free teacher resources

What is the difference between the common cueing strategy animals (e.g., Lips the Fish, Skippy the Frog and Eagle Eyes) and Astute Hoot’s Reading Animal Helpers? There is a tremendous difference!

While the cueing systems approach has been used since the 1960s, it has been proven to be flawed. Cueing guides children to use guessing strategies rather than decoding and phonics skills to read unfamiliar words, which impedes their progress. For more information about the issues with this model, read the article “At a Loss for Words: How a Flawed Idea is Teaching Millions of Kids to be Poor Readers.”

Astute Hoot’s Reading Animal Helpers are NOT cueing strategies. Each of our animal helpers are aligned to research-based strategies and critical literacy skills. Our animals are designed to be used in conjunction with evidence-based reading curriculum to support and enhance instruction, as well as awaken the joy of learning.

Enhancing the Science of Reading: Our lovable animal characters bring the literacy instruction to life, helping the most reluctant students blossom into motivated, enthusiastic learners. Each animal helper has a unique feature and rhyming poem that is used to teach children a specific, standards-based strategy or skill in a purposeful and intentional way. Our Reading Animal Helpers are intended to complement and reinforce instructional approaches backed by the Science of Reading in the areas of phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency and writing. We have found great success with embedding our Reading Animal Helpers within effective reading intervention strategies such as those demonstrated in the Reading Rockets special video series, Looking at Reading Interventions.

Sparking Enthusiasm and Motivation: Seeing the looks of happiness and pure joy on our students’ faces when we use the Reading Animal Helpers just confirms how important it is to include some fun and wonder in our classrooms. Joy can be the center of learning without sacrificing high quality literacy instruction. Given the recent emphasis on social emotional learning, it is now even more evident that as educators we must design our instruction to build student confidence, ease pressures and anxieties, and motivate hesitant or disengaged learners to take healthy risks and fully participate.

Incorporating Innovative Tools and Resources: Our resources include multisensory centers, games, graphic organizers and hands-on tools which have been field-tested and refined in various early childhood classrooms. When using these tools and visuals, students are able to anchor the strategies with our concrete Reading Animal Helpers. This is critical to transferring and applying new skills across settings and a variety of texts from decodable readers to authentic literature and challenging non-fiction books, See some examples of our resources in action alongside a variety intervention curricula such as Equipped for Reading Success (phonemic awareness), Heart Word Magic (orthographic mapping), and Wilson Reading System and Fundations (phonics).

Heidi the High Frequency Word Hedgehog — Heidi the High-Frequency Word Hedgehog helps tricky sight words “stick” by learning the irregular parts of words by “heart” and multi-sensory activities.

Elkonin Box — Sally the Sounding Out Snake helps students blend, segment, and manipulate the sounds to strengthen phonemic awareness as an Elkonin box.

Sally Sounding Out Snake — Sally the Sounding Out Snake enhances magnetic tile boards and keep students engaged during our direct, systematic phonics instruction.

Charlie the Chunking Chipmunk makes syllable division accessible to students.

Sharon the Sequencing Squirrel provides a hands-on visual tool and accompanying graphic organizers to help students retell what they’ve read.

Quinn the Questioning Quail encourages students to monitor their reading comprehension by asking and answering text dependent questions.

Fiona the Fluency Fox encourages students to improve their reading fluency through repeated readings and self reflection of their accuracy, rate, expression and phrasing.

Paco the Pointing Porcupine guides emerging readers to finger point to make the connection between the sounds and printed text.

It truly warms our hearts to see young children blossom into proficient, confident readers who love books! We hope you join us in saying Goodbye to the cueing animals and Hello to our Reading Animal Helpers!

Download this FREE book and FREE poster to introduce your students to the Reading Animal Helpers. We would LOVE to see how you use Astute Hoot to boost your literacy instruction and bring joy to your students too!

With the implementation of Common Core standards and performance-based pay, teachers are under more pressure to perform than ever. Every minute must be devoted to instruction, causing teachers to cut any activity not directly aligned to standards.

This intense pressure starts at the beginning of the year, a vital time to set expectations and establish procedures and routines, or tight transitions. The costliest mistake teachers make is to introduce academics too early without laying the foundation for tight transitions. Many think they are saving time or getting a jump-start on the year; but in reality, this is costing them their most valuable resource—time. Sounds contradictory doesn’t it? Time wasted in poor transitions equates to a great loss of instructional time. It’s the difference between finishing a lesson effectively and running out of time without recapping or closing the lesson, a critical component of effective lessons. Furthermore, messy transitions often invite misbehavior and other disruptions that require teacher redirection, a loss of time. Tightening transitions saves up to 10 minutes daily, which equates to hours of instructional time throughout the year.

It took me years to perfect the art of teaching tight transitions. At first, I couldn’t understand how students didn’t know how to line up—it’s such a simple concept. Why couldn’t they quietly put their materials away or quickly meet at the carpet? After a great deal of professional reading and help from fellow teachers, I realized that I need to explicitly model and teach these transitions starting from day one.

I’ve created the Back to School Teacher Toolbox: Routines, Procedures and Transitions to help all teachers with the critical process. This Toolbox contains engaging, colorful resources and activities that explain how to teach, model, practice, and reinforce important systems and routines throughout the year.

Check out our next week’s Back to School blog: The Do’s & Don’ts of Classroom Management.

free teacher resources

Goodbye Cueing Strategies, Hello Reading Animal Helpers!

The Costliest Mistake Teachers Can Make