Marina, Felicity Structured literacy 21/10/21

• Can you give us a brief explanation of the Science of reading?

The science of readingis a vast, body of scientifically-based research from a range of multiple disciplines. This insight has helped explain how early reading develops, why students struggle and what are the most effective assessment and instructional practises that benefit all students.*

The main influential findings tell us that:

1. Reading is not natural like learning to talk. Early reading development requires, for most, systematic instruction in understanding the relationship between sounds and letters and how they are used to record the spoken word in print. Children who don’t have this understanding called the alphabetic principal by the end of their first year in school, tend to never catch up - despite good intervention. Hence the need to have a preventive model in schools by ensuring all children understand how speech sounds are mapped with letters and groups of letters from Day 1.
2. Everyone learns to read the same way. Research has shown all skilled readers have both good word level decoding skills and appropriate language comprehension skills.
3. There is a known pathway for reading. Reading starts with oral language. The reading pathway starts with connecting speech sounds to print and to the meaning of words. Struggling readers and non-readers haven’t yet established these connections. Explicit instruction that centres on language and reinforces the speech to print connection helps students build these circuits in the reading brain. The difference is that some children require more time, more repetition and the most explicit instruction.
4. All children benefit from explicit and systematic instruction in the skills that form the reading pathway. That is phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension. It is not too early to start teaching these foundational skills in Kindergarten. The same instruction we use for preventing reading failure is also ideal for our dyslexic students.
5. Prevention is easier and cheaper than intervention. There are known indicators of reading that can be assessed early and change the course of a children's life if we get in early. So the message is, early, early, early. Don’t wait for them to fail.

Last minute notes:

Strong Leadership in schools makes the change to a SL an enormous difference. Teachers need not just the tools (decodable text) but the time to have those conversations with a literacy expert in their school. They need someone who is available within school to support them with observations, planning, continued assessments and refining practise. We are teaching in a very exciting time with literacy education finally changing through Aoteroa.

Top 10 Websites / Webinars / Facebook Pages to Follow

Facebook

The Reading League

Reading Science in Schools

Science of Reading - What I should had learnt in College

Webinars:

Zaner-Bloser

https://www.zaner-bloser.com/science-of-reading-resource-hub.php

Blogs/Websites

The Reading Ape

https://www.thereadingape.com/

Reading Rockets

https://www.readingrockets.org/article/alphabetic-principle

Felicity added….

UFLI - University of Florida Literacy Institute

• Virtual Teaching Hub
• Tutorial

The tutorials has short 5min webinars on how to teach different skills like segmenting/blending etc

The Literacy Collective - Podcasts

The Literacy Collective (great podcasts) - a good place to build knowledge

• Link

Sound Pack sounds - NZ English - to make sure teachers are using pure sounds in NZ English

• LINK