Home - Learning at the Primary Pond

Research shows that alphabet instruction is most effective when we differentiate based upon student need.
And that makes sense, right? There’s no use in spending tons of time teaching an alphabet letter to a student who already knows its name and sound....

Did you know that phonics learning is developmental?
This means that we need to match our phonics instruction to students’ levels of word knowledge (Bear et al., 2016). In other words, we need to understand what phonics patterns our students already know (and what they don’t know yet). We need to provide...

The beginning of each school year is an exciting time. It’s also an important time – it’s when we lay the foundations for our work throughout the school year!
When it comes to teaching phonics, I’ve seen BIG payoffs when I teach certain routines to my students at the beginning of the school year....

Having students build words is a really valuable phonics activity! In my phonics program, From Sounds to Spelling, students build words at least a few times a week.
I like my students to each have their own full set of magnetic letters. They keep these letters organized, in alphabetical order. (This saves SO much time – I don’t have to pass out letters, they’re not searching for letters constantly, etc.)...