Supporting Highly Effective Strategies in Literacy: An Introduction to SOR with Elise Lovejoy, ep. 187

Supporting Highly Effective Strategies in Literacy: An Introduction to SOR with Elise Lovejoy, ep. 187, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:00

Hey coach, if you’ve been waiting for the competent literacy coach course to open up, your wait is almost over. The course is opening soon and I want you to be the first to know, make sure you’ve signed up at confidentliteracycoach.com to be included on the waitlist, you’ll be notified as soon as it opens for enrollment.This year is going to be even better than before. I’ve updated the reading and writing modules to provide you with the knowledge you need to support your school and implementing practices that are proven to build skilled readers and writers get the PD you need to provide the PD and learning they need join the waitlist so you can join the course.

Chrissy Beltran  00:36

Have you felt like you’ve provided all the PD, you’ve facilitated all the PLCs and you’ve had all the conversation, but your teachers are still stuck. If your teachers are resistant to instructional change or having trouble implementing new thing, it might look something like this. They’re still using outdated practices that we know don’t work. They fight every PLC to claim to their favorite lessons or strategies. You see evidence of for instructional methods everywhere despite having provided tons of PD and better practices. And kids aren’t learning and the same kids are at the bottom of the data chart every single time. Does this sound familiar? To literacy coaches who are committed to helping students grow as readers and writers This is especially frustrating. That’s why I created a free webinar for literacy coaches. But really any coach can value from it. It’s all about helping teachers embrace new practices and try out something new even when they’re not excited about it will learn why teachers for this change how to help teachers feel secure and ready to try something new. And my favorite strategies and methods to encourage choice while expecting and holding them accountable for trying new things. I’m so excited to share this information with you that I created a free download that you’ll get when you grab the free pre recorded webinar at buzzing with Miss b.com/shift Grab it today. It’s totally free and it will make such a difference in your coaching.

Chrissy Beltran  02:03

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked. Now I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode.

Chrissy Beltran  02:30

Hey, coach, and welcome to episode 187 of instructional coaching with Miss B, an introduction to best practices in reading, we’re going to dig into SLR and we’re going to look at it in terms of Scarborough’s reading rope. Before we get started, I want to remind you that we are partway through our series on better instruction. That’s what we’re trying to support. As coaches, we just want to make instruction better so that it reaches every kid, and that every kid has the opportunity to learn. So I’m really excited to share this series with you. We’ve had some fantastic so far and we are not done yet. Today’s episode is going to include a special guests that I have, but a lot of it is going to be solo information that I’m going to share with you. I do want to tell you before we get into the episode that my cohort, my course the confident literacy coach is actually at a reduced price right now. And you can get 15 additional percent off with the code podcast until May 27. So if you had to competent literacy coach.com, use that code podcast and then until May 27, that’s whenever the code will end. And that will give you a nice chunk of change off of the course so that you are able to get all that information and use it to better support your teachers. As a literacy coach. I also have a really nice free little course free little email download course, if you had to buzzing with Miss b.com slash literacy coach, you can grab that course for free. And it is a great way to get to know exactly where you can focus your time and energy. And we’re gonna get into some of that today. But this is gonna help you focus on what your action should be as a coach. So, if your school, regardless of grade level is moving to embrace what we know about reading based on science, this episode is for you. And it doesn’t matter what content area you teach. I think this information is valuable to you because we need to know how brains work when we read. So it’s an introduction to the ideas that we have learned about how growing readers brains work. And this is going to be relevant to a lot of different levels, even though some of it might sound very primary, we need to think about how this impacts the way we teach at all levels because it really does.

Chrissy Beltran  04:32

So we’re going to organize this information like I organize it in my course the confident literacy coach and we’re going to look at it by Scarborough’s reading rope and breaking down those components. And so in my course I break down Scarborough’s reading rope for you one component at a time and I give you the tools you need to share that information with teachers as well as to coach teachers in those areas. So in the writing modules, I break down sidas writing rope and a similar process and give you the tools and coaching methods for that as well. This episode is just an introduction. So if you’ve been curious about it, here’s the information that can get you started. And if your school is already digging into this material, you can still get some ideas about what it could look like at your school and maybe a different perspective. And you could learn about what I would start with at my school at buzzing with Miss b.com slash literacy coach. So let’s take a little bit of a look here at the different pieces of Scarborough’s reading rope. Scarborough’s reading rope is based on all this information that has been uncovered over time by the science of reading, basically, massive amounts of research, and then the culmination of that research coming all together into one sort of handy little graphic organizers. So if you want to Google Scarborough’s reading rope, that would give you a little picture of what it looks like. Basically, it’s like if you picture like a little rope, all with a bunch of little strands all raveled together, right, and then it branches out into two pieces. And in those two little chunks are multiple strands as well. So we’re gonna look at the first little chunk word recognition first. The second chunk is language comprehension. And we’re gonna get into that. The idea is that word recognition and language comprehension are what makes up the student’s ability to read. And so we’re going to talk about what goes into each of those pieces, so that you can make sure that your school is addressing these areas, in your classrooms, whether it’s in reading classroom or any other classroom, because we can’t just teach reading in one area, because we use reading as a tool all day long, right? So word recognition is area we’re going to start now inside of word recognition is three little individual strands, right? Phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. And I’m going to help you get a little background on what each of those is right now. Phonological awareness, basically refers to like syllables, phonemes, and an understanding of how sounds work in English work. So you may have seen the graphic if you’re from olden times, like me, where it was like the big umbrella that was the phonological awareness umbrella. And underneath that, were a bunch of little raindrops. And we’re going to look at what each of those little raindrops is. So under phonological awareness, that umbrella there’s word awareness, rhyming ability, syllable awareness, onset and rhyme, alliteration and phonemic awareness. Those are the different pieces that make up a kid’s ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds in English language. Word awareness is basically knowing when one word starts and another stop. So whenever you see kids pointing to words, they’re practicing word awareness, because they are identifying each individual word. And it’s foundational for reading and for decoding and for encoding for spelling. You may count or clap or hop the words in a sentence, you may point two words in a sentence with a little pointer. Those are that’s what word awareness looks like. A student’s rhyming ability is the ability to identify and produce rhyming words, orally. So phonological awareness, a lot of it is oral, not all of it. phonemic awareness is pretty much completely oral, well, phonological awareness, which is that big umbrella, it includes the sound and the letter connections. So rhyming has been a requisite in our view for a long time, right? We know that we encourage kids to learn rhymes into practice rhymes and produce rhyming words. However, some research now is coming out that says, it might not be as much of a requisite for reading as we think. But it is still helpful as a component of word recognition. Kids who can rhyme likely do read better, but it’s not necessarily the idea that if they can’t rhyme, they won’t be able to read syllable awareness, which is that third piece of phonological awareness that I mentioned, is the ability to orally identify syllables in a word. So if you’ve ever had a kid, you know, if you say the word octopus, and then all kids go up to us, and they clap each syllable, that’s what they’re doing. They’re breaking that word into syllables. And that’s also foundational for decoding, decoding and encoding. Because if we can teach kids to decode and encode by syllable, they’re more likely to apply those patterns properly. onset and rhyme refers to parts of a word. So the onset is like the beginning of a word like in cat, the onset is, and rhyme is the ending part of the word which is and so whenever you ask kids, okay, I’m gonna put together I’m gonna say a beginning sound, and a word ending. And I want you to put them together to make a word and you say, AG, and kids go back, they’re able to combine onset and rhyme. And we also want them to be able to manipulate those take those apart. Alliteration is the ability to recognize and produce words that start with the same sound. So books are really great tools for this, obviously, because they can encourage kids to play with words and recognize those beginning sounds, and then manipulate them to match and a couple of poems that I have used with my students were silly Sally, and 10, tiny turtles, basic, alliterative poems that I actually use with third graders because this was an area that they were struggling in as well.

Chrissy Beltran  09:49

phonemic awareness is the last component of that phonological awareness umbrella. And that’s the ability to isolate, blend segment and manipulate sounds within words. So if I I’m asking you to say the word bats and then change the, to the, at the beginning of the word, you should be able to go, oh cat, if I take the away and make it a cat, that’s phonemic awareness. And any good phonological awareness program is going to have a pretty strong phonemic awareness probe component. And that’s really done orally, that we want kids to hear to blend and manipulate orally. And that is a foundation for being able to read words later on. It’s a huge indicator. The second component of word recognition is decoding. And this is the ability to pronounce written words correctly. So one thing that has always concerned me is whenever a teacher will say, Well, he can read, you know, the kid can read it. And I’m like, but what does that mean? Does it mean that they decode it correctly? Does it mean they understand it? What are we we don’t have a common language for this, unfortunately. So specifically, decoding is the word that I use whenever I’m asking if a child has read words accurately, can they decode the words, because that’s what it means the ability to correctly read and pronounce written words. We need kids to be able to apply the alphabetic principle, which is that sound letter relationship, I see p on the page, I can say, I know that that’s the sound that letter makes, and then connects those phonemes to graphemes. Right the sound to the grapheme P, the sound to the grapheme sh and then connect those together into words. So this requires consistent explicit and systematic instruction, because we’re working towards automaticity. So we need constant practice, we need kids applying rules and adding to their repertoire of skills over time, because that is how we’re going to get them to be able to decode automatically on their own. You can instruct in phonics in this area around what you know different word parts would be like consonant vowel blends are some teach some don’t teach blends. Because blends are like if you have two consonants together like BL in the word blend, you can decode the word blend without knowing that the algo says bull because that’s kind of individually they say, oh, and when you put them together, they’re gonna say bull. Some people look at as a shortcut, but I guess it’s kind of one of those things that if you have time to teach it great, and if you don’t, as long as kids have a good understanding of each individual sound, they will be okay. digraphs are like if you have k and together Satan, sh like I mentioned says, Those are digress these are two consonants together that make one sound you can also have a vowel digraph or vowel teen. So like oh, you in the word trout, or a Y in the word play. And then we also could look at prefixes and suffixes as parts of words that will help us and decode those words. You can also teach syllable types here. And again, there’s some debate in this area, right? I personally think there’s value in teaching syllable types. Because you get at least at the very least, it helps you as a teacher identify what to focus on. So basically, there are six syllable types. They’re the patterns that our English syllables follow. And our closed syllables are the most frequent words that kids are going to encounter in print. So it’s like 45% of English syllables are closed syllables. So if you know that, you can target certain kinds of syllables in your instruction. And then add to that over time as kids become get better at the kinds of syllables that they already know. It’s also helpful for the teacher because you need to know when do I use this kind of sound? When do I use that kind of sound, the syllable type influences like vowel sounds, for example. So it can be helpful to know that information at the very least as a teacher. And as a student, they may not need to know it to the degree you do, but you can use it to support them. The third component of word recognition is sight recognition. And sight recognition refers to automaticity in decoding written words. So we just talked about decoding, and how we need to use art we need to continually teach decoding skills and strategies using phonics cues, to decode written words with automaticity. This is the automaticity. And so it’s different sight recognition is different than sight words. Sight Words were like, here’s this list of words, Let’s memorize them, right? So I have the word shoe I have the word like I have, you know, really many times or often high frequency words, not really sight words. And so then kids were just asked to memorize but we know we don’t really learn words at a word level that way if your memorization So instead, we need to start with decoding using the alphabetic principle. We start with our phonics cues. We start with our you know, applying our phonics skills, decode words based on that and over time, with practice the brain will attach found and meaning to specific patterns of letters to where you can read things automatically and you don’t have to decode it chunk by chunk anymore. If necessary. automaticity is necessary to build fluency because if we don’t have we don’t have sight recognition of words. We don’t have fluency of reading because when your kid is stopping to decode every third word because maybe it’s There are patterns that they are not familiar with. They are not reading fluently, they are reading one word or two words at a time. So one tool that teachers use to do some of these things, is decodable readers. Obviously decodable readers are more supportive of reading than just teaching decoding skills or sight recognition. We’re not practicing in these areas, but I wanted to include them in this section, because especially in the primary grades, this is a really big shift that some schools are making in the way that they work with small groups and teach these word recognition skills. And what I want you to keep in mind, you may not be a k two coach or pre K two, coach, that’s okay. Because as an upper elementary teacher, I needed decodable. And I did not have them, I was fine with using guided reading level texts for the majority of my kids, because many of them in fourth grade and third grade, have the basic phonics skills that they needed. And I was able to just spot teach certain things, you know, review them really, as they came up, because they had already been instructed in the primary grades. However, I always would have a group of students who was not reading where they needed to read, and they were lacking those foundational phonics skills. And without decodable readers, it was very hard for me to go through and find texts that included enough of those patterns for them to practice those skills. So I would teach the phonics skill in a way that I made up because I did not have a program as a fourth grade teacher, unfortunately. And then I would have to go through and like, find magical texts, or write texts, that kids could practice that pattern. So I do encourage you to listen to this section, regardless of what grade you teach. Because if you have students in your school who struggle with decoding reading words correctly, which is all of us, no matter what grades your school serves, this section might be really helpful and eye opening for you. So I am really excited today to welcome Elise Lovejoy of Express readers. Thank you for being here today. Elise,

Elise Lovejoy  16:47

thank you so much for having me.

Chrissy Beltran  16:49

Yeah, I’m glad that you’re gonna be able to give us a little bit of insight about decodable. But before we get there, I want to know, who do you help? And how do you spend most of your time? Well,

Elise Lovejoy  16:58

I was a teacher for a very long time, and then wrote decodable started writing to Kota bowls, and it took me out of the classroom. So I basically helps support schools, teachers, I do professional development, I do, obviously little volunteer teaching on the side, just to help out. But yeah, that’s pretty much how I spend my time. Perfect.

Chrissy Beltran  17:19

Thank you. And so I want to kind of dig into a little bit of your knowledge about decodable readers. And so this episode is helping people kind of learn a little bit more about some of the signs of reading that we need to keep in mind as we’re looking at our curriculum as we’re looking at our resources for teachers. And I’m specifically I just kind of finished talking about the word recognition piece. So if you could share a little bit about the qualities we should be looking for in decodable. Readers, I think that would be really helpful because there’s so many Reese’s resources out there, but we want to know how to choose good ones.

Elise Lovejoy  17:53

Yeah, well, definitely at first, I always tell teachers vet your products. So get a sample from a company, make sure that it’s what you’re looking for. I’ve seen some really big companies that I trust, do this poorly, making sure that our scope and sequence so if you’re teaching skills in a specific order in your class, let’s say your phonics goes along a certain way, finding a series of Dakota bowls that go along with it. But also, you want to make sure that they’re fun. And that sounds so simple. But there are a lot of decodable books that either don’t make sense, or they don’t have a full storyline or there isn’t something funny. We want kids to love reading. And in doing so, if we’re having them apply the knowledge that we’re teaching in classes, we want them to apply it to something that they’re going to get joy out of. On top of that, part of it is making sure that it doesn’t have too many sight words. And by sight words, I mean, things that they’ve already mastered. Or sorry, yes, things they’ve already mastered. Because we don’t want them running into too many hurdles, like hurdle minimization, how many words are they going to run into where it’s going to be problematic? We’re gonna have to work through other strategies. So in order to practice things efficiently, we want to make sure that they don’t have too many hurdles. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  19:15

I’m glad you brought up the joy factor. Because I feel like that was a big challenge. I was an upper elementary teacher. And so then I, you know, I always had groups of kids who needed support in phonics, and they needed texts that was controlled, so they could practice. And so you know, I use guided reading leveled readers with most of my kids, but with those groups of kids who were not reading anywhere near a grade level, it was a real issue to find something that they were not dislike. This is just the absolute worst, because age appropriateness is difficult as well, with decodable.

Elise Lovejoy  19:50

Like I always say, when when people approached me about our decoder rules, I would say ours aren’t for everybody. Ours are definitely like a T K pre K through second, maybe third grade, there’s really great companies doing it really well now, like phonics Books Ltd, like places where they do catch up readers or simple words, books, but books that have a very controlled tax but have a higher story level line. So, you know, for for readers that have made it further in life that have more experiences that can handle a little more content, and that maybe have more words per page, because our little ones definitely need less text to a page. But the older ones sometimes have more endurance to get through more. And so having more of a story and more content.

Chrissy Beltran  20:38

That makes sense, you have to consider who am I purchasing these decodable? For? What is the needs that I’m trying to fulfill? Is this for general instruction for all of my kids in second grade? Or is this for intervention in fifth grade?

Elise Lovejoy  20:50

Right? Exactly. Because they’re not all going to be the same? There’s no, no decodable? is, it’s going to be perfect unless you’re basing it on the child.

Chrissy Beltran  21:00

Mm hmm. That makes sense. So then, as like, let’s say, we have decodable readers and they we’ve got something that aligns to our curriculum of phonics instruction, how can we use those decodable readers in our teaching to support better reading and writing instruction? Well,

Elise Lovejoy  21:14

so decodable is, I would say, are not only powerful as a tool, they’re essential if you get the right ones, because we have to apply what we’re learning. It’s like telling a child how to ride a bike, and then just expecting they’re going to do it, they have to practice in order to get there. And so Dakota bulls are powerful, as far as cementing the knowledge, like we say, the studies show that practice makes permanent. And it’s something like one in four times for our gifted child, four to 14 for a regular reader, 14 to 40, for a struggling reader, and 40 to 200 times for a child with dyslexia, so that the use of something over and over again, so finding decodable books, where they’re using those structures that we’ve been teaching them, and they’re using it in a way that is natural, not, you know, just a ditto sheet, where they’re practicing that one skill over and over again. Also, it helps so much with writing, because when we cement those phonics skills and the sound structures, kids and can transfer it to what they’re putting down on the page, if you’re using a decodable, I always have kids do a writing activity after it during a group or whole class, depending on how you’re using it. Because the kids then have a bank of words that they know the sound spellings for. And it helps them to not only gain the confidence as they use all the skills, but they can write effectively about a topic. So if we’re doing character, and I say write about this character, what were they doing in it? How do you feel about them, they can use the words that are in that book. And and it helps with that writing piece. And on top of it, honestly, it’s the confidence. We all know when our kids can do something, and they know they can do it, they start to do it faster and better and acquire skills in an easier fashion.

Chrissy Beltran  23:08

Mm hmm. Yeah, I totally agree with that connection to reading and writing and making sure that we give them opportunities to apply and make that bridge that leap from decoding to encoding, right? Because that’s not, they don’t always they don’t realize that can apply those rules, right? Where they sometimes have to be explicitly introduced to that idea. So then, briefly, would you walk us through kind of what that little little lesson could look like? What did you like a lesson with a decodable? reader could be,

Elise Lovejoy  23:35

honestly, I try to help teachers by understanding that we still love a small group format, we’re not removing that piece from our work, what we’re doing is we’re changing it out so that it’s not just, you know, this kind of vague reading group where we’re skills based. So maybe we do a quick activity with the phonics structure that we’re working on something that can can be super fun, you know, a mini phonics game, and then I always go over we come sticky words, but whatever the sight words are, so what in that sight word is tricky for us, like, let’s say today, I did a lesson on four, f o r, because the children knew CVC blends and digraphs. Well, they hadn’t learned the or sound. So I’d pointed it out. It’s just about letting the kids know what is going to be a hurdle for them. And then reading the book now, I try not to single out kids, I try not to do it one at a time. I actually like the ready, set, go. And then we all read it together. There’s a repeated reading, whether they go off and they read with a partner, they read to me. They read to a book buddy, ie a stuffed animal. But there’s more than one practice. And we’re finding to that there are shades of meanings of words. So in a small group instruction, what I mean by this is that even though the book is decodable, and the words are probably smaller, vocabulary doesn’t have to be made. have long words, it can be very small ones. And it’s equitable for us to make sure that kids get the meanings of all of those. So an example uses the word fit, you might be fit for something it might fit you, you can be fit. And so we talk about the differences in this tiny little word, but we’re building that vocabulary while using a decodable book in a small group.

Chrissy Beltran  25:23

Yeah, my first thought was the word dim, and how that’s not maybe a word that I don’t know if we should. I was thinking about all the multiple meanings of dim, and I mean, the light can be dim, and then I thought somebody can be dim, and I thought maybe you shouldn’t use that example. The problem with

Elise Lovejoy  25:40

that is teachers all the time. Oh, wait, that’s not a good one. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  25:42

nevermind, Doug, is that? Yes. But I think is a good one. Yeah, that would be another because that can have, you know, multiple meanings. And

Elise Lovejoy  25:52

today, we’re doing cub jets. And I said, to do a lot of airplanes. What is this? And they all kind of, you know, and then we talked about it, they they took turns jetting across the classroom and coming back. I mean, you can only do that in certain settings. But we needed body movement anyway. Yeah. But just you know, to utilize all the different kinds of words, you can just because words are short doesn’t mean that they aren’t valuable and powerful to what they need to comprehend later.

Chrissy Beltran  26:19

And so like in your readers, as you move up in in skills, right, as you move into later skill block, you have like, multisyllabic words that have different kinds of syllable types and things like that, right? Yeah,

Elise Lovejoy  26:31

definitely. Because we want to help kids so that they can approach all kinds of words. And so it can be decodable for them. But we do need to increase the length, so kids aren’t getting overwhelmed. And they also start to see, hey, I can do this. I can all the skills I have on this word that I previously would have thought was too long. Yeah.

Chrissy Beltran  26:50

Yeah, makes total sense. Well, thank you so much, Elise for kind of giving us an some insight into decodable. And how we can use that to teach some of these practices that we know are essential for word recognition.

Elise Lovejoy  27:01

Thank you so much for having me.

Chrissy Beltran  27:06

Okay, so that was our introduction to decodable. And that kind of fits in in the word recognition piece, but it also supportive, like at least mentioned of language comprehension, which is the piece we’re going to talk about next. So Scarborough’s reading rope, like I mentioned, you’ve got your little rope, and it’s kind of separated out into two chunks like a V. So we just talked about the top one, which was word recognition. And the second is language comprehension. language comprehension is not reading comprehension. But it is a component and a predictor of reading comprehension. And so if you think about language in the classroom, the teacher is the one who has to elevate the language in the classroom. And there are five things that the teacher is going to be trying to support and grow in their students. Okay, the first one of these is background knowledge. And in the next episode, and Episode 188, I’m going to get into a little horror story about how background knowledge is sometimes introduced to kids. But what I want you to know about background knowledge, for our purposes today is that background knowledge is the information and knowledge that students have. And more and more research has shown that background knowledge is a huge predictor for comprehension success, that it comes from experiences, from wide reading from talking about things, even videos, my brother was obsessed with animals when he was little, and dinosaurs and that young, he’s a young man. Now, he still knows everything about animals and dinosaurs. But he spent hours and hours and hours watching Animal Planet and talking about it with us. And he grew so much knowledge from that, right? You can grow knowledge from videos and for like well made videos, from not like the ones I’m going to tell you about in the next episode. You can grow your language, your background knowledge from wide reading from listening and participating in read alouds. But we have to build background knowledge and kids. And one of the things that we want to consider is what opportunities do you already have built into your school day to go grow background knowledge? Well, obviously your read aloud, right. And also the topics that you choose for things that kids are going to read on their own or in groups, but also science and social studies and math are all your content areas are great opportunities for building background knowledge. So don’t forget about those. We can’t always take a kid to NASA, but we can learn about it in science, right? And if we can use those opportunities that we have to build background knowledge, hopefully, we can stop cutting out those content areas, because that’s a really dangerous practice that has been happening. You can even see it in the world. People don’t know about finance and people don’t know about history, we need to be teaching these things. Because if not, we face huge consequences not only in reading ability and in just discrete knowledge, but in their ability to function as citizens in our country and in our world. So you know, we we got to teach content guys. But background knowledge we know is that is really huge indicator of comprehension because if kids can comprehend, then I mean it kids A lot of stuff that they’re more likely to comprehend. The second thing that we want to be growing in classrooms is vocabulary. And again, we’ve known this for a long time. Vocabulary are the words that students know the meanings of can read and can use in speaking and writing. So, in this case, there’s, there are words that students kind of, they’ve heard before, their words that they like, really know the meaning of, and they can use in speaking, there are words that they can just read, but they really like they can read them. And they have a vague idea of the meaning. There’s a spectrum of knowledge about words, right, there are different levels of understanding of words. And there are also words that are part of your expressive vocabulary, which are words you can use in speaking and writing and your receptive vocabulary, which are words that you can understand when you read or hear them. So we have to be considering the different levels of knowing a word and the different ways of using words, when we’re instructing vocabulary. Our oral instruction supports kids written abilities, right? The more that we can get kids talking and using words, the more those words are going to make their way into their writing. And one of the things that we know for sure is that new vocabulary is best used when we make connections to known words. So if we want kids to learn new words, we have to connect them to the words they already know. The third component in language comprehension is language structures. The structure of the English language is particular, right, and the structure of English influences the meaning. So for example, in a sentence, it has specific syntax, there are grammar rules that apply when we write sentences, and understanding those grammar rules help us understand the meaning. Submit syntax is the grammar and semantics is how that grammar and word choice affect the meaning. So for example, in a sentence that says, more than most, I love ice cream. Well, that can kind of sounds awkward, orally, but it’s something you could read, right. And if you don’t know how the structure of that sentence is working, and you don’t understand the syntax, there’s no way you can understand that I love ice cream, like more than most people, you have to make sure that we are teaching grammar structures, and that we are teaching how that grammar structure affects what the sentence actually means. So that kids can comprehend on a sentence level, there are patterns to these structures, right. And so we want to make sure that our kids are having opportunities to experience those patterns with direct instruction, and apply them in their writing and understand what they mean. So that’s why the connection between reading and writing is so essential. And why my personal action research shows that mentor sentences are like one of the best ways to teach grammar, because that’s whenever we are directly instructing in a pattern, we are giving kids an example, we are helping them understand what it means and how the words are working together to form that meaning. And we are helping kids think about okay, this is how I can write my own sentences using this structure. The fourth component of language comprehension is verbal reasoning. So this means understanding at deeper levels beyond a literal understanding. So if we’re thinking about verbal reading, we’re thinking about reading beyond the literal level, we’re thinking about like, do they understand metaphor? Can they understand idioms? Can they think inferentially, even at the sentence level? And so that’s something that I want you to think about. Inferential thinking at the sentence level looks like what I like understanding how if we refer a pronoun, refer to someone by a pronoun, they know who that is referring back to, that is an inferential thought, but it’s happening at a very minut level. And sometimes that’s where we lose kids. So we make try to make inferences on a large scale. But they don’t even understand these tiny little inferences, like I gave my paper to her, who’s her, you have to figure out it doesn’t tell me who her is, I have to use a sentence structure to go back and figure it out. And that is making an inference. So whenever we’re talking about verbal reasoning, kids have to be able to use their background knowledge, they have to make connections within the text and beyond the text. And then they have to synthesize that information for deeper meanings. So they have to connect to what they already know, and come up with new understanding. It’s a tall order. The last component we’re going to look at is literacy knowledge. So literacy knowledge refers to a knowledge of genres and structures, and basically how texts work. And this is why we know that kids who have exposure to wide reading, they tend to be better readers. Not all the time. Obviously, there are specific issues that impede that. But in general, if a kid has access to lots of different kinds of books and texts, and they read those texts, especially with an adult, they’re going to have noticed a lot of patterns. So your literacy knowledge includes things like concepts about print, so how books and texts work, just sitting with a child and reading to them, they’re going to start noticing those things. They are the ones you could tell who sat with their parents and read sometimes because they come in, in the early grades and they know about how to hold a book, How to turn pages, how to look from top to bottom, left to right. They also may notice things like genre or structures or features, they may say, Oh, this is a story. Not every book is a story, guys. Not every text is a story. We can’t tell her kids, kids, oh, I’m reading a story today. And it’s really not a story. It’s like information, pet peeve of mine, we need to make sure that we’re using proper terminology, and introducing these genres and structures and features accurately to kids. So my number one rule, if it’s not a story, don’t call it a story. But beyond that, we also want to think about okay, so what kinds of structures are we likely to see in a fiction story? What kinds of structures are we likely to see in an informational article? What kinds of features might we see in a persuasive text, we want kids to be thinking about how these texts work and use that to help them comprehend. So a lot of this language comprehension, we really focus on it being done orally. Whenever we combine the oral comprehension, with the decoding, and you know, sight recognition, and phonological awareness, that all comes together in word recognition skills, when we put these two things together, that’s when we get comprehension, right, unless something else is at play. So without the oral language, and without the decoding skills, kids are probably not going to grow as readers, we have to make sure we are addressing both of these things. Okay. So did I get into? Yes. So from there, I want you to think about what this means for all levels. Okay. Whenever we’re planning instruction, we need to ensure that the components and the methods that we are introducing are supportive of these areas, regardless of grade level, do we have opportunities for kids to build literacy knowledge? Are we giving opportunities for kids to grow their vocabulary by connecting new words to known words? How are we giving kids opportunities to build background knowledge and apply it in different areas? Some of the things that teachers already doing their classrooms that maybe they don’t consider SLR are really already supportive of these components, and some are not. And our job is to support teachers and learning what’s working, and what can we do differently.

Chrissy Beltran  37:01

I know this was a quick and dirty introduction was a really fast overview. But I hope it was helpful to you and if your school is moving into the science of reading, or you feel like some of these ideas were exactly what your school is missing and what you want to grow. I have got this email course you’re gonna love head to buzzing with this b.com slash literacy coach to grab that feat free email course. And you can also of course, like I told you before, use that 15% off coupon code, confident literacy coach.com. Grab the course for 15% off the already reduced price until May 27. I cannot wait to talk to you next week, we are looking at three shifts that we need to make at schools to better support literacy instruction at all levels. Even if you’re not literacy coach, a lot of these things are going to be things that you can do in different components of your day. So definitely listen to that episode as part of our better instruction series. And until then, happy coaching.

Chrissy Beltran  37:59

Now that you’ve got so much to think about, head over to buzzing with Miss b.com to grab some free downloads, become a VIP, and check out the podcast show notes. Happy coaching!