teaching children to read

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Getting your team on the bus of consistent, explicit teaching in the early years is no easy task. A few years ago, I developed a course called Reading Success in the Early Primary Years and a little while later, published a book with the same name through Routledge, a well-known academic publisher. I am so pleased to announce that I'm running this highly practical online course again in 2025, to help your team build a more robust understanding of what structured l…

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Well, hello there and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania, the land of the Palawa people.

In this latest mini-series, I've been doing a little bit of spring cleaning. So far, we've looked at the idea of classroom news for oral language development and one student coming up to the front of the room during phonics lessons.

Today, I'm sharing my thoughts on something that impacts all grades in the primary school, t…

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss encouraging students to represent their knowledge at their current transcription level, rather than forcing them to write full texts.

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to this week's Tuesday Tip. When we're working with our young writers or writers of any age at all, it can feel like there's a huge amount of pressure to get everybody writing a full text, whether they have the transcription skills for that or not. One of the ways that you can shif…

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss being careful with assessment in phoneme grapheme correspondence, stressing not to prematurely label students and to ensure they can quickly and confidently connect graphemes to phonemes during evaluations.

Video Transcript

Hello there. Welcome to another Tuesday Tip. My name is Jocelyn. When we're assessing our students, one of the things we need to really be careful of is to make sure that we don't say they have something until they actually…

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss teaching children to blend sounds using continuous phonemes first, before introducing stop sounds.

Video Transcript

Hello everyone, I'm Jocelyn and it's time for another Tuesday Tip. We all know that when we're helping our young children to learn to read, that we are going to have a few who struggle to learn how to blend with graphemes. So if the children are able to blend orally, so you can say, m-a-t, and they can tell you that that's "mat", the…

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss helping struggling readers improve fluency by identifying and underlining text, fostering independent thinking and fluency development.

Video Transcript

Welcome to this week's Tuesday Tip. Now you might not know, but I've worked with struggling readers for about 15 years now. Actually they're my favourite students to work with. And one of the things that I see happen with them is they learn the phoneme-grapheme correspondence. They learn their word le…

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss the concept of children actively doing in the classroom.

Video Transcript

Jocelyn here with a Tuesday Tip. This is number four in our series about maintaining high engagement in low variance instruction. And today's tip is about making sure that children have enough to do. In the words of Anita Archer, explicit teaching is about, I do something, you do something. I say something, you say something.

Watching, copying, learning, listening, they, and just doin…

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss suffixes and avoiding using shortcuts when teaching students.

Video Transcript

It's Jocelyn here with a Tuesday tip. It's easy to fall into the trap of sharing shortcuts with children about how words are spelled. So perhaps the word raked comes up. Well, you might say, well, we have to add the suffix -ed, but there's already an E there, so just whack a D on the end. Well, that actually doesn't help children understand how that particular convention works.

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss function over perfection.

Video Transcript

Hi everyone. It's Tuesday and here's my tip. The goal of word study in the primary school is not to teach a full linguistics course to our students or to teach them every single thing about every word. It is to help them have a functional understanding of how words work so that they can use this knowledge later in their own work.

So when you're deciding how deep do I go in the explanation here? How much do I have…

In last week’s post, ‘Phonics without the Froo Froo’, I wrote about the need for phoneme grapheme instruction to be direct, simple and explicit. If you haven’t read that post, you can find it here.  In this post I also outlined Stanislas Dehaene’s 4 pillars of learning. You can learn more about these pillars in his book, ‘How We Learn’.

This week, I’d like to take the discussion even further and evaluate some common classroom practices against Dr Dehaene’s 4 pillars to help you maximise the i…