by Jan and Kari | Oct 7, 2022 | Blog, Decodable Texts, Fluency, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
We’ve all had them! The kind of days when you just need to call a teacher friend on the way home from school to talk to someone who just “gets it.”This is your person! The one who offers a listening ear, offering empathy, and encouragement. And the great thing about a...
by Jan and Kari | Sep 29, 2022 | Blog, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
This week, we help students develop trust. Trust?! YES, trust! Students will take the skills they’ve learned in the first two components of our Explicit Phonics Lesson Template and put them together in one orchestrated action. The Blending section of The Template...
by Jan and Kari | Sep 23, 2022 | Blog, Phonics, Prompting & Feedback, Word Reading Instruction
Last week we warmed up our phonological processors during the Phonemic Awareness Warm-up component of the Explicit Phonics Lesson Template, (If you missed that post you can find it here.)Now that your students are all warmed up, you are ready to roll up your sleeves...
by Jan and Kari | Sep 15, 2022 | Blog, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics
Let’s get reeeeaaadyy for a warm-up! No, not that kind of warm-up! The phonemic awareness warm-up portion of the Explicit Phonics Lesson Template won’t have you breaking a sweat, but it WILL support your students while they exercise their phonological processors! Last...
by Jan and Kari | Sep 13, 2022 | Blog, Decodable Texts, Fluency, Literacy Leadership, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
The start of the 2022-2023 school year is here! One wonderful thing about being an educator is the gift of fresh beginnings that a new school year brings! If only we could bottle the special mix of emotions that accompanies the back-to-school season–excitement,...
by Jan and Kari | Aug 26, 2022 | Blog, High-Frequency Words, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
Orthographic mapping (Ehri, 2014) is essentially alignment work. It is the brain making sense of, or proving, how the sounds in a spoken word (phonemes) match up with the series of sound-spellings in the same word (graphemes). So, if orthographic mapping is truly an...
by Jan and Kari | Aug 19, 2022 | Blog, Fluency, High-Frequency Words, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
If we asked you to guess how many encounters with a new word a typical reader needs to be able to retrieve the word instantly and automatically, without guessing, decoding, or relying on other hacks . . . what number would you guess? 20? 30? 40? More? Well, you might...
by Jan and Kari | Aug 16, 2022 | Blog, Fluency, High-Frequency Words, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
If you’re looking for a bit of magic in your sight word instruction, you’re in the right place! The real magic, of course, comes from HOW you teach high-frequency words. And spoiler alert – successful word instruction has everything to do with leveraging the...
by Jan and Kari | Aug 3, 2022 | Blog, High-Frequency Words, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
We’ve all been there! We’ve all said some version of this phrase! After chanting and practicing and highlighting and rainbow writing a word repeatedly, a student encounters the word in print (or goes to use it in their writing) and looks at it like it’s a martian with...
by Jan and Kari | Jul 29, 2022 | Blog, Fluency, High-Frequency Words, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
If you’re like us, you’ve likely used these two terms – high-frequency words and sight words – interchangeably.But to really understand the brain science of word recognition, it’s important to get clear on the difference between these two labels...
