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….
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…
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…
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…
Testing is over. Field day is on the calendar. And somewhere between the end-of-year chaos and counting down the days, phonics instruction falls off the schedule. It makes sense. You’re tired. Your students are distracted. And if you’re honest, it can feel like whatever you do in the last three weeks won’t matter much anyway….
You’ve heard about the science of reading. You’ve made changes. Maybe you’ve swapped out some materials, added more phonics, stopped telling kids to “sound it out and skip it.” But here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: 3-cueing can still be happening in your classroom even after you think you’ve let it go. The…
If you’ve ever used the terms “sight words” and “high-frequency words” like they mean the same thing, you’re in good company. Most teachers do. I did too. It wasn’t until someone sat down and explained the actual difference that I realized the mistake I’d been making, and immediately understood why some of my students weren’t…
Every time I scroll through teacher Facebook groups or sit in a PD session, I hear the same thing: “We’re doing the science of reading now.” And almost always, what that means in practice is: “We switched to a new phonics program.” I get it. Phonics has been the loudest part of this conversation, and…
When I see a product labeled “Science of Reading aligned,” my alarm bells go off. I know that sounds strong. But after looking into countless programs, activity sets, phonics tools, and readers that carry that label, I’ve learned it doesn’t always mean what you think it means. It’s trending, and everybody is slapping that label…