Podcast and Blog

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S3 Ep23 - Supporting Your Year 3-6 Team to Board the Bus



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Hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast coming to you from Pataway, Burnie, the lands of the Palawa people.

The road of robust, explicit, structured teaching is not an easy one.  It is full of bumps and sharp turns that can take us by surpriseI say the road of and not the road to, because there is no magical destination where everything is effortless. There is no finish line we cross and then all challenges end.

Helping our teams grow their prac…

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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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Phonics Program Evaluation

S3 Ep22 - How to Choose a Phonics Program



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Hello, hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn, I'm so very pleased to bring you this episode direct from Pataway Burnie, the home of the Palawa people in gorgeous Tasmania.

In last week's episode of the podcast, I shared some thoughts on ways that you can get ready for changes that are coming in the early years reading space. If your school already has a systematic, structured approach to early reading in place, well you're all …

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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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S3 E21 - 5 Ways to Get Ready for the Coming Change



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Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, the place where we dive right into the nitty gritty of bringing structured literacy to life in your school.

I'm recording this episode in mid-June 2024 and there have been some huge announcements recently about how literacy will be taught in two states in particular. Victoria has just announced that all students will learn to read with explicit phonics: that includes 25 minutes of a phonics lesson every day. …

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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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S3 Ep20 - 8 Reasons that the Same Page is a Great Place to be



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Hello there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn and I'm so pleased to welcome you here to this episode.

Now, this is a bit of a shorty one, because I know it's report writing time for teachers in Australia and you don't have time to listen to a big podcast episode, so I'm going to be sharing with you some thoughts that come from a blog post that I wrote in 2021, called Eight Reasons the Same Place Is A Great Place To Be.

One of the …

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S3 Ep19 - How To Make Sure That Your Spelling Instruction Is Explicit



Hello, hello and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Pataway, Burnie, the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn and I'd like to start this episode with some words of encouragement.
So many teachers and leaders are way too hard on themselves. I'm going to bet that includes you. The very fact that you're listening to this podcast means that you want to do a great job for kids.
You're on the bus and you are prepared to …

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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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S3 Ep18 - Explicit Instruction That Doesn't Come At The Expense Of High Flyers


Hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, the podcast where we keep it real about what it's like to shift practice and teach in a way that reflects evidence from research. As much as I'd like to give you a set of general principles about instruction that will work perfectly in every situation in school, I'm afraid it doesn't actually work that way. Yes, there are some considerations and principles about instruction that apply across contexts that w…

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