reading instruction

When I run online workshops and free PL I often ask, “who finds it difficult to manage the range of student needs in your classroom?” Every single time there are masses of green ticks and thumbs up in the reactions.  It’s usually not that teachers don’t know how to meet students where they are up to, it’s that the quest to do so can leave us feeling like an instructional plate spinner and just when we feel like we’ve got it covered, something else is introduced threatening to bring all of the pl…

School has started back and many foundation teachers are wondering what phonological and phonemic awareness (PA) should look like in the early days of the year.

There are a lot of ideas around about this. Here are just a few.

• Phonological and phonemic awareness develops in a progression of skills that we have to work through one at a time. This means that students need to have learned all of the earlier phonological skills before we begin on phonemic awareness.
• We shouldn’t use a pre-writte…

One of the hardest things for us to fit into our day is listening to every student read aloud. In days gone by, this was a daily feature. Even if students spent much of their time doing busywork or mucking around putting pegs on the end of their fingers during Guided Reading sessions, we at least felt good that we had heard everyone read.  The move away from these groups to more whole class instruction means that teachers feel an understandable anxiety that we aren’t paying enough attention to i…

One of the frequent questions I am asked is, “What does planning look like in structured literacy?” Firstly, let me say that I think that planning is an individual thing.  As a school leader I never mandated particular planning templates, but did provide them for my teachers to use if they chose to. We also bought teachers a nice diary for consistency. I felt that mandating how planning was arranged would likely add to my team’s cognitive load. After all, it’s so much harder to plan and teach …

The start of a new school year is an exciting time to be purchasing all sorts of new resources for reading instruction.   Decodable texts, magnetic letters, whiteboards and new phonics programs are all high on the list of importance.   It’s exciting to receive all of those shiny, new things in our classrooms. When these things are purchased, it feels good. We imagine that having them is going to make a difference to our teaching and our students. And it can.  But it could also, just as easily, n…

If you are a teacher in Australia, there’s a fair chance that you are feeling a degree of worry about what the 2022 school year is going to throw at you.   School communities are going back to the classroom with uncertainty about a range of things including:

• When exactly will we go back?
• Will we be in person or online?
• Will we be expected to teach in a hybrid model?
• What happens if staff or students are covid positive?
• Exactly what will all of this mean for learning?
• How do I prepare for…

This last week I’ve been interviewing teachers for my book, ‘Reading Success in the Early Primary Years: A Teacher’s Guide to Implementing Systematic Instruction’. As well as a summary of the research and in-depth details about how to bring structured literacy to life in your classroom, the book will contain ‘snapshots of practice’ from experienced teachers who have adopted the approach in their classrooms. While these teachers certainly don’t feel like they know it all (who does?), they are far…

2022 is here and it’s time to get clear about what’s important.  Learning to read is a complex process that goes on behind ‘closed doors’. That is, we can see the impact of what we do as teachers, but we don’t see the processes happening inside children’s heads.  Reading instruction is also complex. There are so many moving parts to gold standard reading instruction, especially when we are trying to meet every one of our students where they are up to, that teaching reading can feel like an overw…

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 dow…

In last week’s post I wrote about how you can arrange your structured literacy block to get the biggest bang for your buck.  The inevitable questions that arose from that post were, “how do you differentiate?” and “How do you fit everything in?”

 These two things are separate, but related so I’ll tackle them one at a time and go from there.  The first thing to note is that there is no, single, one way to make all of this happen. I could poll 100 teachers and come up 100 variations of the bloc…