Teaching Middle School ELA
Welcome to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, where we are dedicated to helping English Language Arts teachers create dynamic and engaging lessons for their students, while also managing the day-to-day responsibilities that come with being a Middle School ELA teacher.
As educators ourselves, we understand the challenges of finding a work-life balance that allows us to pursue our passion for teaching while also enjoying our personal lives. That's why each Tuesday, hosts Caitlin Mitchell and Jessica Cannata share practical and innovative solutions for managing your workload and staying inspired in your teaching practice.
Whether you are looking for fresh ideas to inspire your students, strategies for improving your writing instruction, or tips for managing your time more effectively, this podcast is designed to provide you with the tools you need to thrive as a Middle School ELA teacher.
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If you teach reading and writing to middle schoolers and want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in ELA education, then this is the podcast for you! Tune in every week and let us help you make a difference in the lives of your students and in your own teaching career.
Teaching Middle School ELA
Episode 307: Navigating the Science of Reading Part 8: Sight Recognition
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In this episode of The Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast, Caitlin, Jessica, and Megan conclude their Science of Reading series by focusing on sight recognition, the final strand in Scarborough’s Reading Rope. Discover why sight recognition is key to fluent reading and explore practical strategies to help your middle school students instantly recognize and remember words. From engaging word wall activities to interactive games, you’ll walk away with actionable ideas to reinforce sight recognition in your classroom. Tune in for this important episode and help your students take their reading skills to the next level!
Hey teachers, welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. So did you know that sight words are not just for elementary school students? We made it to the final episode of our Science in Reading series and today we are wrapping things up with sight recognition. So in this episode, we're going to talk about why sight recognition is essential for fluent reading and how you can help your students commit words to memory. So you're also going to hear about fun, practical tips and activities that are going to get is essential for fluent reading and how you can help your students commit words to memory. So you're also going to hear about fun, practical tips and activities that are going to get your students actively engaged with words. So, whether we're talking about an interactive word wall, creative games or simple but effective reading practices, get ready to see your students reading fluency with these strategies. Start to elevate, because you are going to be utilizing these right away in your classroom. All right, let's go ahead and get started. Hi there ELA teachers.
Speaker 1:Caitlin here, ceo and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher Digital Planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB academics programs, and we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description and in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody and welcome back to our Science of Reading series, where we are helping middle school ELA teachers navigate the strands of the reading rope. We're sharing tips, we're sharing activities to help your students strengthen their reading skills, and this is the eighth and final episode in our series. We hope you have enjoyed all the strategies we've been sharing with you. We've enjoyed talking about it, for sure, and today Megan and I are back to talk about sight recognition Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yes, and to your point, jessica, this whole series has been so, so fantastic.
Speaker 3:So if you haven't listened to all these episodes, you are more than welcome to go back to episode 300, where we started it all, or you can just start with this episode and get a little taste of what the reading rope and the science of reading is all about. But in the first five episodes in this series we talked about the strands of the rope from the language comprehension section, and today we're going to be focusing on the second section of the rope, which is word recognition, and in particular, we're going to be talking about sight recognition. So sight recognition is really the ability to instantly recognize and then read words without needing to sound them out or decode them, and it's really a crucial part of fluent reading because it allows students to focus on understanding the meaning of the text rather than spending all of their mental energy on processing individual words. And so typically, sight recognition really begins to develop in the early grades, but it's important to reinforce and expand the skill even into middle school to support more advanced reading.
Speaker 2:Right, and if you've ever taught young grades like kindergarten or first grade, or your own child is in one of those grades you probably remember sight word flashcards. I have Harper's again right here. Right, it's like the the cat, the cat sat and it comes home in your kid's backpack like every week. You're supposed to practice them every night, right? You know what they are. Well, for on-level middle school readers, adding sight words to their vocabulary isn't as straightforward, right? You're not just going to get a little set of flashcards and they're going to go home and say, mom, I want to practice my sight words. Right, not going to happen like it does in kindergarten, because typically, as readers mature, adding words to their memory banks is more subtle. It involves a broader process of encountering, decoding and using words repeatedly. So our previous two episodes can give you a little more insight into what I'm talking about there. But research shows that skilled decoders, which are readers who can efficiently break down words, they need fewer exposures to a word to commit it to memory compared to struggling decoders. So this really underscores the importance of active interaction with words to achieve that instant recognition we aim for in reading. So I'm going to repeat that active interaction we to achieve that instant recognition we aim for in reading. So I'm going to repeat that active interaction.
Speaker 2:We're going to be sharing lots of tips and ideas with you today that are going to help your students commit important and high-frequency words to memory so that they can instantly recognize those words as they read and then read more fluently as a result. Right, that's what we're going for here. So you're going to hear several ideas, and I don't want you to just try them all at once. Just see if one or two resonate with you and try those with your students. You can always come back, listen to this again, try something new, okay? So the first question you're probably having at this point is like well, which words should my students focus on? Right, how am I supposed to do this? If you have a dedicated vocabulary program, you can absolutely use the words from that program. So, for example, many of our EB teachers, they use our year-long vocabulary program. Perfect, use the strategies we're about to share with those words. Just build it into your weekly activities. But you can also choose words from the stories and the articles that your students will be reading in class, and the benefit of choosing words from your students' texts are that they're going to see the words in genuine context, and learning them will have a direct impact on what they're reading with you. So it's really good to focus on just a small batch of words at a time. So, for example, if your class is reading a novel, just start with words from the first chapter or two, do these activities and then pick your next set of words like, build onto it, and so now we're going to share.
Speaker 2:I believe we have three different ways to help improve sight recognition with you. So again, pick the one that resonates with you the most. The first one is to review and explore words as a class. So our first recommendation is to review each word systematically with your students. You are not going to just pass out word lists, read the definitions out loud and then tell students they have a quiz next week. And like I'm kind of guilty of that, my first two years right, we read the words, maybe we revisited them once or twice and then that was kind of. I got much better at that and I'm going to be sharing some other ideas. I did later, after you know, year one, when I could kind of stop treading water in the classroom, not breathe. But you really want to walk through these words with your students, so I'll give you an example. Let's say your class is reading Wonder which fantastic book, by the way, so good. Have you seen the movie?
Speaker 3:Megan, oh yeah, oh yeah, I read it with my fourth graders and we watched the movie. Yeah, it was so good Right.
Speaker 2:I like normally don't like the movie versions of books, but that one does a really good job, yeah, and I feel like it's good to watch in the fall. It shows New York in the fall, I know.
Speaker 2:It's so good, right, I'm going to go watch that again. I think it's on Netflix right now. It is. It is, is it Okay?
Speaker 2:So again, imagine you're reading Wonder with your students and they come across the word stringent, or you choose that word that you want to review with them. So what you want to do is you want to write the word on the board and ask students to guess how it's pronounced and talk about how it's said as stringent, not stringent, and have the class recite the word back to you, and I think even that simple little strategy is just going to bring awareness to them with that sight recognition. And then you can have students share some other words that they know that end in gent, just like stringent, and students may come up with words like agent or intelligent or urgent. And then from here you get to have some fun and get the other senses involved and you get to help students interact with the words. So what I'm going to share is going to sound silly and kind of maybe awkward and you're like I don't know if I really want to do that, but it's fun and it just helps again with that sight word recognition.
Speaker 2:So you can ask your students if that word had a smell, what would it smell like? Why You're going to get crazy answers, and that's okay. Or if stringent had a taste, what would it taste like? Why do you say that? And again, it sounds weird Like I was trying to do this with myself as I was going over the notes for this episode and I was like, okay, what would stringent taste like? And just the way I say it, I'm like stringent. It tastes kind of slimy in my mouth. I don't know why, but that would be my answer. How about for you, megan?
Speaker 3:I'm putting you on the spot. Sour is what I get immediately. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2:It's like different answers. Now we can talk about it. Why'd we say that? Right, so students might base their responses on the word's meaning or even the shape of its letters and the sounds within it. And again, there aren't right answers, there aren't wrong answers.
Speaker 2:It's just a way to get students turning the words over in their mind and playing with it. And then, of course, you can have students start making connections with it. So you can ask students to turn and talk with a partner right, and ask them well, what are some things or people that we could describe as stringent? And they may bring up school rules, judges, curfew, whatever, depending on the age of your students and encourage students to use that word stringent in their responses. So they've seen the word, they've talked about it in different ways. Now they're answering questions about it, they're repeatedly using that word.
Speaker 2:It's really like building those pathways for students in their brains to help them get exposure to the word. So if this seems like a lot or you have a long list of words to review, you can just choose a few words. You know, do this with one or two words instead of using the process with all of them and then teaching students to analyze a few words in this way can really encourage this kind of thinking on their own with other words they encounter. So I'd be curious, like if any of you hear a word saying you're like, hmm, I wonder what that word would smell like right, you never know.
Speaker 2:So now let's talk about something I'm going to just kind of segue into strategy number two here. Sorry, Megan, I feel like I'm talking a lot.
Speaker 3:No, you're good, You're doing great.
Speaker 2:Interrupt me, megan, if you have questions. Okay, so strategy number two this you probably already have in your classroom I know I definitely did in fifth grade and it's a word wall. So it's basically a collection of words that are displayed on a wall or a bulletin board in the classroom, and it's like a visual tool, right, where students can add new words. Teachers can add new words. Everyone's learning for them. The idea is that by keeping these words in sight, students will become more familiar with them.
Speaker 2:But what happens to most of us with word walls? It's there, it looks pretty, and we never do anything with it other than occasionally add a new word or two, right? But since turning a word into a sight word is all about multiple encounters and interactions, we really have to make sure our word wall doesn't just become background or part of the classroom scenery. So that again brings us to the second way to improve sight recognition for our middle school students, and that's have a word wall and actually use it. So what does that look like, right? Well, I encourage you to periodically call on your students to interact with the word wall, as the class helps. Like this activity, you guys, is so much fun, it is so easy. Please, please, please, try it in your classroom so you can help students develop automaticity. Did I say that right? No, am I saying it right? Automaticity that does not roll off my tongue. That's the word. I need to have more sight recognition. You did it, though.
Speaker 2:It was great, okay, good, I'll interact with it a few more times, but that's the ability to recognize words quickly. And so what you do is you have your word wall in your classroom. You pick a student, you hand them a clean, new hopefully fly swatter or they could just use their hand, but the fly swatter is really, really fun and then you say a word from the word wall, the student says it back to you, then they find it and they swat it as fast as they can. That's it. To take it up a level, see how many words they can swat in a certain time period. Like, give them 30 seconds and the class can help. You know they're going to want to help and they can yell out it's in the top right corner or no, no, no, go down three, go to the left right, help them find those words and they just keep swatting at those words.
Speaker 2:Students love this activity. You can even use it I know this sounds silly, but use it as a good behavior reward at the end of class periods, right? Who wants to play sight word swat or whatever you want to call it? Right, it's so fun. Now, if that's again just for sight recognition, if you want an activity that also includes words meanings. You can play charades or Pictionary. I always did this with my students. So again, not my first year, that's when I was just handing them the list of words, right. But after that, charades was so much fun in the classroom.
Speaker 2:Pick a vocabulary word, act it out, let the rest of the class guess, and I'd ask class like how did you guess that word? What clues made you think it was that word? And I'd ask the person acting out like why did you choose to act it out in that way? So again, we're using that word over and over in our discussion. We're having fun, students are up and moving. You can do it in groups, whatever you like.
Speaker 2:Another fun idea Last one, then it's Megan's turn is to get students paying more attention to that word wall. Right, because again, you don't want it to be in the background. It's just change it ever so slightly, once or twice a week Maybe, switch a word around or add a little decoration to it, or remove a word, and ask students notice anything different about the word wall, and whichever student notices it, give them a little prize, an extra credit point, uh, an extra two minutes of game time in the back, I don't know whatever you want with your students, but it keeps students kind of on their toes and realizing okay, this is an interactive bulletin board. It's not just something I stare at when I'm kind of like zoning out in class, although you know that does help too, because they are still looking at those words. True story, I will stop talking now.
Speaker 3:No, you're great, I have to say so. This is totally off topic, but I don't know what it is like handing kids something they can point with or slap with. I don't know what it is. So I have this Pete the Cat pointer in my music classroom this year and I bought it for the little kids but my fifth graders we were doing some rhythm work the other day and I was like, do you guys like Pete the cat? And they're like Pete the cat and like handing them a pointer to identify rhythms on the board, like cause they were able to point with this thing. It was like all of a sudden fifth graders were five again.
Speaker 3:So I give them the fly swatter friends I don't know what it is about having something to point or slap with, but it's a thing for kids.
Speaker 2:I think that is so important because again, going back to this like this is all academic stuff, right, this is so good for them, but we can make it so much more fun and engaging. And your principal is going to walk by and be like what is happening in there? And again you're like, oh, we're working on our sight word recognition and it's like, oh, good for you hitting those goals Right. And then kids are like we're having so much fun, want to play, they're engaged.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love it, so, anyway. So total sidebar there. But those are all super fun ideas that Jessica shared. But I'm going to share one last way to improve sight recognition that doesn't involve games, but it's still super, super helpful.
Speaker 3:So having students say words aloud is so important for them, committing them to memory. So just take every opportunity you can to let your students practice saying words. This is our third way to improve sight recognition, which is to recite for recognition. So to give students practice pronouncing words and using them in context, you can take the words you want them to tackle and have a program, like you know, chat GPT. Write a paragraph or two that just uses all of the words. Read this paragraph to the class and have the whole class read it back to you in a choral reading. Next, you're going to have students take turn reading to each other, to a partner. So if you have time, it's great to extend this by just simply challenging students to write their own paragraphs with the words you're using and then read these new paragraphs to each other. This way, students aren't just reading words but actively using them as well, and when it comes to articles or short stories and even novels.
Speaker 3:Hearing these read aloud can be very helpful for making new words stick for students, and I think we've talked about this on episodes before. But, like reading aloud even in an eighth grade classroom, read to your kids, and it doesn't always have to be you reading right. You can often find really great read alouds online. I used to find some on YouTube that were so good They'd have like the spooky sounds for like telltale heart. That kind of thing Kids love it. You can find them at your local library and then just share those as students are reading along with their texts. So even if you're reading a long novel, you can supplement independent reading with a few chapters being read aloud.
Speaker 2:It's always totally fine. I like that. It's a very simple activity but so effective. And I'm thinking we talked about this I guess it was episode 300 on background knowledge. But that what you just shared would make a really great like into activity for a novel unit or short story unit. If you take the words, you're previewing that, and I guess this was episode 301 too, with the vocabulary. As soon as you're getting used to it, you're giving them a paragraph about background knowledge for the text they're reading Like you're really tying in so many aspects of the reading rope that's, three different skills or strands, right there into one activity and then rinse and repeat it with other short stories. So I love that, yeah.
Speaker 2:So what all these methods that we share? What they have in common is each one really encourages multiple encounters and interactions with words. That's your takeaway, right? That's essential for building a strong sight vocabulary. And again, do not use all of these in a single vocabulary lesson. Pick one, pick two and see how they work for your students and then try something else. Now this actually wraps up our podcast series on Scarborough's reading rope.
Speaker 2:So we should emphasize here, now that we're wrapping it up, is that all the strands that we covered all eight of them are not meant to be taught one at a time or in isolation.
Speaker 2:So you want to keep these reading comprehension elements in mind throughout your year, allowing them to work together to strengthen your students' reading skills over time.
Speaker 2:And it ties back into what I was just saying about. If you use that last activity, megan said, you are tying in background knowledge, you are tying in vocabulary, you are tying in sight recognition in one simple activity, and we hope you come back to these episodes. You use them as inspiration, you get ideas, reach out to us, let us know what you've tried or if you have more questions that you want us to cover. We would love to chat more about it, and we think that you'll find that you're already actually addressing the strands of the reading rope in many ways, and hopefully these will just give like an extra boost to what you're doing with your students to help improve their reading comprehension. So we are truly grateful that you joined us for this whole series. Thank you for spending your time with us, learning from us as we learn from each other as well. So thank you. I don't know if you want to add anything, megan.
Speaker 3:No, it's great. This has been super fun, I think, even for us. You know, just learning some of the nuts and bolts of all of this is super helpful.
Speaker 2:So thanks everybody For sure, yeah, Thank you everyone. And next episode. Actually, we are totally switching gears. We're going to be sharing a literary shuffle activity. Hopefully that piques your interest. It's so fun. You're going to love it. It's I don't know. Just join us. That's all I'll say about it. Have a great week, everyone. Bye everybody.