Podcast and Blog

One of the most common questions asked in Facebook groups about literacy instruction is “Is this a science of reading resource?”   It’s a question that usually ends up with a variety of answers ranging from, ‘No! Don’t touch it!’ to ‘Ooooh, I love that one’.  Neither of these answers is very helpful if you are the teacher trying to wade your way through complex decision making to get the best outcomes for your students.  This week I’d like to provide a little information and some ideas to consid…

This post was previously published under the title, 'A Review of Online Resources - Pinterest'. 

Teachers LOVE Pinterest. We try and have a Pinterest perfect classroom, with cute displays on our doors. (Here’s mine from a few years ago)

I’ve made rain clouds out of balloons, paper Mache and cotton balls. I’ve created a box of paper fruit and veg for my dramatic play area. I’ve even made whole immersion experiences for my kiddos usi…

I love data. I love it so much that the other night I had a dream about going to a school and volunteering to assess every child’s reading. I actually woke up wondering whether I had time…

Data has always been a cornerstone of my practice, both as a teacher and a school leader.  I wanted to know where students were up to. I wanted to know what the journey forward looked like. I wanted to know what it would look like when students had learned the things I planned for them to learn. I also wa…

The release of John Sweller’s recent report about inquiry learning has been followed up with a range of tweets, Facebook posts and articles either coming out in favour of either explicit teaching or inquiry learning.  In this post I am going to share my own thoughts on this in a way that I hope is measured and nuanced. But let’s be clear, I am not going to go down the road of ‘teachers use a range of techniques based on what they believe is best for students so just leave them alone to make thei…

 Early in 2021 I held a Masterclass called ‘The Top Three Mistakes Foundation Teachers Make in Reading Instruction – and How to Avoid Them’.  This week’s post revisits mistake number 2

Assuming that because you have taught something, students have learned it.

Every single one of us has made this assumption at one point or another only to realise later that we were so wrong!

The first thing to consider are three little words -

Essentially, students need to do something with and think about…

One of the struggles I have seen teachers have in put together their home learning packs for phonics is ‘what on earth do we give our children who can’t read anything yet?’   This is especially challenging if your school is not offering live stream lessons or families do not have access to unlimited internet data.   In our regular phonics lessons the teacher is absolutely crucial to scaffolding and leading learning. No worksheet or set of instructions for parents can replace that.   So, how do…

For a while now I have been in contact with an early career teacher who co-teaches with a teacher who is more experienced than her. This arrangement might work out beautifully, except that the more experienced teacher is an ‘expert’ in a balanced literacy approach and the early career teacher is firmly ‘on the bus’ of evidence informed practice. This leaves my young colleague in the precarious position of taking 2 steps forward and then doubting everything she does.  I know that there are so man…

You may have heard that English is way too complicated and illogical to teach explicitly.  This myth is one of the reasons that memorising words persists as a spelling strategy, but it is simply not true. What is true is that English has an opaque orthography. This means that the relationship between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters that represent those phonemes) is, well….busy. The ‘basic code’ is reasonably simple. One alphabet letter represents consonants and the short vowels, with a …

It is now generally accepted that decodable texts of one sort or another are a key part of a systematic approach to reading instruction. Decodable texts provide the practice students need to develop strong decoding skills with reading material containing limited graphemes and sentence structures. In light of the announcement that all NSW Foundation classrooms will receive a delivery of decodable texts, let’s dive deeper into the what, when, who and how of decodables in learning to read. 

Wh…

If you are an Australian or New Zealand teacher you are more than likely actively planning for Semester 2 and if you are a US or Canadian teacher you will be contemplating your new class and the brand new school year ahead. Whether you are looking down the barrel of online lesson delivery or in-person school, the same principles apply when it comes to comes to creating a classroom program to maximise student learning in reading.

The first thing we need to do is understand what reading developme…