Podcast and Blog

So many teachers have guided reading as the foundation of their reading instruction approach. With a growing understanding of structured literacy, many of us have seen that it’s time for a change. When making the switch from traditional guided reading, there are two components to consider. 

The first thing to think about is the ‘what’.
Traditional Guided reading involved: 

• Assessing students using benchmark assessment
• Grouping them based on this assessment 
• Teaching lessons using levelled t…

Keeping Planning Simple

Planning is one of the necessary, time sucking things that we do as teachers.  I’m actually one of those nerdy people who like planning and curriculum design.  It really floats my boat!  BUT, what I don’t like is spending more hours planning and preparing than I spend teaching.  I would much rather have easy ways to plan and prepare that leave me free to spend time on the fun stuff (like writing text based units using mentor texts) or watching Netflix.  As a Teaching Pri…

It’s not a secret that I’m not a fan of group rotations. The minute you divide up your students and put them into groups, you cut down the time students can experience fully guided instruction. However, I am aware that some students with additional needs do much better in small groups for various reasons. There are simply times when the range in our classes and lack of adult support means that small groups are the only option available to you.

But a wide range or doing it on your own doesn’t me…

So, you’ve adopted a structured approach to phonics but aren’t seeing the growth you had hoped for?  This lack of growth could be evident in some, most or all students and leave you scratching your head, wondering what went wrong?  This week, I’d like to point you in the direction of a few things that might need tightening to get those results you are looking for. 

Reason #1 – Student focus is not what it could be

Our early years students are little people.  Their ability to pay attention ofte…

I recently wrote a post about my impressions of the English component of Version 9 of the Australian Curriculum. You can find that post here.  There is much to be celebrated in the update including the removal of references to predictable texts and 3 cueing strategies.  In reading through the content descriptors, however, I was a little disappointed to see that comprehension strategies,

“such as visualising, predicting, connecting, summarising and questioning to understand and discuss texts list…

There has been a lot of talk in the media in recent weeks about the difficulties experienced by the teaching profession. The television show, 60 Minutes presented a story about teacher workload and teacher shortages. A former teacher recently spoke on stage about how “…Teachers’ hearts are broken” by the work we are asked to do, and we have seen industrial action on the news. I don’t, for one minute, want to imply that there are no issues that need attention in education. What I do want to do in…

The new Australian Curriculum is out and there is some exciting news.  The words ‘predictable texts’ and ‘combining contextual, semantic, grammatical and phonic knowledge’ are now gone.  Other worrisome phrases such as ‘visual memory’ have disappeared from the year 1 descriptors that relate to reading and writing high-frequency words.  These changes reflect the growing understanding of how we learn to read and are to be celebrated.  No longer will we have to try and counter arguments in favour o…

As teachers seeking to work with the research evidence about reading and reading instruction, we acknowledge the Big Six Ideas of Reading and plan our classroom instruction accordingly.   However, this post is not about incorporating all of those elements. Today I am writing about going broader and deeper with the phonics we are teaching and how we can help our Year 2 and 3 students understand the full complexity of the alphabetic principle and how words work. I will also discuss how we can brin…

This week I released the summary report from the 2021 Teacher Voice in Literacy Instruction survey. 

The survey had two purposes:

• To give teachers the chance to have their voices heard
• To take the temperature on current classroom practices

Despite the informal nature of the survey, I think we have done that.  

The survey summary report released this week draws no conclusions about what the data means for us and our schools, but today I would like to share my thoughts (and dare I say…