I want to share with you essential building blocks that can help your students move from letters to reading CVC words.  Before we begin, let’s start with some vocabulary we’ll use during these show notes today.

• Phonemic awareness - the ability to blend, segment, and manipulate phonemes.  This is oral and doesn’t involve letters or print.

• Phonemes - our smallest units of sound.

• Alphabetic principle - taking the sounds and connecting it to written letters.

Podcast #48 - Yearlong Phonics Pacing Guide

Show Notes

You guys - it’s here!  My Yearlong Phonics Pacing Guide for Grades K-2 is designed to help you plan and implement effective phonics instruction throughout the school year. Here,  we’ll share tips on how to make the most of this invaluable resource in your classroom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.