The Learning Spark

Teaching my kindergartners to read was so frustrating my first year. As kindergarten teachers, we naturally focus a lot on phonics.  After all, our main objective is to teach students the alphabet!  We spend a lot of time drilling and practicing letter names and sounds.  So, after spending so much time on letter/sound instruction, I'd bring small groups of students to the reading table and would give them books provided by our big box curriculum.  Suddenly, I had to tell students to stop sounding out the words and basically throw everything out the window that we had previously been learning. Example of a "repetitive" or "predictable" text. Another example of a "repetitive" or "predictable" text. "Oh, this word you can't sound out. Look at the picture, does it give you a clue?" I was so frustrated that these stories could not be read without me telling them the sentence pattern or having them look at the pictures fo