The last week of school is not the time to plan next year. You’re exhausted. Your students are restless. The classroom looks like a paper tornado hit it. The last thing anyone wants to do is sit down with a blank planning doc and think about fall. But there’s one thing worth doing before you…
You’ve spent the whole year building your students up as readers. The last thing you want is to watch those gains disappear over summer because parents didn’t know what to do at home. The problem isn’t that parents don’t care. Most of them do. The problem is the advice they’re working with: read for 20…
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 know the teacher I’m talking about. Maybe you are that teacher. You’ve done everything. You sat through the PD. You bought the decodable readers and the phoneme mapping sheets. You restructured your reading block, dropped the leveled readers, and stopped asking kids to use picture cues. You followed the curriculum, watched the YouTube videos,…
I used to think I needed to completely transform my reading block overnight. Sound familiar? You read about the Science of Reading, attend a workshop, or dive into structured literacy research, and suddenly everything you’re doing feels wrong. Your mind races with all the changes you think you need to make. Here’s what I’ve learned…
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…
I had a fifth grader who wasn’t progressing in reading. She was brilliant. On the autism spectrum. Highly capable in so many ways. But no matter what I tried in her leveled reading group, nothing moved the needle. I kept thinking: more practice, more time, more exposure to text.I adjusted the books. I changed the…
You already know what struggling readers need. You’ve done the training. You’ve read the research. You know that effective intervention requires targeted practice, repeated exposure, and systematic instruction. The hard part isn’t the knowledge. The hard part is actually providing it, consistently, day after day, without burning yourself out. Because here’s the reality:Intervention isn’t just…