Teaching Reading and Writing

Bilingual Kindergarten teacher, First grade teacher and Reading Recovery teacher

Robin Shelton

I taught in a bilingual classroom for many years. The majority of my students spoke Spanish as a first language and were learning English as a second language. In the morning I taught my students to read in Spanish and in the afternoon I taught them English. At the time it was difficult for me to find Spanish materials for teaching reading in Spanish and English material that was geared toward English learners. So I decided to make my own.

I wanted learning to read for my students to be easy and fun, so I made fun little characters and simple stories with relatable little twists. Since my students were English learners I supported the text with illustrations that were familiar and avoided using names like Nat or arcane words like Vat. I avoided making pattern books, since some of my students tended to learn the pattern and not read the words.

As a Reading Recovery teacher I learned the importance of early skills such as one-to-one correspondence and blending. The books I made support these early skills and helped my students easily master the basics. The emergent books slowly increase in difficulty with longer and more complex sentences while slowly adding new words yet still revisiting the previously learned words. My students loved these little books and read them over and over in class and at home.

For our writing program, my colleagues and I developed writing units that were centered around a theme, with lots of support and guidance so that our students felt successful each step of the way. We began with oral language support, forming sentences and learning new vocabulary, then worked on handwriting, spelling, drawing and finally paragraph writing. Our students enjoyed making an art project to go along with their final paragraph which we would display around our classrooms.

Over the years my students found a lot of success in their reading and writing learning journeys. With materials that support their learning it makes the job easy. I hope your students can also find success in their learning to read and write journeys.