Reading teachers are busy giving students the PAT test in their room this week! What is the PAT test? PAT stands for Phonological Awareness Test (not to be confused with Physical Abilities Test for potential law enforcement or Playing Ability Test used to measure golf ability.)  This test focuses on assessing students awareness of the oral language segments that comprise words.  The test is broken down into the following structures. 

• Rhyming: Discrimination and Production—Identify rhyming pairs and provide a rhyming word.
• Segmentation: Sentences, Syllables, and Phonemes—Divide by words, syllables and phonemes.
• Isolation: Initial, Final, Medial—Identify sound position in words.
• Deletion: Compound Words, Syllables, and Phonemes—Manipulate root words, syllables, and phonemes in words.
• Substitution With Manipulatives—Isolate a phoneme in a word, then change it to another phoneme to form a new word.
• Blending: Syllables and Phonemes—Blend units of sound together to form words.
• Graphemes—Assess knowledge of sound/symbol correspondence for consonants, vowels, consonant blends, consonant digraphs, r-controlled vowels, vowel digraphs, and diphthongs.
• Decoding—Assess general knowledge of sound/symbol correspondence to blend sounds into nonsense words.

The test results help us focus on aspects of a child's oral language that may not be specifically targeted in the general ed classroom. The test takes about 30-40 minutes to administer and is updated three times a year. When scored, the test breaks down each component relevant to the child's age and is then normed. This assessment helps us identify the greatest phonological awareness need, group students and choose the best word work instruction. Interested in the results? Feel free to ask for a copy. 

For all those devoted Kinder teachers, here's a list of 5  fun and unique ABC books to start off your school year. If those aren't good enough, click here for 50 more :) 

A Typography ABC book with upper and lowercase letters mixed throughout. A great way to introduce lowercase and play around with the idea of typography as art! What fun!

One of our FAVORITE authors and illustrators. If you haven't checked out any of Oliver Jeffers' books, please do so ASAP! Letters with a story, and even a few puns in this scrumptious ABC book. Great for all learners, not just the little ones. 

In our hunt for new, fun books at our students reading levels, we came across this series about a Narwhal and  Jellyfish. If you haven't noticed, Narwhals are joining the rankings in kids hearts along side llamas and emojis. This cute series follows a Narwhal and his buddy, jellyfish as they pretend to be superheroes, navigate friendships and deal with their emotions. A combination of humor and simple text makes this book perfect for younger readers. The dialogue and graphic novel style lends to lots of practice with expression and punctuation. Come by our room and see these gems, or order some for your classroom now :) 

The holidays came early this year in the reading room as we opened all our boxes to find new books! Loving the collaboration with the 4th Grade Newbery Book Club and our research on new and upcoming book series. The result- plenty of GREAT books to get kids inspired and motivated to read here in the reading room. Need some good book ideas for your classroom? Email us or come on by and see what we've found!