you’ll get inside The Plato Pack membership. (You'll get unlimited access to thousands of other sanity saving printables too!) But we only open up enrollment twice a year and you have to be on the waitlist to get an invite so, if you love teaching shortcuts... 👉 Comment SHORTCUT below and I’ll send over an invite! #phonicsfun #phonics #spelling #scienceofreading #scienceofreadinginaction #kinderteacher #prekteacher #firstgradeteacher
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Let’s be real…. It’s a whole lot easier to just keep teaching the same way we’ve always been teaching. In fact, when it comes to teaching reading, there are lots of reasons NOT to make the switch to brain-friendly, research-based teaching strategies and tools... 1️⃣ Learning new things can feel hard… 2️⃣ Discovering that some of our favorite teaching strategies are actually ineffective for kids feels icky… 3️⃣ Hunting down trustworthy, research-based lesson plans and activities takes time… The list goes on and on. But here’s the thing: The longer we wait, the more kids will slip through the cracks. And that’s just unacceptable. So I created a shortcut that makes it easy for you to go all-in on the science of reading in your Pre-K, Kinder, or 1st Grade classroom right away. (You can literally cross off tons of the things on the “hard stuff” list!) 👉 Comment ROADMAP below and I’ll have our friendly Plato-Bot send you the info. #kinderchat #earlylearning #kindergartenteacher #prekteacher #firstgradeteacher
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This only happens twice a year and it’s officially GO TIME! 👉 Comment ROADMAP below to request your invite.
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Big news! 😆 I recorded The Science of Reading in Action as an audiobook yesterday… And on my drive home from the recording studio, I stopped by the nail salon for a long overdue manicure. I was agonizing over what color to pick when it hit me: Teaching reading is a lot like nail polish (stick with me here) - It doesn’t matter how great your manicure was, if you choose the wrong color, you’re going to have disappointing results… Just like if you make any one of the three most common teaching mistakes, you’re going to have disappointing TEACHING results - No matter how awesome you are as a teacher or how dedicated you are to helping your students thrive… And since there are exactly 5 GAZILLION different theories about what’s the “best teaching strategy”, it’s no wonder that so many teachers feel overwhelmed! It’s hard to know what to fix because there are waaaaay too many options and everything you tried in the past didn’t work.😭 But that’s why I created a solution that’s going to cut away all of the noise and distraction and get you right to the good stuff: getting MORE reading growth for your students and LESS planning time for you… I’m breaking it all down in my brand new F-R-E-E training sharing the 3 secrets master reading teachers use to double students’ reading growth + cut planning time in half.🚀 👉 Comment DOUBLE below and our friendly Plato-Bot will send you an invite!
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Foldable open & closed syllables for the win! 🔥 They’re quick & easy to make and they pack a powerful learning punch… Bonus tip: You can quickly pump up the fun factor for kids by using brightly colored paper. 🥳 Here are some word pair ideas to get you started: A—> Am Hi—> Him I—> If Me—> Men She—> Shed No—> Not 👉 Save this so you can quickly find the how-to again when you need it! 👉Then share other word pair ideas in the comments so we can make a giant community list to pull from! #scienceofreadinginaction #syllables #scienceofreading #phonicsfun #learningthroughplay #astrobrights
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Your kids are going to LOVE these C+Le flip books!👏 And the best part is they’re quick and easy to prep. 1️⃣ Staple a stack of post-its to the left side of a strip of paper. 2️⃣ Write a C + LE syllable on the paper. 3️⃣ Write the beginning letters of a word on each post-it. 4️⃣ Then flip and read! You could use this for any C+ Le words (and they work great with other phonics rules too!) but, to help you get started, here are the ones I used: —> BLE Cable Able Table Humble Thimble Ramble —> DLE Idle Ladle Cuddle Paddle Needle Riddle —> GLE Goggle Bugle Angle Eagle 👉 What other C+Le words would you add to my list? Share below so we can make a giant list of options. 👉 Save this & tag a friend who would love it too! #phonicsfun #playfullearning #scienceofreading #readingteacher #iteachphonics
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playdough2plato

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I haven’t stopped thinking about this since I listened to @themeasuredmom’s newest podcast episode! 🤯 For years, teachers have been encouraged to move through phonological awareness skills in a particular order, starting with the biggest word units - like counting words in a sentence or breaking words into syllables – and eventually leading students to focus on those individual sounds called phonemes. But research has shown it’s actually *not* necessary for students to master larger word chunks before they move on to phonemes. And that’s great news for us because it means that even at the beginning of a kindergarten year, you can dive straight into phonemic awareness activities… And as soon as students are familiar with letters, you can attach the sounds they hear to the letters that are used to spell them <— a HUGE key to unlocking their reading and writing growth. 💥 You better believe I will be updating the phonological awareness module in The Reading Roadmap PD before it kicks off on May 1st! When we know better, we do better, right? 👉 Comment PHONEME below for the link to this fact sheet from @dyslexiaida! #phonologicalawareness #scienceofreading #scienceofreadinginaction #phonemicawareness
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The 7 Jobs of Silent E! (This is a great post to share with your teaching besties.💪) 1. A silent final E makes the vowel before it say its long sound: make, bite, pole, cube. 2. English words cannot end in the letters V or U, so E may be added: have, give, blue, clue. 3. A silent final E makes a C say /s/ and the G say lj/: face, ice, huge, age. 4. Every syllable must have a written vowel, so E is added when a syllable has just an L: little, turtle, waffle, google. 5. A silent E keeps singular words that end in S from being mistaken as plural: moose, purse, goose, house. 6. A silent E makes TH say its voiced sound: bath versus bathe, cloth versus clothe. 7. E is added to help distinguish between similar words: by versus bye, or versus ore. 👉 When it comes to teaching reading, knowledge is power. If you’d like a fast pass to becoming a master reading teacher, comment BRAIN below and our friendly Plato-Bot will send you an invite to grab my new book, The Science of Reading in Action. It’s jam packed with game changing tips like this roundup! #scienceofreadinginaction #structuredliteracy #phonics #kindergarten #firstgrade
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The Science of Reading in Action. 💛 We’re just DAYS away from shipping and I can’t wait for you to get your hands on it. 😆 👉 Comment BRAIN and our friendly Plato-Bot will send over your book invite! (There are TONS of pre-order bonuses.)
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5 science of reading books I couldn’t stop thinking about long after I finished reading them. 🔥 SPOILER ALERT: I saved my favorite for last! 😍 My brand new book, The Science of Reading in Action, combines the must-know information from all of these favorites (plus TONS more!) into a quick, easy-to-understand read. I’m so excited for you to get your hands on it! 👉 Comment BRAIN below and our friendly Plato-Bot will send you an invite to pre-order the book so you can be the first to get it on April 1st. #scienceofreading #scienceofreadinginaction #iteachprek #iteachk #iteachfirst
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How many of these facts did you already know? 🤔 Read through the list to find out and then comment BRAIN below to get an invite to grab my brand new book and discover even more. 💕 #scienceofreadinginaction #phonics #phonicsfun #phonologicalawareness
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This is not just a book. It’s a teaching movement. ⚡️ We all want to help students learn to read, but what happens when 67% of children don’t get that chance?? 2022 National Report Card data shows that’s the reality in the United States right now because 67% of fourth graders are reading BELOW grade level. Sixty-seven percent. 😰 But it doesn’t have to be this way! Researchers have been studying how brains learn to read for more than 70 years. That’s great news because they’ve pinpointed what strategies work for kids so we can keep doing them and (more importantly!) what does NOT work so we can stop wasting time. Inside my brand new book, The Science of Reading in Action, I’ll break down the research for you in simple, bite-sized pieces and then go one critical step further by giving you printable tools that make it quick and easy to start implementing right away. This book empowers you to be not just a good reading teacher but a GREAT one. It’s a true game changer. 👉 Comment BRAIN below and our friendly Plato-Bot will send you the book invite! #scienceofreadinginaction #thescienceofreadinginaction #bookstagram #instabook #teachersonig
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For years, I thought the best way to build students' reading comprehension was simply asking follow up questions: 📕Who was the main character? 📒What happened in the beginning, middle, and end? 📗What was the problem and solution?... But now I know that reading comprehension actually involves FOUR different brain processing systems! And if a student has holes in any one of them, their comprehension can be compromised: 🧠 ORTHOGRAPHIC PROCESSING involves translating words on a page to spoken language. Although you may not have noticed it before, when you’re reading, your brain actually reads the words you see out loud in your head like an audiobook narrator so you can use your natural human superpower for spoken language to understand what you are reading. 🧠PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS means listening for and producing speech sounds. When your brain is “hearing” the story being read aloud in your head, it is separating sentences into individual words, noticing the difference between similar sounding words so you can process each word being spoken, etc. Without solid phonological processing, your brain wouldn’t recognize the difference between the words “cat” and “bat” because they would sound the same. 🧠MEANING PROCESSING is retrieving every meaning your brain has stored for a word. If you hear the word “bat”, for instance, your brain will pull pictures of the nocturnal animal, baseball equipment, and someone hitting a ball. 🧠That’s when CONTEXT PROCESSING kicks in! You use background knowledge and larger context to decide which meaning fits best. In our bat example above, if you’re reading a book about caves, your brain will throw out all of the baseball options and keep the nocturnal animal. The key to reading comprehension success is ensuring that all FOUR brain processing systems are solid and strong… I know it can be hard to know where to start, but you'll get simple, brain-friendly ways to strengthen them inside my brand new book, The Science of Reading in Action. 👉Comment BRAIN below and I'll send you the pre-order info. 🖊️: @paper.samosa #scienceofreadinginaction #scienceofreading #readingcomprehension #elementaryteacher
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  • This fun place value game, makes learning ones, tens and hundreds super fun for kids. As players compete, they practice reading and writing three digit numbers and base ten blocks – two key steps toward understanding the ins and outs of place value. Perfect for first and second graders! Makes for a fun and engaging math center or small math instructional group activity! #mathcenters #placevaluegames #mathgames
  • These free interactive analog and digital clocks will keep your kids engaged while learning to tell time and how time relates to their everyday activities! Perfect for first and second graders! This will make a fun and engaging math center or guided math group activity! #tellingtime #mathcenters
  • This amazing-smelling green apple playdough recipe uses only two ingredients and makes a soft and stretchy dough your kids will love. Kids will love making this playdough with you and playing with it for endless fun! #homemadeplaydough
  • These blend clip cards are the perfect activity for a fun and engaging literacy center, word work activity or homeschool game! Kids will love matching the beginning blend sound with to the matching picture! Perfect for kindergarten and first graders! #clipcards #blends #literacycenters
  • These lowercase letter tracing roads are sure to engage every young learner! Perfect for pre k and kindergarten kids! These tracing sheets will make an exciting literacy center, homeschool activity or just for free choice time! #lowercaseletters #letterformation #abc's
  • These 11 digraph decodable readers are the perfect resource for your small reading groups, phonics practice, whole class lessons, or take home books. To add an element of fun for your students, they get to illustrate the book! Drawing the pictures to match the meaning of each page will help to build their reading comprehension.

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Playdough to Plato
4 days ago
Playdough to Plato

F-R-E-E-B-I-E alert! 🚨 Did you know that the 26 letters in English actually make FORTY-FIVE different sounds?! It’s enough to make our fluent reader brains spin so imagine how brand new readers must feel.😵‍💫

To help you keep all of the letter-sound combinations straight so you can confidently help your students learn them, we pulled together a batch of sanity saving phonogram charts that break it all down in one go-to spot...

PHON means “sound” in Greek and GRAM means “letter” so these charts connect the sounds to the letters we use to spell them.

👉 Comment CHARTS below and our friendly Plato-Bot will send you the link!

#phonics #phonemicawareness #scienceofreading #iteachprek #iteachk #iteachfirst ... See MoreSee Less

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