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For a very long time, we have focused exclusively on what goes into the early years literacy block and upper primary teachers, it is your turn. One of the questions in the Facebook group and other places is: exactly what should my literacy block look like in years three to six? And I have to say that finding the perfect literacy block can feel like chasing a magical unicorn through an enchanted forest so that you can make a wish. We ferventl…

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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…

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Moving from a guided reading small group approach to reading instruction means embracing a whole new literacy block structure. We are moving to one that seeks to maximize adult-led instructions, time on task, and the number of successful learning trials. And we are not doing this simply because it's the next shiny thing or because that's what someone told us. We are making this move to a more explicit approach because that's what the research tells us is the mos…

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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…

At a certain point in a child's reading development we start the focus on fluency and one of the signs of a struggling reader is stilted, slow reading even after several years of reading instruction. The Australian Curriculum says that children should be ‘practising fluency’ from foundation the foundation year and ‘using fluency’ from year 1.  I’m really sorry (ok, not sorry) but what on earth does that even mean?   As teachers we are often left to our own devices to interpret what fluency act…

To say that it has been a big year here at Jocelyn Seamer Education is an understatement! Over the past 12 months, I have: 

• Submitted, finalised and released my first book with Routledge
• Delivered Teach Along courses to almost 1000 people
• Finished and released Reading Success in Action – Decoding 3
• Written around 50 blog posts
• Presented at 3 Sharing Best Practice conferences 
• Met and had dinner with Linnea Ehri (eek, so exciting!) and presented at an event alongside her
• Directly support…

As we approach the end of the 2022 school year here in Australia, you may have the good fortune to be asked what resources you would like to order for 2023. If that's the case, here are my top suggestions for items that can support you in your quest to move towards a structured literacy classroom.

1) A subscription to the Resource Room. The Resource Room is the only online membership dedicated solely to structured literacy. Sure, morning teas are lovely, but if you really want to support your te…