In this column for American Educator, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham defines critical thinking and provides strategies for fostering thinking in the everyday classroom. Willingham defines critical thinking in three ways stating it must be: novel, self-directed and effective and that it is the third attribute that makes it difficult as what constitutes effective thinking varies…
In this Occasional Paper Series from Education Future Frontier, cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham takes a deep dive into the science behind teaching critical thinking and offers strategies such as understanding the domain knowledge required for understanding, creating conditions for transferable skills, and understanding the structure of the problem, to help students gain and use critical…
In this lesson, students grasp online advertising’s essence and marketers’ creation of captivating virtual spaces for children. After learning advertising techniques, students partake in an online game, practically simulating a website promoting the fictional cereal Co-Co Crunch. This hands-on exercise applies learned strategies, showcasing comprehension of advertising methods. Through active participation, students gain insights into…
This instructional content is tailored for educators guiding students through the lesson. It introduces students to the concept that media can be misleading and encourages exploration of how creators intentionally frame media presentations, prompting contemplation of what remains beyond the scope. The objectives of this session encompass acquainting students with the unreliability of certain online…
Curious about how sounds are represented in print? Not sure about what the most common spelling is for a phoneme? This handout provides the most frequent spellings for the vowel phonemes in English.
Wanting to up your read aloud game? This lesson plan from Dr. Stephanie Stollar will support you in maximizing vocabulary and comprehension in your read alouds.
Dr. Stephanie Stollar developed a free set of presentation slides outlining basic findings in the science of reading. Slides, speaker notes, and handouts are provided.
Contrary to popular belief, students should not be taught to memorize irregular words by sight. In most irregular words, only one or two letters do not conform to their usual sound correspondence. This means that most irregular words are at least partially decodable. This is a printable collection of irregular word cards.
What if you only had to teach 20 sight words from the Dolch list? Guess what? You can–because the other 200 words are completely decodable.
Often, high-frequency words are called “sight words” with the expectation that these words are irregular and must be memorized. Integrating high-frequency words into phonics lessons allows students to make sense of spelling patterns for these words. To do this, high-frequency words need to be categorized according to whether they are spelled entirely regularly or not….
Elkonin boxes build phonemic awareness skills by segmenting words into individual sounds, or phonemes. To use Elkonin boxes, a child listens to a word and moves a token into a box for each sound or phoneme. In some cases different colored tokens may be used for consonants and vowels or just for each phoneme in…
Dr. Stephanie Stollar explains set for variability in this brief video. Set for variability is the set of skills that allow students to correct close approximations while decoding.
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