Teaching beginning readers is an awesome experience. Seeing kids learn to use many different strategies to help them learn to read is one of my favorite things.
I work with a large population of English Language Learners, so in addition to learning to read, many of them are learning English. This added an extra challenge for the beginning readers in my class. As I was working with my kindergarten students, I was noticing that many of them were having trouble applying the reading strategies I wanted them to practice. When I prompted them to “look at the picture” or “make the beginning sound” they couldn’t because they did not remember the name of the object in the picture.