Teaching Reading and Writing with a Smartboard

At the core of a child’s academic development is their literacy level. Forming a solid baseline knowledge of reading and writing is one of the most important things a teacher can do. However, it’s possible to forget how challenging learning to read and write for the first time can be. After all, teachers have spent a large part of their training and careers internalizing much of the process.

Unlike mathematics or the sciences, breaking reading and writing down into clear and logical steps is not always easy. Many educators fall into the trap of assigning reading and writing for homework too early. Competent literacy skills are built in the classroom and there are a number of strategies educators can use to teach these essential skills.

5 Strategies for Teaching Reading and Writing with a Smartboard/Digital Whiteboard

With the introduction of digital whiteboards, making learning to read and write appealing and engaging has never been easier. Below, we’ve suggested 5 strategies that will help to enhance and direct your reading and writing lessons with a smartboard. However, many of the ideas discussed below can be applied to classrooms without them.

1. Think about Phonemes and Phonics

Understanding how to read and write an alphabetic language via the relationships between spoken sounds of the language, or phonemes, is one of the basic building blocks of literacy teaching. Talking always comes before reading, so phonemic awareness in the classroom is essential. With the aid of a digital whiteboard, you can easily create interactive games that will heighten a student’s phonemic understanding and teach critical phonic skills.

With Explain Everything’s clipart library, you could create a set of image pairs to help students identify rhyming words, gather a set of images that need to be organized into beginning or end sounds, or create recordings of certain words and get your classroom to write and spell the word they hear. Interactive teaching technology can help children to grasp spelling, prefixes, and suffixes more quickly and efficiently.  

2. Get Creative

Creative writing is one of the best ways to engage students in the practice of writing. Not only does it give them the chance to express themselves and connect the experience of writing with their own personal interests, but it also helps them to order and structure their thinking and critical faculties. Guided by a teaching professional, creative writing offers students the opportunity to expand their vocabulary and practice spelling, experiment with new sentence structures, and apply grammar correctly.

With a digital whiteboard, one strategy for guided and effective creative writing is to display a collection of images, words, and grammatical symbols, and task the classroom with creating a short story with these elements. Equally, short creative writing sessions where students write a response to an image, video, or animation, are an ideal way to fill spaces between lessons and practice vital literacy skills.

Remember, reading and writing complement each other, so, if possible, give students the chance to write about a text that they’re currently studying.

3. Active Vocabulary Learning

Giving students the chance to actively build their vocabulary, as opposed to passively learning new words, will allow them to progress their reading and writing skills more quickly. There are a number of different strategies that can make the process of learning a new word or phrase more active and engaging. In today’s digital world, there’s no need to break out a dictionary and transcribe definitions.

A staple of teaching vocabulary today is collaborative writing.In groups or as a classroom, you can write something together, allowing you to model the writing process towards using new words. You can equally use your smartboard as a kind of mural or graffiti wall. You can post words in one part and ask the class to contribute synonyms on the other side.

For a truly interactive vocabulary lesson, you could even get your students to record short videos about a new word they’ve found and then present them to your class as a small movie on your smartboard.

4. Fluent Reading

Many teachers aim to make their students “fluent” readers, who read in the same way they speak and speak in the same way they read. This also means that a pupil can read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. The only sure way to do this is to give your students multiple opportunities to read and be exposed to what fluency sounds like.

Traditionally, this might involve a teacher reading to their students, or having the classroom take turns in reading short passages. As good as this is, digital whiteboard technology can help make this more engaging. For example, an activity could involve visualizing where to put emphasis in sentences, taking audio recordings of students reading a passage and correcting it, or providing the classroom with a few sentences that have no punctuation and letting them decide what punctuation to use to create emphasis.

5. Visualizing Reading Comprehension

Comprehension and the task of processing a text can be a difficult thing to learn. Re-reading, reflecting, and marking up a text is not something that comes naturally to most students; it often requires a lot of practice. A good way to teach comprehension is to physically draw diagrams (like Venn diagrams of plot points or character traits) and annotate a chosen document with concise notes.

This can be done easily with Explain Everything’s collaborative whiteboard space, whether it’s on the student’s own device or collectively on the smartboard in the classroom. You can add colors and create diagrams with just a few clicks.

Conclusions

Integrating smartboard technology into the teaching of reading and writing opens up a realm of possibilities to enhance students’ literacy skills in an engaging and effective manner. The five strategies outlined—emphasizing phonemes and phonics, fostering creativity in writing, actively expanding vocabulary, promoting fluent reading, and visualizing comprehension—demonstrate the versatility and transformative impact of digital whiteboards in the classroom. By adopting these strategies, educators and teachers can create dynamic and interactive lessons that not only make the learning process enjoyable but also lay a solid foundation for students’ literacy development. Contact us today to see how Explain Everything can help enhance students’ learning experiences.

FAQs for Teaching Reading and Writing with a Smartboard/Digital Whiteboard

Reading and Writing Learning Styles?
There are a number of different reading and writing learning styles. A read-and-write learner will prefer to use notes, textbooks, and class handouts to learn. They will also make use of other reference materials like dictionaries and benefit from repeatedly rewriting notes from classes.