Podcast and Blog

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…

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Hi there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, the place where we dive right into the nitty gritty of bringing structured literacy to life in your school.

I'm recording this episode in mid-June 2024 and there have been some huge announcements recently about how literacy will be taught in two states in particular. Victoria has just announced that all students will learn to read with explicit phonics: that includes 25 minutes of a phonics lesson every day. …

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…

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Hello there, welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. My name is Jocelyn and I'm so pleased to welcome you here to this episode.

Now, this is a bit of a shorty one, because I know it's report writing time for teachers in Australia and you don't have time to listen to a big podcast episode, so I'm going to be sharing with you some thoughts that come from a blog post that I wrote in 2021, called Eight Reasons the Same Place Is A Great Place To Be.

One of the …

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Hello, hello and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Pataway, Burnie, the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn and I'd like to start this episode with some words of encouragement.
So many teachers and leaders are way too hard on themselves. I'm going to bet that includes you. The very fact that you're listening to this podcast means that you want to do a great job for kids.
You're on the bus and you are prepared to …

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…

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Hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast, the podcast where we keep it real about what it's like to shift practice and teach in a way that reflects evidence from research. As much as I'd like to give you a set of general principles about instruction that will work perfectly in every situation in school, I'm afraid it doesn't actually work that way. Yes, there are some considerations and principles about instruction that apply across contexts that w…

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.

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Hi there, it's Jocelyn here, and I'm so pleased to welcome you to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, where we talk about teaching, leading and literacy. This podcast is recorded here in Pataway, Burnie, and I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands on which I work and live, the home of the Palawa people. One of the points of contention in adopting a structured approach to teaching literacy is nonsense words. These words, which…

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…