Blending and Segmenting Sounds to Instill Phoneme Awareness

One activity is segmenting sounds and then blending them together using both real words and nonsense words. This activity gives students practice manipulating phenomes and is consistent with the research supporting stimulation of both posterior processing systems (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003). Another activity is oral blending and segmenting paired with letters. This process may help students practice the alphabetic principle (the establishment of a correspondence between a phonem...

 Keeping Students Motivated Using Future Rewards

Periodically remind students that their mental effort is relevant to pleasure in the near future. The younger the children, the less tolerant their brains are to activities that are not pleasurable now or expected to be so in the very near future. Fortunately, the dopamine-reward network releases motivating dopamine in expectation of pleasure. Let students know which of their enjoyable math activities will be coming up during the lesson and how what they are practicing now connects to the des...

 WHERETO Mnemonic for Lessons

Learning Activities: What learning experiences and instruction will enable students to achieve the desired results? How will the design W = Help the students know Where the unit is going and What is expected? Help the teacher know Where the students are coming from (prior knowledge, interests)? H = Hook all students and Hold their interest? E = Equip students, help them Experience the key ideas and Explore the issues? R = Provide opportunities to Rethink and Revise their understandings...

 Science is a Progressive Activity

Science is a progressive activity. The outstanding peculiarity of man is that he stumbled onto the possibility of progressive activities. Such progress, the accumulation of experience from generation to generation, depended first on the development of language, then of writing and finally of printing. These allowed the accumulation of tradition and of knowledge, of the whole aura of cultural inheritance that surrounds us. This has so conditioned our existence that it is almost impossible for ...

 Imaginative Play with Rules

Vygotsky was one of the few researchers of his era to study dramatic play in children. He predicted that the ability of the under-5 crowd to engage in imaginative activities was going to be a better gauge of academic success than any other activity—including quantitative and verbal competencies. The reason, Vygotsky believed, was that such engagement allowed children to learn how to regulate their social behaviors. Hardly the carefree activity we think of in the United States, Vygotsky sa...