Halloween did not get skipped in the reading room this year! We read poems for fluency and used our reading strategies to read directions about a Haunted House we created. Of course, we had some candy too! 

It's hard to dig back in your brain and years of education to remember all those phonics sounds, right? Well these guys have them down pat and are happy to share them with you. Here we are practicing the different sound pairs and spellings. We try and identify the sound as quickly as possible! It's quite entertaining, actually!

Brooke was so excited to bring Desi to reading today! They had a blast! 

Play "Slides and Ladders" with upper and lowercase letters to practice identification and sounds! Add to your centers or partner up and play!

Tara gave us a great tip for isolating words. We made these word isolators and it seems to help dramatically with decoding. Seeing all of those words on the page can be intimidating! Just cut a rectangle in a piece of card stock. The students who use these keep them in their reading group materials and pull out during reading groups. It's a quick and effective accommodation. Thanks Tara! 

Here is one way to practice the letters in your name. You'll need one piece of paper for each letter and a few pages of circle labels (or something similar) with the letters in the students name.  Have them transfer labels to letters and match. Make sure every time the stick a label, they say the letter. Great fine motor practice too. 

These rock stars all finished their punch cards this week after two months of hard work on their reading. They're ready to celebrate by bringing friends to reading, playing games and eating soft pretzels. Life is good. 

We went hunting for vowel pairs and practiced reading them, of course. We're getting pretty good! 

Author of Newbery Book Club book, The Last Panter, was here at our very own AES. Students in grades 3-6 had the opportunity to learn about Mitchell's book as well as ask and answer questions about specific parts of the story.  What a great opportunity,  thanks Denise! 

CoCo brought in her favorite book today to share, she was so excited to tell us about it. She even sang us the silly lullaby at the end...AND upside down, for that matter!