"Cloze the Gap"

A cloze procedure is essentially a "fill-in-the-blanks" activity. Students use clues from the context  or surrounding text to supply words that have been deliberately removed from the text. Activities such as "Cloze the Gap"  facilitate the development of reading and writing skills in comprehension, spelling, fluency, syntax, and word identification.  This is just one way to gain proficiency in using context clues. Many teachers also use the cloze procedure to assess comprehension. You'll see this strategy in most standardized tests.

For more information on rationale and directions for creating and scoring cloze activities, go to:

http://members.tripod.com/~emu1967/cloze.htm

Blends and Digraphs Chart

This chart contains the most common blends, consonant digraphs, clusters, and silent clusters (kn) and an anchor picture for each. It is recommended that teachers/parents use this as a reference for beginning and/or struggling writers. If a child hesitates when writing a word with a blend at the beginning, ask him or her to look at the chart. Do they see a picture of something that starts like the word they're trying to spell? Reproduce and laminate this chart to place in writing folders or to use in small writing groups, and/or for tutorial sessions. Enlarge at Kinkos to poster size and read it like you would the Alphabet Chart for automaticity.

Blends Poster Project

This poster project idea came from Jaime, a first grade teacher. She posted it on www.Teachers.net  and I asked her if she would mind sharing it on this page. It's a great project to enhance the phonemic awareness of initial blends while working together as a family at home. Let me know what you think so that I can pass the compliments on to Jaime. On reflection, I think this project would work well for lots of other skills! Thanks again, Jaime!

Included in the packet: letter to parents, sample and scoring rubric.