Route2Reading Podcast

A podcast for teachers who are ready to learn what structured literacy is and the Science of Reading behind it. Join Amie to pinpoint where your readers are struggling and get the tools to help them.

Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Interview with Neena Saha

All About Neena Saha:

  • Neena earned her master’s degree in educational neuroscience from Columbia and has a PhD in special education from Vanderbilt.

  • Her doctoral work on decoding resulted in a patent and her research can be found in journals like The Journal for Learning Disabilities and The Reading and Writing Interdisciplinary Journal.

  • Upon graduating, Neena founded Elemeno, which helps bridge the research practice gap in early literacy.

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Structuring Literacy Blocks

Scheduling literacy blocks and finding enough time in a day is an ever-present challenge in our classrooms.  How do we do it, and where do we start?  Today, we’ll go over some of the challenges we face, what to do about them, and how we can get in the time we need to teach literacy.

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Interview with Meghan Hein

All About Meghan Hein:

  • Proudly been in education for 20 years with jobs as a 2nd grade teacher as well as a math coach.

  • Eventually transitioned into a literacy intervention teacher and served there for 5 years.

  • She’s now back in the classroom using the skills and knowledge she learned as a literacy interventionist.

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Letter Formation

The Complexity of Letter Formation

  • Letter formation is the foundation for literacy development. This is because practicing letter formation helps students with shapes and sounds of letters, which is important for foundational reading skills.  

  • Students also need fine motor skills in order to accomplish appropriate letter formation.  Good letter formation needs good fine motor skills.

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Alphabet Quest

The Birth of Alphabet Quest

  • During the pandemic, I was asked to leave my literacy coaching role and teach kindergarten.  When I went back to the classroom, I discovered that we were in desperate need of speeding up and enriching how we learned our alphabet.

  • My time in the classroom was what birthed a really fun and effective idea I had:  Alphabet Quest!  Alphabet Quest is the idea of teaching the alphabet in an intense, systematic (and faster) way. 

  • I returned to my literacy coaching role and introduced Alphabet Quest to my co-workers.  

  • Instead of teaching one letter a week and spending 26 weeks inside the alphabet, Alphabet Quest was designed for children to learn their alphabet and letter sounds in only 5 weeks’ time.  

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Interview with Melanie Brethour

All About Melanie Brethour:

Full-time elementary resource teacher in Montreal, Canada and also a parent to a child with severe dyslexia.

Passionate about dyslexia and the science of reading, specifically supporting parents through navigating the dyslexia journey.

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Developing Readers Academy with Megan & Laura

Can you chat about Developing Readers Academy and how you support parents?

Our program is self-paced. Kids begin with a diagnostic assessment (phonological awareness, letters, phonics, etc.) We look at the individual child and then give them a personalized path.

What we wanted to do that’s different from other resources out there is that we really follow the child. Families are getting us as if we are their private tutors, yet it’s flexible!

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Interview with Jake Daggett

In your opinion as it pertains to literacy, what do we do really well and what do we need a better understanding of?

We’ve done a fantastic job at getting the word out. You see so many shares on a reel and hundreds of likes, which really means that people are finding this advice useful. The word is out now that there’s a problem with how we’ve been teaching reading. When you curate your social media feed so that it’s an uplifting experience, you’re sharing with the world that it works for all students.

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Interview with Wiley Blevins

A Podcast with Wiley Blevins

Author, travel-lover, and expert in all things literacy.

Comes from a history of grandparents who were illiterate - books were not a part of his everyday life. It was these limitations that encouraged him to perform well in school and learn to read.

When he began teaching, he didn’t know how to teach reading, so he had to do his own mini studies in his classroom.

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Choosing and Using a Scope and Sequence

Phonics instruction, which teaches the relationship between sounds and letters, is a fundamental component of reading development. To ensure effective phonics instruction, teachers must follow a well-designed scope and sequence. When it comes to choosing or creating a phonics scope and sequence, there are many things we should consider.

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Amie Burkholder Amie Burkholder

Tips and Tricks for Mastering Blends

I don’t know about you, but teaching blends can be tricky. Blends (also known as consonant blends) are two or three consonant sounds that appear together in a word without any vowel sounds in between. These are words like flip, stop, strip, help, desk and spring.

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