It’s Week 3 of first term in Australian schools, and it has been a busy, and rewarding time. My new foundation learners are settling into school and their class: the Cognitorium. They are also participating in the beginnings of our English/literacy block.

I have a wide variety of early readers and writers, as many teachers will have gauged in their own classes: Some have no formal reading, handwriting or spelling skills as yet, and a few are already able to tackle simple chapter books.

However, none of my students are high or low across the board; rather their profile of skills and knowledge differ considerably. My strong decoders, who can pull the words right off the page, are not necessarily my most confident communicators, and do not yet have commensurate strengths in reading comprehension. Inversely, students at the start of their reading and spelling journeys are already making high level inferences during teacher read alouds, drawing upon their background knowledge.

So how do we cater for students when their abilities differ even in the first month of school?

Well, you don’t have to do it all in the one type of lesson!

Literacy is made up of lots of different parts.

It’s important to teach these parts in targeted ways, to maximise students’ success.

Our work must aim to reduce the cognitive load for students by avoiding tackling everything in every session. The science tells us that novices cannot attend to all these new skills simultaneously, and that breaking these facets down into manageable components/steps is vital. At my school, we actually think about these subskills of literacy quite differently, and teach them in distinct ways, as per understandings from the Science of Reading.

However, the separation of these facets, as I am about to review, is not recommended under balanced literacy, the ever popular approach of teaching reading and writing. You may have been told, for instance, that that it’s best to teach all the mechanics and skills of reading and writing “in context”, say during picture storybook reading, or free choice student writing.

In contrast, I will illustrate below that approaching these facets differently actually makes your life easier as a teacher. I’ll explore how I am building early literacy skills in a multifacted way that caters for the varied profiles of my learners.

ORAL LANGUAGE AND COMPREHENSION

At my school, we are excited to be using the FREE and fantastic Core Knowledge English Language Arts curriculum materials. For my foundation students, we have started with the Nursery Rhymes unit, and this is shaping up to be a perfect introduction to read-alouds and shared text reading, as we discuss the key ideas, vocabulary, and questions about these (mostly familiar) texts.

The point is: at this early stage, students are not expected to read text at the same time as grappling with understanding. Instead, they can enjoy listening, singing, and asking/answering questions about the ideas in the poems and rhymes in these oral language sessions. They are attending to the language and meaning of the text, without trying to learn how to decode at the same time. If I tried to do both decoding and comprehension in these sessions, I would lose many learners, if not all.

My students are loving these sessions going home singing the nursery rhymes, and telling their parents all about the colour of roses and violets, or that curds and whey are cottage cheese. We are also using picture storybooks to share the reading experience, and discuss story parts, vocabulary, characters, and also to just enjoy reading as a class.

We usually finish these 20 minute sessions with a brief art or letter/shape tracing activity that centres on the theme from the rhymes (e.g. umbrella and rain for: Rain, Rain Go Away, and It’s Raining, It’s Pouring).

DECODING AND ENCODING

In contrast to our oral language and comprehension sessions, we are teaching early decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) as part of a separate 50 minute literacy skills block each day. Here are the main components:

1. PHONEMIC AWARENESS (3 mins)

Blending of onset-rime pairs (e.g sp + ot = spot) and individual sounds (e.g. c + a + p = cap). This is short and sharp, and the kids love the challenge of these little word puzzles.

2. Decoding and Spelling Review (10 mins)

We start the decoding and spelling section with a review of our previous codes (sound-letter patterns), and short CVC words using these codes. These reviews are fast-paced, and tell us if students are consolidating their knowledge from previous sessions, or if we need to slow down and review more. As we get into the year, these reviews will contain words and sound-letter patterns from the previous week, month and term.

3. New Decoding and Spelling (17 mins)

This is where we teach the new codes and words which use these codes. For example, we started with <s a t p>, and students were reading and spelling words like <sat, cap, pat>. Critically, this isn’t part of the English block where we talk much about the meanings of words. Instead, we are focussed on how words are made up of sounds, and how to blend and segment these to read and spell. Working memory is limited!

Additional component - Reading Fluency (10 mins)

We are bringing in Paired Fluency for 10 mins a day once our foundation students can access decodable books semi-independently. We will likely trial this in the coming weeks.

HANDWRITING

Another component of the literacy skills block is handwriting.

4. Handwriting (10 mins)

We have a fortnightly cycle of handwriting for all upper and lowercase letters, with a focus on strokes and letter formation. Here we hone in on pencil grip, paper placement, and posture. In addition, we also talk about the placement of letters, and provide explicit teaching for the order and directions of strokes.

Kids aren’t handwriting for meaning much at the moment, as the focus is on the motor aspects of the task. Many students find it challenging to form letters neatly and use dotted thirds for the first time. So we are just working on the physical side of things. Working memory!! We mix this up with letter craft, art activities involving scissors, and name writing.

VOCABULARY and morphology

The last part of our literacy skills block focusses on the review and teaching of new vocabulary, and morphemes (prefixes and suffixes in Foundation, and root words in later years).

5. Vocabulary and Morphology (10 mins)

Words come from our reading texts (nursery rhymes at this stage), and a scope and sequence of Tier II Vocabulary, which we have compiled. These are brief, targeted discussions of the words, and short tasks to help students use them.

We also have morphemes that we teach in a specific sequence, which are also reviewed regularly.

In this part of the skills block, we are most definitely all about meaning, and the use of vocabulary and morphology. Our challenge is to embed and model the items during the rest of the day, week, and month, to encourage independent use and understanding of these words and morphemes.

ORAL SENTENCE COMPOSITION

Finally, in our early writing sessions (just started this week!), we are implementing The Writing Revolution, and our adapted version of the Reading Science in Schools Syntax Scope and Sequence. We are aiming to start students off on their own composition of sentences (orally first), then paragraphs, and eventually whole pieces. Right now, we are starting with repeating phrases and sentences, counting words and hearing word boundaries, and also filling in missing words (aka. sentence completion using pictures).

Oral composition using the Writing Revolution

We are aiming to start students off on their own composition of sentences (orally first). Here we are repeating phrases and sentences, and filling in missing words.

Our aim with this part of our English block is to help students craft their own original sentences orally first, until their transcription (handwriting and spelling) is robust enough to write sentences with support. Handwriting, spelling and punctuation aside, writing is very much an oral language task, so I’m aiming to develop my budding writers’ voices before they even need to put pen to paper.

As we continue this work on writing, I’ll be sharing these resources and insights into how this has worked, so look out for future posts!

CAN WE teach IT ALL?

As you can see there is a lot of different parts that make up how literacy is taught in the Cognitorium, and across my school. Each component targets specific areas of reading, writing, and oral language, and is structured to reduce the working memory demands for students, so all can achieve success in each lesson.

We could of course just read a lot to students, and have them experiment with writing and drawing, as many schools currently focus on in the early years. But where would that leave the students who are struggling to hold a pencil, identify letters, or understand English vocabulary? And how would my group of adanced decoders start to understand the why and how of English spelling, morphology, and vocabulary?

It is because of the differences in our students’ early reading and writing skills that we all need a varied repertoire of instructional routines for literacy. It is a lot for teachers to do, but this way students only have to focus on getting good at one thing at time. And as each part improves, all the threads of reading and writing proficiency can be woven together into continual and cumulative successes for each and every child.

My colleague Shane Pearson and I are excited to be presenting on our Literacy Skills Block: PhOrMeS at the 2022 Language, Literacy and Learning Conference. We were hoping to present in person in Perth, but (lucky for everyone else) it is about to launch as an online conference in April this year (thanks to covid). Check out the website for when tickets go on sale.

Thanks for visiting, and see you next week!

ABOUT me

Dr Nathaniel Swain

I am a Teacher, Instructional Coach, Researcher and Writer. I am passionate about language, literacy and learning, and effective and engaging teaching for all students.

I teach a class of first year foundation students, in a space affectionately known as Dr Swain’s Cognitorium. I also work as Science of Learning Specialist in my school.

Teaching all the facets of reading and writing