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 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...
by Jan and Kari | Jun 25, 2022 | Blog, Decodable Texts, Fluency, High-Frequency Words, Language Comprehension, Literacy Leadership, Meaningful Independent Practices, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Prompting & Feedback, Word Reading Instruction
If you are a teacher or literacy interventionist struggling to: assess students in meaningful ways, provide more effective differentiated instruction, manage the diverse needs of your students with limited time, or find the instructional resources you need (like...
by Jan and Kari | May 21, 2022 | Blog, Decodable Texts, Literacy Leadership, Phonics, Word Reading Instruction
What could be more fun than thinking about pups? We really can’t think of much.Speaking of puppies, if you’re familiar with our book, Shifting the Balance, then you know that Chapter 6 is about finding “aligned” texts for students. Aligned texts are more than...
