It’s Thursday afternoon. You taught the letter Z this week, which means you have finished the alphabet and digraphs start Monday. Four students have Z cold and several more are close. Three of them are still hunting for the sound when you point at the card. Your plan says digraphs Monday, so what do you…
A child hesitates on a word he can’t read. You have five other kids at the table and four minutes left, so you say, “Look at the picture. What would make sense?” So he says a word and you both move on. But he didn’t read it. He guessed, and he got rewarded for guessing….
It’s the second week of school. You gave the assessment, or you just watched your class try Lesson 1. Two students are already reading. Four don’t have all their letter sounds. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle, and your scope and sequence assumes none of that. So what do you do with Lesson 2?…
Your student reads chip, chat, and chin off the word list on Monday without hesitating. On Thursday you hand them a sentence with chip sitting in the middle of it, and they stop cold. Nothing went wrong between Monday and Thursday. You taught the sound and they learned it. They have been able to read…
Your UFLI manual is sitting on the counter. Maybe it came in a district box in June, maybe you ordered it yourself in July, and either way the plan is to open it properly on September 3. I want to talk you out of that plan. UFLI Foundations is a strong program. It is also…
This year Prime Day runs for 4 days from June 23-26. It’s their biggest sale of the year and I always take advantage. But you do have to be a Prime member to get these special prices so if you’re not, then sign up already! Click here to try it out free for 30 days and…
You followed your curriculum. You taught every lesson in the order it was laid out. And you still have students who can read CVC words one week and fall apart on them the next, or who breeze through a decodable on Monday and stumble over the same patterns on Friday. When that happens, most teachers…
A 2026 report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that 82% of K-3 teachers say they’ve received science of reading training. But only 52% say their instruction actually reflects it. That gap exists because the system never set most teachers up to close it. Only 2% of teachers say preservice training is where they…
If you’ve been skipping plural nouns in your phonics block, you’re not alone. Most teachers file it under grammar and move on. But plural nouns aren’t just a language arts standard; they’re one of the first morphology lessons your students actually need. Here’s why that matters, and how to teach it explicitly. What Are Plural…