Podcast and Blog
teaching reading
S4 Ep16 - Summer Series - Research to the Classroom: Dyad Reading Part 1 (The Research)
Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. It's Jocelyn here, and I am so pleased to welcome you this week.
One of the things I remember so vividly is being in school as a teacher and then leader, really wanting to keep up with readings and research and just not having the bandwidth to be able to do it. So we've started a brand new series for you, called Research to the Classroom. It's a series of three episodes on a topic, the first episode being dis…
S4 Ep15 - Summer Series - Five Ways to Get Ready for the Coming Change
Getting your team on the bus of consistent, explicit teaching in the early years is no easy task. A few years ago, I developed a course called Reading Success in the Early Primary Years and a little while later, published a book with the same name through Routledge, a well-known academic publisher. I am so pleased to announce that I'm running this highly practical online course again in 2025, to help your team build a more robust understanding of what structured l…
S4 Ep13 - Let's Talk Year 3-6 Reading Assessment and Grading
Hi there. Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast recoded here in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. I’m Jocelyn and I want to say a huge hello to all teachers and leaders grappling with assessment and reporting. Last episode of the podcast, I shared a perspective on reporting and grading early years reading without a benchmark assessment. In the old days, we assessed students, looked at the level and then used that to determine what A-E grade students r…
S4 Ep12 - The Secret to Grading Early Years Reading
Hi there, I'm Jocelyn and I'd like to welcome you to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, recorded here on the lands of the Palawa people of Tasmania.
Here in Australia, it is Term 4 and the end of the school year is just a few weeks away. That means that teachers and leaders will be turning their attention to assessment and grading in preparation for report writing. So in this episode, I’d like to share some thoughts and suggestions on grading early …
S4 Ep10 - Instructional Spring Cleaning - Timers During Classroom Fluency Work
Well, hello there and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania, the land of the Palawa people.
In this latest mini-series, I've been doing a little bit of spring cleaning. So far, we've looked at the idea of classroom news for oral language development and one student coming up to the front of the room during phonics lessons.
Today, I'm sharing my thoughts on something that impacts all grades in the primary school, t…
Tuesday Tip - #2 Affirmed Students are Engaged Students
In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss consistently using affirmation, praising students for their efforts to boost confidence and encouraging positive interactions among peers.
Video Transcript
Hey there, it's Jocelyn with tip number two about maintaining high engagement in low variance instruction. My tip today is about injecting affirmation. Everybody wants to feel good about what they do. And we all love being told that we've done a good job. So, when your students do something right…
Tuesday Tip - #1 Manage Your Own Response
In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss that a lively and positive attitude from teachers can significantly boost student engagement in a low variance lesson.
Video Transcript
Hey there, it's Tuesday and time for a tip. We're doing a little series of tips about how to maintain high engagement in low variance lessons. And this is tip number one.
If we want children to be enthusiastic about learning, we have to manage our own attitude. If we announce our reading lesson by saying, Okay, come o…
Tuesday Tip - Transcription at Student Level
In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss encouraging students to represent their knowledge at their current transcription level, rather than forcing them to write full texts.
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to this week's Tuesday Tip. When we're working with our young writers or writers of any age at all, it can feel like there's a huge amount of pressure to get everybody writing a full text, whether they have the transcription skills for that or not. One of the ways that you can shif…
Tuesday Tip - Be Strict When Assessing Phonics
In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss being careful with assessment in phoneme grapheme correspondence, stressing not to prematurely label students and to ensure they can quickly and confidently connect graphemes to phonemes during evaluations.
Video Transcript
Hello there. Welcome to another Tuesday Tip. My name is Jocelyn. When we're assessing our students, one of the things we need to really be careful of is to make sure that we don't say they have something until they actually…
Tuesday Tip - Continuous Sound Blending
In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss teaching children to blend sounds using continuous phonemes first, before introducing stop sounds.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone, I'm Jocelyn and it's time for another Tuesday Tip. We all know that when we're helping our young children to learn to read, that we are going to have a few who struggle to learn how to blend with graphemes. So if the children are able to blend orally, so you can say, m-a-t, and they can tell you that that's "mat", the…