The Beanie Babies Program is a reading program designed for Cycle 1 elementary classrooms, to work in tandem with classroom reading practice routines, such as a silent reading or team reading routine. It utilizes stuffed animals in order to teach a wide variety of decoding and comprehension strategies to help young students learn to read. The program is comprised of a series of Beanie Babies, each assigned a particular reading strategy. For example, the Stretchy Snake beanie baby is assigned the stretching strategy in which the reader stretches out each syllable of a word, sounding it out, in order to help read the word as a whole; The Questioning Owl would encourage students to ask questions about what their reading in order to further comprehension, and so forth. Various posters can be placed around the classroom explaining the strategies connect with each animal. The students are then assigned an animal to help remind them of the connected strategy as they practice their reading.
This program works off of assuming that the students have knowledge of the graphemic structure of the English language, as well as the phonemes associated with each grapheme. With this prior knowledge in mind, the program teaches students strategies to use these graphemes and corresponding phonemes to decode and comprehend language. These
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The play like element to this program is sure to get young students excited about reading and engaging both their tactile senses with the physical object, and aural senses with the alliterations found in most beanie baby names is sure to help activate their memories in a fun way that will have students learning without even realizing it! When used in combination with the classroom reading routine, this program is sure to help many students nail down those reading strategies and become strong