Podcast and Blog

The end of the 2021 school year is upon us and many of us are turning our thoughts to what will happen in 2022.   In my last post I talked about different aspects of getting ready for structured literacy instruction and shared a reflection template and action plan for individuals and teams to work through.   This week I’d like to address what it looks like to support teachers through this journey at their various stages of development.

Just as there is no one size fits all for student learning,…

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…

This post has previously been published, and has been republished on 27/11/2021

It is report time in Australia right now and tens of thousands of parents are either reading, or about to read about their child’s academic progress over the last two terms.  All schools in Australia are required to grade children’s academic results on a 5 point scale.  In many schools this is represented through A – E grades, with a C grade meaning that the student has learned to complete the skill or task reason…

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…

It’s one thing to understand the basic of a systematic phonics lesson and the need to use decodable texts, and it’s another thing to know where that all fits in with the big picture of the literacy block. In this post I’m going to briefly outline the what, when, why and how long of what one option for a literacy block set up could look like.

Daily Review – approximately 15 minutes

Your daily review is a short, quickly paced chance to consolidate phoneme/grapheme correspondences, blending, segm…

It’s a great thing that our understanding of the role of phonological and phonemic awareness has increased in recent times.  This shift in awareness means that the largest number of children possible have the active ingredients necessary to learn to read well.  Phonological and phonemic awareness is divided into two sections:

• Phonological sensitivity – the awareness of language units larger than phonemes. This includes syllables, rhyming, onsets and rimes, phrases and words.
• Phonemic awarene…

This week I had the great pleasure of presenting for Think Forward Educators.  This excellent organisation is committed to bringing quality, accessible information to us teachers about the science of learning and the science of reading.  It’s completely free to join. Members enjoy access to all previous webinars and presentations as well as a terrific array of resources and guides. You can find Think Forward Educators (and access the recording of my presentation from this week) here. 

Before th…

There’s a curious phenomenon that many teachers experience when they begin to shift practice towards structured literacy.  They start to do a bit of reading before quickly ‘going down the rabbit hole’. After a little while they come to understand (or hope they understand) the fundamentals of the evidence of reading instruction, then something funny happens. Suddenly, they feel lost and begin to doubt every single move they make.  They second guess every decision, every moment of instruction and …

If we were to go for a visit to many a local school we would likely find a great deal of variation in reading instruction from one classroom to the next.  It’s not uncommon for one teacher to be using one program for phonics and decoding and another to be using something different. Even if both of these programs are evidence informed, this difference in programs and approach is problematic.   In far too many schools, teachers are left on their own to ‘figure out’ how best to teach reading.  This…