Tuesday Tip - Frontload Learning

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss daily review in the classroom, and how it is important and can be used to prepare students for upcoming lessons, helping struggling learners by reinforcing previously taught concepts to better manage new material.

Video Transcript

Daily review is an incredibly important and valuable structure to have in your classroom. But had you thought about the fact that you can use that review time to frontload for extension and learning to come? Here's an example of how you might do that. Let's say you've taught three graphemes for the sound <a> ay, ai, and the vowel split E or split diagraph A.

You know that coming up is the open syllable A, or just the A by itself, that long A, that is in multiple multi-syllable words like label and baby. To get your students ready, particularly those who have vulnerable memories, who might be a struggling learner, who really just benefit from a little bit of extra practice, you can use the review of the week before to touch on what you've already taught and practice it, so that when it comes to teaching that open syllable A, or the long vowel A here, and you put it all together, it means that those students are much better equipped to manage the cognitive load of what you're teaching.

They can then spend their time thinking about how do I know which A I'm supposed to use? And doing all of that metacognitive really in-depth thinking about spelling. Of course, the week after, you are then going to review all of the a sounds or the all the A graphemes that the students know.

This is a way to support all of your students, but particularly your strugglers. This will help you keep more of your students together in that main group of learners and reduce the need for small group work.

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