supporting struggling readers

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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…

At a certain point in a child's reading development we start the focus on fluency and one of the signs of a struggling reader is stilted, slow reading even after several years of reading instruction. The Australian Curriculum says that children should be ‘practising fluency’ from foundation the foundation year and ‘using fluency’ from year 1.  I’m really sorry (ok, not sorry) but what on earth does that even mean?   As teachers we are often left to our own devices to interpret what fluency act…

Sometimes our students get stuck in an apparently endless beginning phase of reading, sounding out word by word.  Where other children make steady progress in building fluency, reasonably quickly arriving at the point where they can recognise and read many words, our ‘stuck’ kids make little progress. 

We know that the first step in learning to decode is to use our knowledge of phonics and combine it with our phonemic skills to sound out words. Everyone works through this phase …