Teaching early reading skills relies on working from the most basic skills and activities that students need to learn to be successful in the classroom and building a slow and steady progression of sounds. We recognize that teaching letter sounds and beginning blending is truly only one aspect to learning to read but it’s absolutely critical.

One of our favorite things to do with our students is to create interactive notebooks. We absolutely love it because it is a really great way to start off your systematic, structured, reading intervention. It's also a great way to keep students engaged!

Phonological awareness is a key foundation for building early reading skills.

It's an umbrella term that essentially refers to the ability to break words into individual sounds, blend sounds to create words (sounding it out), and the ability to manipulate sounds in our language through tasks like rhyming, changing the ending sounds of words or the order of words (like in Pig Latin).

One of the most effective ways to teach reading and spelling skills is to teach students about the Six Syllable Types and how to divide words into syllables using syllable division strategies. When we teach reading, we teach our students that sounds (consonant sounds and vowel sounds) come together to create syllables, syllables come together to create words, words come together to create phrases and sentences, and sentences come together to create paragraphs, which come together to create stories or information text.

I was reflecting on why this field can be so difficult at times. I was considering the beliefs we have, the realities we face. This field is beyond rewarding and the impact we make as therapists as educators is truly second to none. But it’s hard.

And part of the reason it’s so hard is because we expect a lot from ourselves. And then we never seem to measure up no matter how many hours we put in. It often feels like there is no winning. When I started out in this field I thought I had two choices. I could only be one of two types of educators.

Today we wanted to have a little real talk with all of you. We wanted to address three common myths we keep hearing about research-based reading intervention.

When I started out in this field, shifting from working purely as an Assessment Specialist (psychometrist if we want to get fancy) working alongside psychologists I was enamored with this approach that I heard so much about. I took the fancy Orton-GIllingham trainings, I made OG based activities & games, created OG based lessons, followed an OG Scope and Sequence…but it wasn’t enough. Here’s what I did next.

Whether you are a teacher, a parent, an SLP, or an interventionist, if you’re anything like us…which you are, because you’re here, you care about providing top notch intervention or instruction for your students. However, with all the differing opinions out there in the field of education it can be difficult to know if what you’re doing is the right thing. Click through to read about our 7 Must Haves for effective, research-based reading intervention.

Now, if you have been working with us for a while, you’ll know that we LOVE teaching with key images and phrases to help anchor skills for a student. For au/aw, we use the phrase “Yawn, I have to do the laundry.” This helps our struggling readers and spellers remember the rule. Keep reading for more tips, tricks and activities surrounding the au/aw vowel team.

We use the key phrase “Snow Plow” to teach this phonogram because “ow” has two sounds - /O/ like in snow, and /ow/ like in plow. Read on for teaching tips, tricks and activities!

OU has two sounds. To help our students remember these sounds, we use the key phrase “Trout Soup” because it can say /ow/ like in trout and /oo/ like in soup. The visual of fish soup is one the students don’t forget very easily! Keep reading for more tips, tricks and vowel team activities!

OO can be a tricky vowel team because it has two sounds. Click through to read about our tips & tricks for teaching this vowel team!

We use both “oi” and “oy” to make the /oi/ sound (think of the words “boy” and “foil”). When that sound comes in the middle of a word, we use “oi.” If it comes at the end of the word, we will use “oy.” Keep reading to learn more about how we teach our students all about this vowel team!

Vowel teams can be tricky for students, but we have found that teaching them in this way has made a massive difference. Keep reading for ideas for teaching the OA/OE vowel teams!

We know we are strange but absolutely LOVE data tracking and data analysis. Not joking. Part of the reason we love data is because Data Tracking & Data Analysis are the absolute best way to see how much growth our reading intervention students have made and to see where they need continued practice.

Your data is your road map, your GPS, for literacy intervention. One of the best things we can do is to get a good look at how our students are performing overall. This data will be invaluable to parents, other professionals, and next year’s teacher.

With so many ways to get long E sound, we wanted to show you how we teach the ‘ee’ and ‘ey’ vowel teams. Open to read about our approach and grab our ee/ey center activities.

Both “ai” and “ay” say the long A sound. We use “ai” in the middle of the word (think rain, pail, train, mail) and “ay” at the end of the word (play, stay, day, May).

I love to provide literacy based centers that reinforce the learning that took place during the small group time. Students rotate through a series of centers where they can work independently (or with a partner at times) to further engage with literacy experiences. 

 If you look at our Suggested Literacy Block schedule, you will note that SMARTER Intervention lends itself nicely to this type of classroom system.