Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a student tell you that your instruction is boring. This past year, we were doing everything we could to keep students excited during our literacy lessons. Especially when reading and writing are often the hardest tasks for them.  Today, we want to share a strategy that worked really well for us & our students. How we get students excited about what they are learning — When students would rather be doing anything other than reading, we need to get creative when we present reading tasks to them. When working with a hesitant student, we look for subjec ..read more

Do you know how many minutes a day (on average) your students spend learning about literacy versus science and social studies? According to the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education, students spend over 80 minutes a day receiving language arts instruction compared to an average of 21 minutes in science and 18 minutes in social studies. These numbers drop even more significantly when students who are struggling with literacy are pulled from class to receive additional reading instruction. Students need this content area instruction to develop background knowledge, a key contribut ..read more

Have you ever felt like there are a TON of phonics patterns to teach in your literacy instruction? That's because there are! Last week we talked about how we organize our scope and sequence by syllable types to help make our instruction more meaningful for students. If you haven't had a chance to read through that yet, you can find it >>here.<<  Once we have our scope & sequence outlined, we need to dive in and start teaching the patterns.  So…what does SOR-aligned phonics instruction look like? Introducing a New Phonics Pattern Within our syllable type units, we teac ..read more

Well hey there! We’re so glad you’re here. Now over the last month, we’ve been talking all about how to use the Science of Reading and effective reading instruction strategies to support students with varying needs. We’ve talked about supporting students who are reading on grade level, supporting students who struggle with decoding and word recognition, we’ve talked about supporting students who struggle with comprehension, and today we’re going to talk about our last group of students, Students who struggle with word recognition and comprehension Now, when I first started learning about struc ..read more

Hi Friend, All month long, we are talking about the strategies and our favorite resources that we use to support students who struggle to read for different reasons. Last week, we talked about the most effective ways to support on-grade-level readers. This week, we are taking a look at Group B our… Students who struggle with word recognition (or sounding words out for reading & spelling) Research tells us that between 70-80% of students who are struggling with reading specifically struggle with word recognition. In order for these students to read effectively, it is critical that we are ab ..read more

Hi friends, When we look at a reading intervention lesson, there are several components that we should be including in order to target everything that research says we need to target. Today, we want to take a closer look at one of these components. The Sound Drill The sound drill, or phonogram drill as you may have heard it, is when you provide students with a letter and ask them to produce a sound. This helps build the connection between a student’s phonological (sound) processor and orthographic (visual) processor in the brain. The goal here is to build fluency and automaticity so that when ..read more

Hi friend, In the field of reading - phonics is a pretty common term. However, there is much more to phonics & teaching the skills it encompasses than you might think. Today, we are going to break down what exactly phonics is, and how we ACTUALLY should be teaching these skills to our students. Here’s the thing - there’s a LOT of information out there and it can definitely feel overwhelming if you are trying to pull all of this together alone. The good news though? It doesn’t have to be hard! Our goal is to give you a clear framework you can use to implement research-based instruction! Fir ..read more

Hey again friends! Last week we chatted about the first core component of literacy, Phonological Awareness - if you missed it, you can check it out here! Today, we wanted to jump into the second core component of literacy. Phonics Many educators in the field have a love-hate relationship with phonics. In the sense that some educators love a phonics approach one week and hate it the next (it can be extremely difficult to organize it all for Pete’s sake). And…some educators LOVE a phonics-based approach and others hate it in favor of a more whole-language approach. The research is clear, phonic ..read more

The English language can be tricky, there is no doubt about that. With everything that goes into reading and spelling, it’s a wonder our brains can do it at all. I think often we take for granted just what a complex process reading and spelling truly are and we’re asking children to be able to accomplish this task at a really young age and often without strong explicit instruction. Kindergarten teachers are often doing a phenomenal job setting the stage for reading and spelling by teaching the alphabet and the letter sounds. They’re often also doing a wonderful job teaching the sound structur ..read more

Hey, there! We’re so glad that you are interested in learning about the au/aw vowel teams and how we teach them. Vowel teams can be tricky for students to learn and tricky for instructors to teach! This is why we have been diving into how we teach all of these, in the hopes that it will help you and your instruction as well! Teaching the au/aw Vowel Teams Now, if you have been working with us for a while, you’ll know that we LOVE teaching with key images and phrases to help anchor skills for a student. For au/aw, we use the phrase “Yawn, I have to do the laundry.” This phrase helps students r ..read more