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.
I was scrolling through my Instagram feed the other day when I came across an image that made me stop and do a double take (and not in a good way): Now, I’m admittedly not an expert in reading pedagogy for young children, but even I can tell that there’s something wrong with this picture. It seems obvious that is should be treated as a sight word because, well, it’s one of the most common words in the entire language and because it follows a semi-irregular phonetic pattern. Had is a different story altogether. Yes, it’s short, and yes, it’s super common, but the differences end there. There are a lot of words…
