Today’s teaching tip works with dashes, but it also generally applicable to what we do all day: introduce something before your students encounter it. A good example of this is vocabulary. If you know ahead of time that there is a word that is going to trip your student up when you are reading aloud to her, tell her before the reading. This way, she doesn’t have the inclination to interrupt the reading to ask you what the word means. In a sense, this just means that teaching asks us to be prepared.

So when it comes to Teaching Reading with Bob Books, we take this approach all the time, don’t we? We introduce new phonics rules and punctuation before they see them, right?

So today, it’s the mighty DASH. In Bob Books Set 5 Book 3, the dash is used for the first time. A couple words (butterfly and buttercup) run off the end of the line, but instead of moving them to the next line, the words are broken up with a dash. This means we introduce the dash before we teach this book.

Got it?

Good.

For this one, we don’t use a binder card. Just grab a piece of paper or a white board — something to write on — and show how these words work. Show that it’s the same word with a dash in it — read and pronounced the same way — as it is without the dash. Your student will be a pro in no time!