Reading Teachers Lounge

Shannon and Mary chat with Malia Hollowell (@Playdough2Plato) about her new book, Science of Reading In Action.    They summarize the big ideas within the Science of Reading for listeners and share practical actions teachers and parents can take to ensure they're doing best practices for students that are backed by literacy research.   After listening, you'll understand more about WHAT t...

Shannon and Mary chat with Khadijah Abdullah, a public school teacher in their area,  about how she balances the wide variety of reading abilities in her classroom.    Khadijah shares about her trauma-informed teaching practices and how she uses visual literacy to provide learning scaffolds for her students. Episode Links for Resources mentioned: Teaching With Multiple Modalities 10 Visual Literac...

Shannon and Mary chat with Jamie Sears from Not So Wimpy Teacher about how to get more done as a reading teacher in less time.  Jamie shares practical tips for teachers from her newly published book titled How to Love Teaching Again.    Listeners will walk away with ideas on how to save time in preparing lesson plans, routines for lesson structure, easy grading techniques, and ways to simplify rea...

Shannon and Mary read over and discuss the Speaking and Listening standards in Reading to develop a deeper understanding of how and why these standards exist and help the students grow in literacy.     They show how the standards develop in the depth of knowledge across the grade levels from Kindergarten to Fifth Grade.   They also share ideas of ways to embed Speaking and Listening standards prac...

Shannon chats with Stephanie Summers from Pride Reading Program about the topic of helping students build their reading fluency.    They talk about what skills go into a student's reading fluency.     They share ways to work on fluency with readers.     In their chat, they reference ideas from The Megabook of Fluency by Timothy Rasinski. Episode Links for Resources mentioned: What is fluency?...

Shannon and Mary focus their conversation on how to build students' vocabularies.    They share less effective methods used in the past and how they've evolved their vocabulary instruction to help students the most.   In the chat, they reference ideas from Bringing Words to Life by Isabel Beck.  Episode Links for Resources mentioned: How do we teach the Language Comprehension strand of S...

Often Shannon and Mary discuss different types of student assessments. Today we are going to dive a little deeper and discuss how we use data analysis to make meaningful adjustments and decisions to our teaching practices. Shannon brings the perspective of a classroom teacher and Mary shares how she individualizes plans for her private tutoring clients. Episode Links for Resources mentioned: SoR a...

Shannon and Mary chat with Emily Gibbons from the Literacy Nest about decodable texts.   This discussion provides information about how decodables are similar and different to trade books and leveled texts.  In this episode, teachers will find out how and when to use decodable texts in reading instruction.  Listeners will also learn the best sources for high quality decodable books and short texts...

Shannon and Mary chat with Dr. Janet Mort, who has fifty years of experience in the field of education and reading.    We discuss the Simple View of Reading and how that affected reading instruction in the 1980s and 1990s.    Dr. Mort then shares how the research following the Simple View of Reading has shifted and become more defined.  This discussion provides context to reading research over the...

Shannon and Mary chat with Ann Geiger from The Measured Mom about how  readers orthographically stores words in their reading brains.  This episode follows our overview of the reading brain, where we talked about the reader's journey to whole word recognition and how reading teachers can help their readers bolt on the orthography to what students already know in spoken language and language c...

Shannon and Mary chat with Dr. Marnie Ginsberg from Reading Simplified about what happens in the brain during reading.   We talk about the reader's journey to whole word recognition and how reading teachers can help their readers bolt on the orthography to what students already know in spoken language and language comprehension. Listeners will learn how to build a strong foundation for readin...

Shannon and Mary ask Linda Rhyne to join them for a live Reading Teachers discussion about how to find balance in our reading instruction.   Teachers are asked to follow various curriculum programs, teach the grade level standards, differentiate for their students' needs, and utilize their own expertise & experience.  How can teachers blend all this together into cohesive literacy instruc...

Shannon and Mary chat with Donalyn Miller & Colby Sharp about their recently published Common Sense Guide to Your Classroom Library .    The reading teachers discuss how to set up and use the library to maximize its impact with kids.   This conversation provides the WHY behind decision making and instructional use of the classroom library. Episode Resources: The Commonsense Guide to Your Class...

Shannon and Mary chat with Mindful Teacher Rachel about the Schwa vowel sound and how to teach it to students.  She shares great stories from her classroom about teaching reading and all about her newly published book that can be used to introduce the Schwa to readers.   You'll want to listen in on this chat between reading teachers to get strategies and resources for working on the Schwa wit...

Shannon and Mary chat about their favorite free and low cost literacy resources to use in reading lessons and tutoring sessions.   They share links to:  complete phonics curriculum resources that include scope and sequences, decodable texts, vocabulary lists and activities, phonics and phonemic awareness activities, and strategies for teaching comprehension.   Check out the links in the show notes...

Mary and Shannon chat with Stephaney Jones-Vo about how to best support the reading needs of English Language Learners.    Stephaney describes the differences in needs of ESOL students at various levels and provides easy ideas for differentiation and scaffolding for students at different levels.   Stephaney shares how to understand the language load of class assignments and assessments, and this l...

Shannon and Mary meet up after the summer hiatus to chat about going back to school.  They catch up on their personal activities from the summer and then share their instructional plans for the new school year in 2022-2023. Episode Resources: Shannon's Phonics Units Decodable readers from Heggerty Decodable readers from High Noon Decodable readers from Geodes Decodable readers from Flyleaf Mo...

Shannon and Mary catch up on their teaching activities and personal lives during the past school year.  They share highlights from the past season and what is coming next in Season 5 and the 2022-2023 school year. Episode Resources: Shannon's Phonics Units Decodable readers from Heggerty Decodable readers from High Noon Decodable readers from Geodes Decodable readers from Flyleaf Morpheme Mag...

Shannon and Mary share some new understandings they've discovered about the differences between long and short vowels.  They chat about how they'll modify some phonics activities for students after discovering these new understandings. Episode Resources: The ABC's and All  Their Tricks by Margaret M. Bishop (*Amazon affiliate link) our Season 1 episode about Short Vowels our Season...

Shannon and Mary chat with Nancy Young, the creator of the Ladder of Reading & Writing,  about differentiated instruction for readers at different levels.      [Note: Our podcast has explicit permission from Nancy Young to use her Ladder infographic image and information with our audience.]  In this episode we discuss the equitable need for differentiation, in order to "offer children wha...

Shannon chats with Sarah Rich, CEO of Just Right Reader, about her company that provides decodable readers to students, families, teachers, and schools.  Sarah and Shannon talk about how decodable texts are important for the right reading practice for students.   Sarah provides details about their mission to make reading fun and for students to learn to read with engaging decodables that are repre...

Shannon and Mary chat with Christina Edmondson (@literacywithmrs.e) about implementing Sound Walls into your literacy classrooms.  Christina shares how Sound Walls compare to traditional word walls and provides ideas for using them with students in reading and writing.  She describes exactly how to set up your own Sound Wall and start using with your readers. Episode Resources: Transitioning from...

Shannon and Mary chat about the recent debate in the science of reading community about whether phonemic awareness drills without letters are a worthwhile exercise for readers.  They describe activities they've done with struggling readers to build phonemic awareness, and they talk about the use of those activities as a part of Tier 1 reading instruction. Episode Resources: Research article ...

Shannon and Mary chat with Emily Conlan from @wordmorphed_ on Instagram about Morphology.   Emily shows how and where Morphology fits into structured literacy instruction and the science of reading. Their discussion provides easy ways to strengthen students' word meaning knowledge at different grade and age levels of readers. Episode Resources: Wiliam Van Cleve: Morphology Matters, Word Sums,...

Shannon describes some new ways she's helping her older elementary students learn how to encode and spell.   Mary shares the S.O.S strategy for Spelling and explains the research about encoding and the brain processing that happens as students make spelling choices. Note: The S.O.S. strategy is typically included with all Orton-Gillingham training organizations and isn't just attributed...