The background for this blog post and research began with curiosity about my failure to read effectively in elementary school. That failure came to the fore when I became a literacy specialist, delving into other challenges students face that limit their literacy growth. Reading academic literature reinforced that there is more to literacy instruction than just teaching decoding. This post aims to delve into the critical connection between decoding and comprehension in the context of reading. Many "easy" words, sight words, and consonant-vowel-consonant words are more complex than they might a ..read more

Discuss on decoding, comprehension, and memory is a passion of mine. Using poems and books, I am always looking for ways to facilitate comprehension and engage younger students, I often start with simple poems. One such example is: "What a mug of a bug he is to lug his rug along the kitchen floor. Doesn't he know his rug will tug his good things out the door?" While this poem utilizes rhyming words that are easy to read, the meanings may not be immediately apparent to young students. Firstly, the phrase "a mug of a bug" may not be familiar to many children. To aid their understanding, I sugges ..read more

My son struggled with early literacy - so did I. As a child, I grew up reading words unaware that I could not comprehend. I worked out that I struggled with comprehension when our school bought the infamous “SRA” Reading Box – A box of multicolored reading passages that a student read and self-corrected. Now- even now (I’m in my 60’s) - I still recall the effort of reading and failing – to find the correct responses to those reading passages. I just couldn’t do it. AND, no one, no teacher or parent, helped me. The message I received was, “It is your fault. It is your problem.” I know what it i ..read more

Creating Connections to Mindset – Why Students Fail Throughout School My life has been spent teaching the most “vulnerable” students to read.  I will never forget some of my students and the conditions that placed them in the lowest position in school – in the Special Education room – where they completed meaningless worksheets for meaningless grades only to repeat this process every day.  First Case Study:  Amy was eleven when I met her. I recalled watching her sitting in our small “pull-out” classroom. She was loud, boisterous, & engaging. Yet, from what I could see, tota ..read more

In teaching the most vulnerable students, I bring a unique perspective.  Teaching vulnerable students requires educators to look deeper into the struggles & challenges students face. All students who struggle face challenges on various levels. My task is to tease out, explore multiple places where literacy breaks down, and find remedies or interventions to address those issues.  In a world faced with constant change, an overabundance of information, and expectations that every child should be on grade level every year, the work of both parents and teachers is challenging, to say ..read more

So what does “Structured Literacy” or “Balanced Literacy” mean to you as a teacher or parent? Does it mean something slightly different to every person? The final paragraph from the Iowa Reading Research article states: “Finally, high fidelity Structured Literacy can be diagnostic and explicit in nature. Because no assumptions are made about what students can do, no lessons are skipped or considered unimportant. Language learning is cumulative, so glossing over or skipping keystone lessons eventually could erode students’ abilities as they move into more advanced texts. Explicitly teaching c ..read more

“The Reading Wars, The reading wars, Causes me to roar, and snore and think of dinosaurs, Cause while we are fighting, Kids are hiding  in the trenches Because of the reading wars.” Reading Wars come up often in discussion of literacy - the fight between whether we teach the “whole language” OR “phonics” In truth, doing both - using the “whole” and the “parts” are important for teaching children. The difference tends to be the amount of time it takes for the most “vulnerable” children to learn anything.  The reality is that for those who learn to read with ease, how we teach matters ..read more

We’re here to help! An exciting update on Matthew, 17, who I’ve been working with since August 2020. Matthew spent 4 years in a specialist school for dyslexic learners, only to still be non reading- it's a terrible fate. His mother had to sit with him to complete all his school work. Matthew was terrified of meeting yet another new tutor, this time with Zoom, and I had an accent. However, despite these challenges my teaching style and approach worked! I remember our first lesson. I chatted with Matthew, and as he talked, I typed our conversation. Next, I emailed this conversation to him and a ..read more

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