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S4 Ep15 - Summer Series - Five Ways to Get Ready for the Coming Change



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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…

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TT - Transcription at Student Level

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…

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TT - Be Strict When Assessing Phonics

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…

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TT - Continuous Sound Blending

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…

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TT - How do I help my students improve fluency?

Tuesday Tip - Improve Fluency

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss helping struggling readers improve fluency by identifying and underlining text, fostering independent thinking and fluency development.


Video Transcript

Welcome to this week's Tuesday Tip. Now you might not know, but I've worked with struggling readers for about 15 years now. Actually they're my favourite students to work with. And one of the things that I see happen with them is they learn the phoneme-grapheme correspondence. They learn their word le…

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Tuesday Tip - Evaluate Student Engagement

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss the concept of children actively doing in the classroom.

Video Transcript

Jocelyn here with a Tuesday Tip. This is number four in our series about maintaining high engagement in low variance instruction. And today's tip is about making sure that children have enough to do. In the words of Anita Archer, explicit teaching is about, I do something, you do something. I say something, you say something.

Watching, copying, learning, listening, they, and just doin…

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Tuesday Tip - Avoid Suffixing Shortcuts

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss suffixes and avoiding using shortcuts when teaching students.


Video Transcript

It's Jocelyn here with a Tuesday tip. It's easy to fall into the trap of sharing shortcuts with children about how words are spelled. So perhaps the word raked comes up. Well, you might say, well, we have to add the suffix -ed, but there's already an E there, so just whack a D on the end. Well, that actually doesn't help children understand how that particular convention works.

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Classroom with Student with Raised Hand and Teacher

S3 Ep17 - Do Nonsense Words have a Place in Upper Primary?



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Hi there, it's Jocelyn here, and I'm so pleased to welcome you to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, where we talk about teaching, leading and literacy. This podcast is recorded here in Pataway, Burnie, and I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which I work and live, the home of the Palawa people. One of the points of contention in adopting a structured approach to teaching literacy is nonsense words. These words, which…

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TT - Aim for Functional Understanding, Not Perfection

Tuesday Tip - Aim for Functional Understanding, Not Perfection

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss function over perfection.


Video Transcript

Hi everyone. It's Tuesday and here's my tip. The goal of word study in the primary school is not to teach a full linguistics course to our students or to teach them every single thing about every word. It is to help them have a functional understanding of how words work so that they can use this knowledge later in their own work.

So when you're deciding how deep do I go in the explanation here? How much do I have…

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Teacher Showing Students Paper

S3 Ep13 - How to Engage Reluctant Students in the Classroom




Hello to you and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in beautiful Pataway, Burnie. My name is Jocelyn and it's wonderful to have you here with me. We have all known a student who we believed can perform skills, such as reading and writing, and have become frustrated when, day in, day out, they produce very little work or appear to be making very little effort to engage in the work we've assigned. I've heard the followin…

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