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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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 power of...

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...

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 because - accurately...

 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, orfind the instructional resources you need (like quality...

Last week, we introduced you to our two sets of decodable word lists, and we even suggested you might want to organize them in a binder for easy access. And today, we share seven simple and practical ideas for using these two collections of word lists and sentences....

Maybe you already knew about our Decodable Word Lists and Sentences. Maybe you didn’t. Maybe you saw the lists and weren’t sure what to do with them. Whatever the case, we want to offer seven simple ways to use these resources to enhance your phonics instruction and...

In Chapter 1 of Shifting the Balance, we untangle a widespread misunderstanding about reading comprehension. It is “Misunderstanding 4” in the chapter that is about language comprehension. Misunderstanding 4 goes like this,“Successful comprehension in beginning...

We didn’t know this word a few weeks ago. But since we first became aware of it, we seem to be noticing it more and more.  Maybe it’s because we’re immersed in thinking about children’s language development these days. Maybe it’s because we’re thinking a lot about the...