The Reading Journey Academic Learning Center
"organize, concentrate, and learn"
Examples
Teaching Borrowing (Subtraction Regrouping)
This is a tough concept to learn for students with directional, spacial, or place value weakness.
It took 25 years of teaching regrouping to students with all kinds of manipulatives and visuals and strategies before a student shared a method she learned in her class. Once the concept has been taught and retaught, it can then be practiced with an easy storyline that takes all of the confusion and reversals out of the equation. "I have 4. You want 6. Do I have enought? No. Go next door and borrow. Scratch it out...etc...etc"
After a few days with the storyline it is memorized and the guesswork is gone!
Teaching r-controlled vowels-
ar, or, er/ir/ur
(When a vowel comes before an r together they make a new unexpected sound.)
We play a hilarious game of Go Fish in which a pair is a word with an r-controlled vowel and one that is the opposite. Ex: trip/tirp Obviously it has many nonsense words that make the activity even more challenging. This is extremely difficult to master because readers look at words so quickly that their brain often doesn't register which side the r is on. Also directionality could be a weakness.
Recently a student stopped right in the middle of playing the game and said, "I know. The r is the remote control and the vowel is the tv. The remote can only control the tv if it is sitting after it." So she drew up the visual of the humpy r turning into a remote control and drew the tv around all the vowels. Remarkable! That's how children teach US.