Topic: Daily Lit Bit

Assessment is not teaching; it is gathering information for teaching.

Daily read-alouds create shared meanings among a group and contribute to a sense of community.

In a cohesive learning community, whoever is working in the school should be creating a vision, goals, and language together.

Whole-group time builds a sense of community as students meet together to share learning.

As you implement phonics, spelling, and word study lessons, you will not only learn more about children's development of word-solving strategies but you will also gain invaluable insight into our English linguistic system.

During reading minilessons, the teacher presents specific, explicit instruction to help children become independent readers for life.

It is important that early in their lives as readers, children learn the power of choice. Only through choice can they develop tastes and preferences, learn that they like some writers better than others, and experience finding a great book that they can recommend to their friends.

Fill your classroom library with many texts your students can read independently. Quantity matters. The higher the quality of the texts they read and comprehend, the stronger their foundation for talking and writing.

For independent reading, students learn how to select books for themselves that interest them and that they can read with understanding and fluency.

Minilessons place a strong instructional frame around independent reading.

A reading minilesson is a concise and focused lesson on any aspect of effective reading or classroom reading work that is important for students to explicitly understand at a particular point in time.

In the highly supported participation during shared reading, children find out how it feels to be a reader.

Shared Reading reinforces and embodies an essential message of the classroom: we can do this together!

In Shared Reading, students go beyond active listening and discussing to participate in the reading.

In any coherent system of literacy learning, phonics, spelling, and word study are not the end goal. Instead, these important understandings contribute to children's competence and ease in reading and writing continuous text.

In Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study, children learn how words work in and out of texts.

The true purpose and promise of phonics instruction is to expand and refine children's reading and writing power.

Interactive read-aloud allows students to be exposed to complex language patterns while developing deep comprehension.