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Aligning decodable books with your phonics program

Posted on 7th April 202126th May 2024 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, Decodable Books, Learning to Read, Reading Resources, Synthetic Phonics and tagged adjacent consonants, Article, beginning readers, consonant digraphs, decodable books, graphemes, linguistic phonics, Phonics, phonics program, scope and sequence, sound-symbol correspondences, structured literacy, truggling readers, vowel digraphLeave a Comment

Regardless of which program or approach to teaching phonics we use, teaching phonics systematically means we follow a particular scope and sequence with its own logic for introducing sound-symbol correspondences and spelling patterns. Many teachers are coming to recognize that when children are given reading material with words that match what they have been taught,…

Does interplay between children and their environment shape the development of reading skills?

Posted on 9th February 202126th May 2024 in Dyslexia, Learning to Read, Reading Difficulties and tagged Article, beginning readers, cognitive resources, comprehension skills decoding, dyslexia, neurocognitive methods, reading research, struggling readersLeave a Comment

An interview with a developmental cognitive neuroscientist Ola Ozernov-Palchik is a postdoctoral associate at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a lecturer and program director at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She applies neurocognitive methods to investigating individual differences in dyslexia in emerging readers. She…

What’s Meaning Got To Do With It?

Posted on 15th December 202022nd May 2024 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, High-Frequency Words, Learning to Read and tagged Article, beginning readers, common words, decoding difficulties, full alphabetic phase, high-frequency words, orthographic mapping, partial-alphabetic phase, pre-primer wordsLeave a Comment

Do you have students who persistently misread small, high-frequency words such as: “he,” “I,” “of,” “gave,” “a,” “the,” “she,” “her,” “on” or “was”? This is quite common even if older students have had remediation for decoding difficulties and have improved their phonics knowledge and word reading skills. We could speculate about why. Maybe teachers do…

Can Lucy Calkins’ changing views shift the way millions of children are taught to read?

Posted on 28th October 202023rd May 2024 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, Learning to Read, Science of Reading, Synthetic Phonics and tagged Article, beginning readers, decodable texts, decode, developing readers#, early literacy, expanding vocablulary, explicit teaching, orthographic mapping, phoneme awareness, Phonics, Science of Reading, structured phonics program, struggling readersLeave a Comment

The news has been spreading that Lucy Calkins, head of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP), has been learning about the Science of Reading and making changes to her guidance and widely used curricula. Throughout her career, she has often characterized phonics as ‘low-level’ work that should be minimized and has promoted top-down…

Books to engage and motivate older, struggling readers

Posted on 16th October 202022nd May 2024 in Decodable Books, Dyslexia, Learning to Read, Product Reviews and Awards, Reading Difficulties, Reading Resources, Synthetic Phonics and tagged alternative spellings, Article, beginning readers, books for struggling readers, books with vowel teams, decodable readers, hi-interest decodable books, Phonic Books, Phonics, struggling readers, vowel digraphs, vowel teamsLeave a Comment

Older, struggling readers often have gaps in the their phonics knowledge. They find alternative spellings particularly confusing. Many suffer from low self-esteem so offering them decodable materials that are age-appropriate is vital. Vital because if the reading materials can engage the disaffected reader, his/her motivation to try and read will grow. Without motivation it is…

Phonic Books is Going Red for the Month of October!

Posted on 9th October 20204th October 2021 in Dyslexia, Reading DifficultiesLeave a Comment

What is all this ‘going red’ about? Go Red is a community of passionate individuals and organizations that campaign to promote literacy and a greater understanding of dyslexia. Being able to read and write is something most of us take for granted. Dyslexia Awareness Month shines a light on the 1 in 10 children who…

Little things can make a big difference

Posted on 8th October 202022nd May 2024 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, Learning to Read, Science of Reading and tagged Article, beginning readers, early elementary reading, Education research, grapheme, orthogrpahic mapping, phoneme, phonemic awareness, Phonics, Reading, Science of Reading, spelling activities, The Reading LeagueLeave a Comment

The education researcher Dylan Wiliam has said, “changing what teachers do is more important than changing what teachers know.” But isn’t knowledge power? And what we do is obviously linked to what we know. So, how can that be? In the past few years, there has been a groundswell of interest in the science of…

Parents steers school toward Science of Reading

Posted on 16th September 202029th April 2024 in Learning to Read, Science of ReadingLeave a Comment

It is so sad when children grow to hate reading as described in the interview linked at the end of this piece. It is uplifting to hear how a parent turned this child’s life around by getting him assessed and starting him on a structured literacy program. But what about less informed or well-to-do parents? How…

Consonant blends and consonant teams—what’s the difference?

Posted on 8th September 202022nd May 2024 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, Learning to Read, Science of Reading, Synthetic Phonics and tagged adjacent consonants, Article, beginning reader, consonant blends, consonant diagraph, consonant digraphs, consonant team, teach consonant blends, teach consonant teams, what are adjacent consonants?, What is a consonant blend?, what is a consonant digraph?, What is a consonant team?Leave a Comment

Many of the terms in phonics are quite confusing. Consonant blends and consonant teams are such terms. So, what is the difference between the two? A consonant blend is a term used for two adjacent consonants in a word that represent two separate sounds. Take the word, ‘blog’: the letters ‘b’ and ‘l’ spell two…

Why we need to teach the Alphabetic Code

Posted on 21st August 202022nd May 2024 in Approaches to Teaching Reading, Learning to Read, Synthetic Phonics and tagged alphabetic code, Article, beginning readers, comprehension, consonant teams, decode, decoding, encode, fluency, how to teach reading, phonic code, struggling readers, vowel teams, What is a consonant team?, what is a vowel team?, what is the alphabetic code?Leave a Comment

What is the Alphabetic Code? English has a complex writing system. It has 26 letters but roughly 44 sounds (this depends on pronunciation). There are roughly 160+ different spellings for these 44 sounds. In order to teach them in a methodical way, they have been organized according to the 44 sounds they spell. This organization…

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