teaching vocabulary

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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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00:00:00
Introduction.
Well, hello. Hello. It's Jocelyn here. Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. The place where we discuss everything about structured literacy and the complexity of making it happen in our schools and classrooms. I'd like to begin by paying my respects to the Palawa people of Tasmania and particularly the people of Padaway Burnie, where this episode is recorded.

00:02:25
Today's topic - Questions from our Facebook Group.
In this episod…

In  a previous post about vocabulary, I discussed how we can choose great Tier 2 words and suggested a couple of ways that we might teach them. You can read that post here.

This week, I’d like to unpack a little more from the absolutely fantastic book, ‘Bringing Words to Life’ and share more about how we can make it all happen in our classrooms.

The first thing to know is that there are three phases to vocabulary instruction.

• Introducing the words
• Working with the words
• Keeping the word…

In last week’s post I shared with you some key insights from my recent conversations with Margaret McKeown and Pamela Snow.  These amazing women very generously gave their time to help all of us better understand what it takes to teach vocabulary and language well.  Some of the key messages from these conversations involved the fact that you can’t teach all the words and that there are no set ‘word lists’ to teach from.  There have been some academic words lists compiled as guidance around this,…