Connecting the Nonsense to the Real

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Hi everyone! I am Em from Curious Firsties and 100% honored to be guest posting for Emily today!  I have learned so much from her this year and love that I can “give back” a little!  Over in Curious Firsties land I am a Title I teacher for only first graders.  We are a departmentalized school and I push into the classrooms to do small group intervention. Due to all the collaboration within the classrooms, I have grown immensely over the years.

Last week on Adventures in Literacy Land, I posted about how to make nonsense words more “real” in your classroom. I discussed the importance of students realizing that these small nonsense words make up multi-syllable words.  As I continue to work on this in my reading groups, I realized the importance of making those connections for my very low readers.  And here is what I mean….

One of my guided small groups is reading a level E book.  They are using their reading strategies but there is still some guessing (groan!) going on.  They do not make the connection that the nonsense words will help them when reading a book. So I have a trusty old friend to help us make these connections….

We used this wonderful highlighting tape to find some of those nonsense words or smaller words that could help us to read the multi-syllable words.  And….it really, truly worked! YES!

I found this quick trick to be very helpful and they were able to see that the blending of those smaller words quickly will help them to read the “bigger” words.

It has also proven to be helpful to do this with high frequency words, as well.  My guided reading group begins with a quick poem.  Some of my firsties are not making the connection that these same words are in the texts that we read.  My trusty tool is helping them to see this.

Do you have any quick tricks to help your students make connections between words?

Thanks for letting me join you today!  I hope you can hop over and see me at Curious Firsties!

Em

Thanks so much!! em

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