Reading Specialist, Savannah Campbell from Campbell Creates Readers, provides a helpful reference guide to phonic acronyms. There are A LOT of acronyms in education. IEP, IDEA, NCLB, NRP. I could go on and on and on. If you are a teacher or parent, it can feel overwhelming! Today, I want to walk you through some…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read MoreAs conversations about effective literacy instruction continue in schools and on social media, questions about the definition, use, and purpose of decodable texts inevitably arise. I’ve even heard these books described as a “battleground”. I recently watched a presentation on literacy to the school committee in a local district, where phonics teaching is currently layered…
Read MoreOver the years, it has become apparent that the Reading Workshop/Guided Reading model of instruction, popular in U.S. schools, does not produce the results promised. Special Education numbers have increased, and many children get labeled, unnecessarily, as having a “reading disability.” It is undoubtedly a huge undertaking to put the brakes on and start fresh.…
Read MoreRegardless of which program or approach to teaching phonics we use, teaching phonics systematically means we follow a particular scope and sequence with its own logic for introducing sound-symbol correspondences and spelling patterns. Many teachers are coming to recognize that when children are given reading material with words that match what they have been taught,…
Read More
Why we need to teach ‘structured and cumulative’ reading instruction In the bad old days before I learned how to teach kids to read, I taught kids to read in a structured way. That is, what I thought was structure: Week 1: letters a, b, c, d Week 2: letters e, f, g, h Week…
Read More
