One day a student sounds out cat, and the next they’re guessing cheese from a picture. It’s easy to read that as inconsistent, or as a student who isn’t trying very hard. Usually it’s neither. That student is in a phase of word reading, and what they’re doing makes sense for where they are. You…
A kindergartener who knows the sounds for a and m can read a word. Put the two letters side by side, have them say /aaa/ and slide straight into /mmm/, and they’ve read “am.” That’s the goal of a letter order. Get students reading words as early as possible, then keep adding letters that let…
It’s Sunday night. Your scope and sequence is open in one tab, last week’s plan is open in another, and you have three more tabs of activities you’re deciding between. An hour in, you’re still not sure what Tuesday looks like. Here’s why that hour turns into three: you’re deciding the same things you decided…
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…