Picture a 60 minute small group block with five groups on the schedule. After transitions, each group gets about ten minutes with you. The students who need you most get the same ten minutes as the students who are already reading the skill. I feel like people think that they need to have every kid…
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…
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…
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…
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…