When I began seriously trying to understand the state of American reading instruction in late 2018, I was immediately struck by how scattered the field was. Although websites like Reading Rockets and Children of the Code were virtual goldmines of information, it was necessary to wade through numerous articles and interviews to form a coherent picture of what one actually needed know in order to teach reading effectively. I would regularly find a nugget of absolutely key information buried in the middle of a website or scholarly paper; and then two months later a colleague would casually mention something just as important.
This went on for more than a year.
Eventually, I started to wonder why I was having to track down this utterly essential information on my own, piece by piece; the things I was discovering seemed too important to be learning by chance. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and create a guide that would distill the key background and points of knowledge about reading instruction down into something manageable. The following ebook is intended to provide an overview of the basics of phonetic-based decoding instruction. If you’re just beginning to learn about the Science of Reading and are trying to figure out what exactly you need to know, this guide is for you. Click here to download.