reading instruction

Subscribe to the Podcast

Introduction.
Hi there. Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, coming to you from Pataway Burnie here in gorgeous Tasmania. I'm Jocelyn Seamer, and I'm so pleased that you've decided to join me for today's episode. Before we begin, I'd like to ask a favour of you. If you find value in the Structured Literacy podcast, can you please do the usual rating and subscribing, and then can you hop on your socials and share your favourite episode? Our purpose in produc…

Subscribe to the Podcast

00:00:00
Introduction
Hi there. Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. It's Jocelyn here bringing you this episode from Tasmania, the home of the Palawa people. If you are a teacher in Australia or New Zealand, it's the start of Semester 2, 2023, and it's time to have a think about what you are hoping to accomplish over the rest of the year. If you're listening from the Northern Hemisphere, you are heading towards a new school year, this post will be just as help…

Subscribe to the Podcast

Transcript Summary

Myth No. 1 -  learning to read is as natural as learning to speak.
Myth number one is that learning to read is as natural as learning to speak, and this is where this idea that if we just immerse children in rich text, if we have language-rich environments for them to grow up in, then all will be well and they'll learn how to read. That's where this comes from. 

Now, it's absolutely flawed, and I'm going to read to you a paragraph from my book, R…

Subscribe to the Podcast

Transcript Summary

Some people think that morphology should be taught from day one of foundation. They tend to think that people should only be exploring words and phoneme-grapheme correspondences through the exploration of morphology and that phonics shouldn't be taught in a systematic structured way as we do in systematic synthetic phonics.

Other people think that morphology should not be touched until after students have the full alphabetic code under their b…

Episode 13 - How do I Differentiate to Support a Range of Learners?

Transcript Summary

00.00
Introduction
Hey everyone. It's Jocelyn coming to you from the home of the Palawa people here in beautiful Tasmania. We have had so many questions over the last few years about differentiation, and today I would like to share some suggestions for you and some different ways of thinking about it. When I started to plan this episode, I realized that I actually have quite a decent chunk of text already …

Subscribe to the Podcast

Transcript Summary 

Many upper primary teachers are very used to having small groups and running guided reading lessons as a core part of their literacy block. Equally, many of us are used to teaching from a novel and having a novel study present in our classrooms. If we are already teaching with a rich text, we are able to level this up with some key practices. If we aren't there yet, we have a little more work to do, but moving to structured literacy is absol…

Subscribe to the Podcast

Transcript Summary

In the past, when we had struggling readers in our class, we'd do a benchmark assessment, identify reading levels, and try to support these students. In our small group rotations. But these days, with the growing awareness that guided reading, levelled texts and three queuing are no longer supported, upper primary teachers are asking exactly what am I supposed to do? Well, we here at Jocelyn Seamer Education have the answer. In today’s episode…

Subscribe to the Podcast 

Transcript Summary

When the words predictable texts were removed from the Australian curriculum in 2022, supporters of structured literacy cheered very loudly. For years, arguments against the inclusion of predictable or levelled text were met with the response, "But it says in the curriculum that children should be using them," and you'd think that having those words removed from the curriculum would be the end of the discussion, but no. The reason that this d…

Subscribe to the Podcast 

Transcript Summary

Benchmark assessments are something that have been in schools forever in a day, and they've come to be understood as a way for us to track student growth and progress through their reading development. The challenge with a benchmark assessment is that they are usually written to align with a series of levelled texts that will be represented by a number or a letter and, unfortunately, they don't actually measure the thing that we think they do…

Subscribe to the Podcast 

At one time or another, most teachers have gone rogue in their classrooms.  We have been asked to do something that we don't want to do and thought, 'nope'.  This doesn't impact things too badly when we've gone rogue about only 1 box of tissues from the office a time or not signing for that extra box of lead pencils, but it can have significant impacts when it comes to substantial areas of our teaching.  

There are many reasons that teachers go rogue. They could b…