News & Information

Organizing decodable books

Trays containing decodable books

What’s the best way to organize your decodables? There are many different ways to go about this. Here, K-5 reading specialist, Savannah Campbell, shares some helpful tips and tricks to make your classroom library user friendly.   Now that you have decodables, how do you organize them? I’m lucky to live in a district that…

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Consonant Blends (Adjacent Consonants) – Speaking and Spelling

Using tiddly frogs for segmenting activity

Systematic Phonics programs now talk of  ‘consonant blends’ or ‘adjacent consonants’, but what are they? Why is it that the letters ‘bl’ in the word ‘black’ are adjacent consonants while ‘ck’ are not? Speech and language therapist, Hema Desai explains the difference and suggests fun, multisensory activities to embed learning. As a speech and language…

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Moon Dogs Extras – An Independent Review

Ann Sullivan of Phonics for Pupils with Special Educational Needs, is an experienced SEND teacher, who has created her own phonics programme specifically for SEND children.  This is what she has to say about our latest set of Books: Moon Dogs Extras for Catch-Up Readers. If there is one question I am asked more than…

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Summer reading doesn’t have to be a struggle – simple tips to stop the slide!

Our kids are out for summer, and now all learning rests squarely on the parents’ shoulders. I know that it can be daunting. You want to make sure your child doesn’t lose any of the skills they’ve learned, but you aren’t always sure of the best way to help during the summer. So today, I…

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Lynbrook School District: A Successful First Year!

In the latest blog post in this series, Guest blogger, Faith Borkowsky discusses her observations and recommendations for any school district considering the transition to a Science of Reading based instruction practice.  The importance of choosing a science-based reading program that is coupled with high quality, carefully aligned decodable books and resources and backed with…

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Part 4: Hollywood Here We Come! From documentary teaser release to the beginning of editing – The Truth About Reading

In Part 4 of this series of guest blogs by Nora Chahbazi, literacy consultant (pro bono) via the John Corcoran foundation to The Truth About Reading documentary team and Founder of EBLI, talks about the the excitement surrounding the release of the documentary teaser. On September 22, 2021, the teaser for The Truth About Reading documentary was premiered at a…

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Bridging phonics and phonemic awareness to build proficient readers

Phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge are the biggest indicators of how well a child will learn to read in the first two years of school. Yet phonemic awareness and letter-sound knowledge are NOT the end goal. Our end goal will always be proficient readers. To reach that end, we must work to instruct children on…

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Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9: How to build decoding skills to read multisyllabic words

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the US Department of Education periodically issues free practices guides for teachers. They convene a panel, review the research, and formulate general recommendations based on the evidence. What I like about these practice guides is that they are concise, accessible, and practical. The goal is not to get…

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Cultural shift from letter names to sounds

Happy Spring!! The weather is getting warmer, the flowers will be in bloom, and the Kindergarten Center teachers are wondering when it will be time to teach letter names! For those of you who did not read, “Lynbrook Takes the Lead on Long Island,” the Lynbrook School District is revamping its reading curriculum and is…

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Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious – scaffolding the teaching of multisyllabic words

Scaffolding the teaching of multisyllabic words –  simple to complex Many teachers are focused on teaching kids how to sound out graphemes (spellings) and to blend sounds together into words.  They will even be teaching kids how to manipulate phonemes in phonemic awareness activities. These are all essential underlying skills necessary for learning to read. …

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