reading instruction

A quick peek at many a Facebook group just now will reveal that teachers are tired. Not just a little bit tired, but pooped, beat, spent and feeling plain old burnt out. Having just read that first sentence, you might then be wondering why I have decided to write about getting set up for the school year that hasn't even started yet. It's this simple. If you are anything like me, trying to rest and rejuvenate while the 'to do' list is swimming around in your head is a fool's errand. You lie down …

I love vegetable gardening. I love the excitement of seeing seeds germinate and little plants break through the soil. I love watching fruit and vegies grow and ripen to the point where they end up on our dining table. Over the years, I have bought many, many gardening books. I have a whole back catalogue of Grass Roots magazines as well as a book on square metre gardening, backyard self-sufficiency, growing vegetables in tropical climates (when I lived in the tropics), growing vegetables in a co…

For most of my teaching life, I have taught in multi-age and composite classrooms. I was once the lone teacher in a little school where I had pre-school to year 5 in the one room! While all teachers have a range of ‘levels’ in their classroom, multi-age/multi-grade teachers, have a special situation to contend with. Not only do they need to meet students where they are up to in building foundational skills, but they need to meet a range of learning outcomes as outlined by the curriculum. When it…

We hear so many voices when it comes to literacy instruction, particularly reading. We hear from departments of education, opinion writers in the newspapers, professional bodies, unions, governments, social commentators, ‘think tanks’ and people in universities. Some of these voices speak from a place of understanding about research and the importance of taking decisive action in schools.  Some of these voices complain about decodable texts and, as in the case of one recent interview, suggest th…

Many of us are now aware of the importance of background knowledge and vocabulary in comprehension. We have learned that comprehension is not a matter of learning a range of discrete skills that are practised and applied to other texts but of having an understanding of the concepts and vocabulary in texts and applying various cognitive strategies to interact with that text. 

Background knowledge is critical for inference (Stahl, 2014). For example, in the book, ‘Go Go and the Silver shoes’, Go …

Within any class, there will be a range of learners. Some of our students will be fast lane learners, picking up everything we have to offer and running with it. Other students need help every step of the way. They may struggle with memory, attention, phonemic awareness or language production. These students usually work at a slower pace than their peers, requiring more repetitions to commit content to long term memory. They benefit from having learning broken down into smaller chunks with frequ…

One of the key elements of English teaching is syntax which refers to the arrangement of words and phrases in sentences. While it might feel like the concepts around syntax are confusing and never-ending, there are only a finite number of combinations for us to master. When it comes to instruction, we need to teach these concepts and combinations explicitly in teacher led lessons. However, this doesn’t end at the last slide of the PowerPoint presentation. Once we have introduced a concept and gi…

Over the past couple of months, you may have heard me talking about my new venture, The Resource Room. I am so excited to bring this membership into the world and share it with you. 

What is it? 
The Resource Room is a membership site for primary school teachers accessed through a monthly subscription.  

What’s in it? 
The Resource Room provides you with teaching resources for structured literacy across the whole primary school. For too long, upper primary teachers have been neglected in structu…

In an ideal world, students will arrive in your Year 3 or 4 classrooms having strong phonics and word level knowledge. They’ll be reading and spelling a range of words with the full alphabetic code, have knowledge of the alternate spellings of phonemes and know how multimorphemic words are constructed. However, we rarely teach in an ideal world, and it is common to have many of your middle primary students still requiring consolidation of some (or all) of these concepts. This is a common occurre…

A quick look on Pinterest could leave you thinking that the most effective teachers create the cutest resources and do everything from scratch. If you’ve been with me for any length of time, you’ll know I don’t subscribe to that viewpoint. I think that the most effective teachers draw on quality, targeted resources that help give their students the most direct path to learning and save them time so that they have the energy to meet students where they are up to. Last week I wrote about text-base…