This episode focuses on phonological awareness. Reading expert Linda Farrell helps kindergartener Autumn learn to blend two parts of a syllable (onset and rime). Watch how Ms. Farrell gives Autumn explicit practice with onset and rime — a core phonological awareness skill that helps kids recognize and blend sound chunks within syllables

Go inside Cathy Doyle's second-grade classroom to observe her students learning the list-group-label strategy. This video introduces the strategy and highlights the vocabulary and comprehension skills that list-group-label supports.

Reading expert Linda Farrell works with Aiko on a common letter reversal — confusing the letters ‘b’ and ‘d’. Ms. Farrell coaches Aiko to look at the letters during b/d practice and to look at the words while she works with Aiko to read short vowel words accurately.

Reading expert Linda Farrell works with Reese to master the name of every letter. She helps Reese sing the alphabet song clearly and with no mistakes. She teaches him to look carefully at letters as he names them. Ms. Farrell also helps Reese identify every letter of the alphabet accurately, including differentiating between letters that look similar (in Reese’s case, ‘y’ and ‘v’). Learning the name of every letter is a critical pre-reading skill.

Dr. Louisa Moats, an expert in the area of improving literacy and elementary education, discusses how nonsense words can help students learn word structure.

Reading expert Linda Farrell works with Calista, an early stage reader, on short vowel sounds, blending and manipulating sounds, reading whole words, and fluency. Ms. Farrell starts by making sure Calista has a strong foundation in short vowel sounds by teaching her hand motions to remember those sounds more easily. After Calista demonstrates she knows short vowel sounds, Ms. Farrell teaches her to change one sound in a spoken word using manipulatives. Finally, Ms. Farrell helps Calista move from sound-by-sound reading to whole word reading.

Reading expert Linda Farrell helps Michael master the ‘silent e’ pattern to help him become a more accurate and ultimately more fluid reader. She begins with making sure that Michael can distinguish between short and long vowel sounds in spoken words, then teaches him a multi-sensory way to recognize the short vowel and ‘silent e’ long vowel patterns in written words. Ms. Farrell emphasizes the need to practice each skill to the point of mastery.

Reading experts explain why parents should create opportunities for their children to write.

Many striving readers struggle with sight words. Reading expert Linda Farrell suggests this teaching sequence: first, be sure your child knows all the letter names, then all the letter sounds — and then you can introduce a few short high-frequency words such as was. Choose words that don't have regular phonetic spelling. Words that do have phonetic spelling, such as in, did, and on can be folded into phonics lessons.

Reading expert Linda Farrell sees this often with striving readers, and she shares a simple tip: encourage your child to silently "think" the sounds as he reads the word. Linda also emphasizes how important it is for kids to keep their eyes on the words as they read. This video correlates with video about Calista the first grader, as it explains routine that is used with the student in the video.

This interview with reading expert Linda Farrell is part of the Reading Rockets special series, Looking at Reading Interventions. She talks about best practices to help children who are struggling to read.

In this video, reading expert Linda Farrell helps third grader Xavier master reading accuracy.

This PDF from Reading Rockets shares a routine for teachers to use in order to help students learn to read and spell high-frequency words, particularly those that are irregular.

Go inside Cathy Doyle's second-grade classroom to observe how her students use semantic gradients to talk about the nuanced differences in the meaning of related words. This video introduces the strategy and describes how semantic gradients help kids become stronger readers and more descriptive writers.

This video clip focuses on phonological awareness, specifically blending and segmenting the sounds in words. Reading expert Linda Farrel helps a student learn to stretch consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and identify the vowel sound in the word. Watch how Ms. Farrell gives the student explicit practice with blending and segmenting the sounds of the word.

Dr. Steve Graham discusses ways you can help a student with writing difficulties in our webcast, "Teaching Writing".

A parent wonders why children need to learn to spell if we have spell checkers. Writing expert William Van Cleave explains that the link between spelling and literacy is important, especially when there are multiple ways to write a sound such as /k/, like in the words cat, click, and kite. He also notes that learning how to spell words automatically frees up space to concentrate on the ideas for writing, rather than just how the words are spelled.