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Recent Posts

  • Jan 22, 2022 Hearing and Charting Reading Fluency
  • May 21, 2021 On “Word Callers” and Vowel Sounds
  • Apr 06, 2021 Teaching Reading Isn’t Rocket Science
  • Nov 03, 2020 The Special Education Bubble
  • Sep 20, 2020 How Love Became a Weapon in the Reading Wars

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  • Decoding,  Fluency,  Phonemic Awareness,  Reading Instruction,  Vowels

    On “Word Callers” and Vowel Sounds

    May 21, 2021 /

    One of Richard McManus’s favorite stories about a student involves a young girl who was brought to the Fluency Factory to prepare for a private-school admissions exam. She was clearly very bright, and when she was asked to read aloud, she did so quite fluently. Richard assumed that she’d ace the test with little trouble. When he told this to her mother, however, the woman’s response was that her daughter sounded fine but in fact understood almost nothing of what she read.  Richard was baffled. Luckily, though his friend Jean Tucker—a speech-language pathologist, reading specialist, and creator of the Spell of Language program—happened to be visiting that day and overheard…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Balanced Literacy,  Decoding,  Dyslexia,  Ed School,  Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  NAEP,  Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics,  Precision Teaching,  Reading Instruction,  Reading Wars,  Science of Reading,  Teacher Training,  Whole Language

    The Special Education Bubble

    November 3, 2020 /

    The reading world was recently rocked by an article from esteemed reporter, Emily Hanford. The longtime maven of whole language, Lucy Calkins, admitted she needed to change her Units of Study after decades of context clues, guessing at words, picture walks, and dismissing the science of reading. Of course, Calkins promptly responded with a statement that essentially tried to take credit for always being a phonics-minded practitioner (despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary). When you look at the latest NAEP data, the influence of decades of whole language-oriented instruction being the dominant pedagogy in the United States is readily apparent. According to this new data, roughly 63%…

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    Ben Tobin
  • Decoding,  Dyslexia,  Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  Lucy Calkins,  Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics,  Precision Teaching,  Reading Instruction,  Reading Workshop,  Science of Reading,  Teacher Training,  Three Cueing System,  Whole Language

    A Child is Not a Mollusk

    July 14, 2020 /

    In some sense, without evidence-based instruction, a child could be more like a mollusk in that they will withdraw from the learning process and build a shell to protect themselves from the emotional anguish of feeling less-than in the classroom.

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    Ben Tobin
  • Decoding,  Dyslexia,  Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics,  Precision Teaching,  Reading Instruction,  Science of Reading,  Teacher Training,  Uncategorized,  Whole Language

    Of Fluency and Fritters

    June 29, 2020 /

    t’s been clear for a long time that something is very wrong with the way reading is taught, but if we genuinely want things to change, we need to take a hard look at what actually works—and building fluency beyond a doubt does so. We owe it to students to get this right: their success in high school and beyond depends on it.

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    Ben Tobin
  • Decoding,  Dyslexia,  Fluency,  Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics,  Reading Instruction,  Sight Words,  Three Cueing System,  Whole Language

    Tipping The Scale on Fountas & Pinnell

    June 24, 2020 /

    Fountas and Pinnell, as well as other balanced literacy programs, places a great deal of emphasis on this guided approach to reading and group work because, fundamentally, they see reading as a social activity, rather than an individual’s ability to decode text, something that happens in the confines of the brain in the reading circuit.

    Read More
    Ben Tobin
  • Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics

    Phonology, Phonemes, and Phonics

    May 28, 2020 /

    Phonology Phonology is the system of speech sounds that make up a language.  Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and distinguish between sounds in a language. It involves hearing only.  It allows people to do the following:  Count words in a sentence Count syllables in a word Identify rhymes Identify the sounds in a word  Manipulate sounds (e.g., replace the “g” in got with an “n”).  Phonological awareness has different levels.  For example, counting the words in a sentence and identifying rhymes requires a lower level of phonological awareness, whereas counting the syllables in a word requires a higher level.  Identifying sounds in a word and manipulating (adding to or deleting) those sounds…

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    Erica Meltzer
  • Dyslexia,  Fluency,  Learning Disabilities,  Phonemic Awareness,  Precision Teaching

    The Sorceress

    April 8, 2020 /

    Elizabeth Haughton sent Jean Tucker to me. She told Jean that I could teach her to chart her student’s performance on the Standard Celeration Chart, and Jean came down to Hingham from Exeter, NH and spent a day with me learning to chart. She found it confusing and frustrating at first, but quickly got the hang of it. Jean was and continues to be the most knowledgeable and inquisitive language and reading expert I have ever met, and that meeting was the beginning of an important friendship.  Jean was happy to learn to chart and went back to her learning center in Exeter and made Precision Teaching a part of…

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    Richard McManus
  • Lucy Calkins,  Phonemic Awareness,  Phonics,  Reading Workshop,  Three Cueing System

    Does Lucy Calkins Know What Phonics Is?

    March 21, 2020 /

    In response to Lucy Calkins’s manifesto “No One Gets to Own the Term ‘Science of Reading,” the University of Wisconsin cognitive psychologist and reading specialist Mark Seidenberg has posted a rebuttal on his blog. For anyone interested in understanding the most recent front in the reading wars, I strongly recommend both pieces. What I’d like to focus on here, however, are the ways in which Calkins’s discussion of phonics reveal a startlingly compromised understanding of the subject for someone of her influence and stature. In recent years, and largely—as Seidenberg explains—in response to threats to her personal reading-instruction empire, Calkins has insisted that she really believes in the importance of systematic phonics, a claim…

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    Erica Meltzer

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Top Posts

Tipping the Scale on Fountas and Pinnell 

10 Reasons the Three-Cueing System Is Ineffective

The Science of Reading: 5 Key Concepts

Forget Sourdough Bread – My Pandemic Project Is Precision Teaching

10 Signs of a Decoding Problem

Recent Posts

  • Jan 22, 2022 Hearing and Charting Reading Fluency
  • May 21, 2021 On “Word Callers” and Vowel Sounds
  • Apr 06, 2021 Teaching Reading Isn’t Rocket Science
  • Nov 03, 2020 The Special Education Bubble
  • Sep 20, 2020 How Love Became a Weapon in the Reading Wars

Archive

  • January 2022
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • November 2020
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  • May 2020
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  • November 2019
  • October 2019
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  • June 2019
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  • February 2019

Links

A Brief Review of Research on Forms of Instruction

An Open Letter to Student Teachers

Basic Phonics Test

Children of the Code

The Critical Reader

Emily Hanford on Reading Instruction

The Fallacy of Balanced Literacy

Filling the Pail (Greg Ashman’s blog)

The Fluency Factory

How Do Kids Learn to Read?

How to Teach Reading

Importance of Background Knowledge

International Foundation for Effective Reading

Jon Gustafson’s Blog

Letter to the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education

LETRS 

Lifelong Literacy

Literary Performance of Ex-Reading Recovery Students

Louisa Moats

The Maloney Method 

Marilyn Adams on the Three Cueing System

Nancy Young: Reading, Writing, Spelling

Orthographic Mapping (Video)

Phonics Myths

Phonological Awareness Screening Test

Preventing Reading Failure: An Examination of the Myths of Reading Instruction 

Reading Matters (Mark Seidenberg)

Reading Rockets

Readsters (Learning Center) 

Right to Read Project 

Running Records

The Science of Reading: Evidence for a New Era of Reading Instruction

Spelfabet

Ten Phonics Research Findings

The Simple View of Reading

The Spell of Language (Jean Tucker)

Structured vs. Typical Literacy

The Three-Cueing Model: Down for the Count? 

Why Aren’t Kids Being Taught to Read?

Why Reading Is Not a Natural Process 

 

 

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