The Kendore Kingdom curriculum is designed to benefit all students. Our activities enable teachers to continually assess student progress so that they can help struggling readers while also giving those who catch on more quickly the opportunity to delve deeper.
We received the following question from a Kendore-trained teacher and wanted to share Jennifer’s answer!
Hi Jennifer,
What do I do if I have students in my group that already know or quickly grasp the understanding of sounds and letters? I want to make sure I attend to all the kids in my classroom and not hold anyone back.
Sincerely, Dealing with Mixed Levels
Great question! All students can benefit from retrieval, memory, and phonological awareness activities while building reading capacity. Teachers often confuse rushing through phonics as true reading instruction, but that would be like memorizing the rule book for basketball and never over-learning the fundamentals. We want students of all levels to have a solid foundation before moving forward.
You can attend to high-performing students by layering challenges into your activities. It’s easier than you think! Help strengthen their oral vocabularies, phonological awareness skills, understanding of syntax, and more with our recommendations.
Here are some ways to provide challenges for students while focusing on phonological awareness. Our curriculum is full of activities, so all kids are sure to stay engaged regardless of level!
- Provide students with a word and ask them for words that rhyme with it (e.g., cat, bat, hat). Discuss why these words rhyme by breaking down the sounds in each word. Challenge students to identify the initial and final sounds.
- Use our Smiley Thumbs Up word lists and have students identify words containing the target sound(s) for the week. Add advanced vocabulary to test high-performing students, e.g., “Give me a thumbs up if you hear the /f/ sound in the word “photograph.” How many times do you hear the /f/ sound in this word?” (2 times).
- Lots of kids may know their sounds, but do they know how they’re produced? Talk to your students about how each of the sounds are made (where the air travels through the mouth, tongue placement, mouth placement, etc.) and ask them to watch their own mouths in a mirror for a full kinesthetic learning experience.
- Incorporate Oral Punctuation and oral sentence construction into your lessons! Watch this helpful demonstration to learn how.
- Try Magazine Madness! During this activity, kids cut up pictures from magazines into strips, one for each sound (phoneme) or syllable. For example, the word “fish” has 3 phonemes (sounds), so a picture of a fish would be cut into 3 vertical strips. This can prove to be quite challenging!
- Incorporate parts of speech into your lessons by using a MadLibs. Teach nouns, verbs, and adjectives containing the target sound(s) for the week (e.g., “Give me a noun that begins with /v/.”).
- Even high performers can build automaticity to increase their reading rate! Use fluency drills to build sound retrieval, and pair off students of similar levels to time each other.
With card games, memory building activities, Sound Track and more, the possibilities are endless!
– Jennifer
Please contact us if you need more ideas or have a question you’d like answered. We may feature it in a future blog post.