Now that Joey is in kindergarten, it is time for him to begin to learn to recognize some high frequency or sight words. Schools I’ve worked in previously have liked for kindergarten students to know about 25 of these common words by the end of the year. After watching Joey confidently learn his letters and letter sounds, I started to feel that Joey was ready for this next step this summer. I introduced them slowly at first, but now I am working on a new one each week.
When I taught kindergarten and first grade, we would learn one of these words in connection with a book or poem we were reading. We would first read the text, then identify the smaller word within the text. We’d break the word up into pieces, talk about what we notice about the word, and decide where it should go on our classroom word wall. We would clap the word, snap the word, cheer the word, and put it up on our wall where we would then practice it every day for a week. We knew those words. We’d write the word on a sentence strip inside a familiar poem or song we all knew, and we’d put that into a reading center that we could practice putting in order. [Read more…]
After reading and studying the silly 
When we talk about reciprocal communication, we think about having a conversation when one person speaks, someone replies, then the initial speaker follows up. 
One of our goals for Joey is to speak in multi-word phrases. All children begin with single words, and then over time develop two to three word phrases, before moving on to full sentences. Of course, all children are immersed in examples of how we use multi-word phrases and sentences throughout the day. Although Joey hears oral examples of how to put words together into sentences, it is rare he is able to watch people model using multi-word phrases on a device. Those of us who use the device with him take time to model these phrases, but there is no way to compare our modeling to the total immersion of a typically developing child.
I plopped down beside Joey one afternoon, and asked him how his day had been. He quickly began chatting away, 
