Videos

19 posts

Teaching Tip: Making Words: an Update

April 12, 2023 teaching tips videos

Making Words is an engaging word building activity that helps link your students’ knowledge of letter-sound relationships with phonemic awareness. If you have used this activity in the past, you kn...

Teaching Tip: Shared Reading in Kindergarten

April 6, 2022 literacy footprints teaching tips videos

Shared reading provides a wonderful opportunity to guide and support students as they read aloud together from a large version of text. Our kindergarten students enter school with a wide variety of...

Teaching Tip: Accelerate, Not Remediate

May 6, 2021 literacy footprints teaching tips videos

I eavesdropped on my granddaughter Mae’s remote first grade class this morning and felt awed by how comfortable the class seemed with participating and conversing online. Mae is doing great, and th...

Teaching Tip: Learning with Kyliee

March 16, 2021 teaching tips videos

I am noticing that we have many Emergent readers spending a long time reading at Levels A and B. If we want to accelerate learning, we need to move students quickly out of the highly patterned text...

Teaching Tip: Teach for Transfer

November 19, 2020 teaching tips videos

One of the positive, yet unexpected, outcomes of COVID-19 has been the opportunity for me to work regularly with my grandchildren (and great-nieces!) on their reading. My granddaughter Mae, a first...

Teaching Tip: Video Book Introductions

April 22, 2020 teaching tips videos

Hi everyone, Since the Literacy Footprints Digital Reader launched last week, I have been looking for a way to create engaging book introductions to accompany the digital reader in a format that di...

Teaching Tip: Guided Writing: Learning about the Main Idea and Key Details

February 13, 2020 teaching tips videos

Guided writing is a powerful part of the guided reading lesson. Evidence shows that high-quality writing instruction can improve students’ reading comprehension, reading fluency, and word-solving s...

Teaching Tip: Learning to Apply What You Have Learned

January 20, 2020 teaching tips videos

Phonics has been in the news a lot lately. It’s very important that we teach phonics. I don’t think any teacher disputes this! But phonics is not a goal in and of itself. We teach students phonics—...

Teaching Tip: Getting Guided Reading Lessons Started

August 23, 2018 literacy footprints teaching tips videos

With the beginning of the school year in mind, I’m sharing my tips for getting Guided Reading lessons going early. Check out the video below! Happy Teaching! -Michèle

Teaching Tip: Organizing Your Classroom Library for Young Readers

August 13, 2018 literacy footprints teaching tips videos

I, like many educators, cannot believe how quickly summer passes! Nevertheless, back-to-school time is here, and many teachers are putting the final touches on their classrooms for this year. I tho...

Hi, my name is Michèle Dufresne. Welcome to my teaching blog! I am passionate about helping children learn to read. I am an author, educational consultant, literacy specialist, and former Reading Recovery Teacher Leader. I have cowrittten with Jan Richarson the best-selling book The Next Step Forward in Word Study and Phonics and the Literacy Footprints Guided Reading System and have authored over 800 titles for young readers, including the ever-popular Bella and Rosie stories and many of the titles in the Explore the World nonfiction series.