Welcome to the My Literacy Space Podcast

If we haven’t connected before you can find me on Instagram, my handle is @myliteracyspace  I share my favourite structured literacy tips, multisensory activities and I am also a children’s picture book reviewer.  My most favourite book genre in kid lit is wordless picture books but that’s a topic for another day.

After chatting with many parents and educators over the years, I want to use this platform to address misconceptions and incorrect information floating around about reading and spelling. This will be a space where together, we can uncover current information supported by the Science of Reading, we will learn and unlearn information together, and discover ways to support ALL children on their reading journey. Whether you are an educator like myself, a speech and language pathologist, a homeschool family, or a parent interested in discovering more engaging activities to promote language and literacy, you are in the right place.  I’m going to be sharing my favourite literacy tips with you and picture books that NEED to be on every bookshelf.

The day I realized my current strategies weren’t serving the children I was supporting

So where do we begin?  Let’s start with the day I realized that what I was doing was no longer serving the children I was hired to support.  Yikes!  I had been working for a local school board for over a decade in a literacy support role.  I worked closely with Speech & Language Pathologists and other specialists to support students in speech and language, pre-reading skills, reading, spelling, writing, etc.  I organized volunteers through a local non-profit agency called Calgary Reads to come and read with children weekly and helped with our annual Literacy Night event. One afternoon, I was meeting with the Assistant Principal and he handed me a package that one of the SLPs had dropped off for me.  As we looked through the resource together, I may or may not have rolled my eyes.  It just seemed like it was going to be one more thing to add to my plate and I was skeptical about how I was going to incorporate it into our daily routine.  Over the next month though, I began to implement the sound cards into our reading support times and truly started to see something remarkable begin to take place.  The kids were not only engaged but were mastering some tricky concepts.  So what was making the difference?

The structured literacy approach

Lively Letters by Reading with TLC

The sound cards, called Lively Letters by Reading With TLC, focus on teaching skills in an explicit way, they follow a scope and sequence and it’s systematic and cumulative.  They specifically teach the 44 sounds of English in a multisensory way using oral kinesthetic cues, mnemonic cues, hand gestures, music and they have phonological awareness skills embedded directly into each lesson.  I realized that this method follows a structured literacy approach - which is explicit, systematic, and cumulative.  I had no idea that this change to reading instruction would make such a huge impact.  You know the saying “when you know better you do better?”  By making this one small change, ok it’s actually a BIG change in the world of reading, I began seeing incredible progress in every single child. I’ll be chatting more about Lively Letters in another episode, so don’t worry I’m not going to leave you hanging.  

Finally, a recipe for reading that works!

Now the kids were NOT the only ones doing better, so was I.  I was learning the greatest recipe for reading.  The structured literacy approach is backed by the Science of Reading and is not new but it has recently begun to flood social media and slowly school boards are taking notice.  The Science of Reading refers to the body of research that cognitive scientists have been studying for the past twenty years and it has helped to debunk methods that are not evidence-based.  Phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension are all important to include in our explicit literacy instruction and I will be touching on all of these topics in upcoming episodes.  “Explicit teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some.” (Snow & Juel, 2005).

Uncomfortable yet? I was too!

So let’s be honest…it’s hard to hear that strategies are no longer serving our students, it’s uncomfortable, it’s yucky and it’s going to make us squirm a little.  Reading strategies such as  “use the picture for a clue”, or “what would make sense there” are NOT the best-proven methods to support our readers because they promote guessing rather than decoding.  We need to be aware of any strategy that leads kids’ eyes away from the text.  As Mark Seidenberg says, “the best ‘cue’ to a word is the word itself.”

Unlearning and relearning is all part of the journey

It’s hard to think of the years that I followed a balanced literacy approach (and let’s be honest some of it was even the whole word reading approach) - memorizing sight words, telling kids that English is tricky and just doesn’t make sense or “that’s just a rule-breaker”, using leveled texts that I knew they were struggling to read but I just didn’t know better.  Reflecting on best teaching practices is part of the journey, so wherever we are, we just need to take one step forward, we won’t be able to tackle it all in a month or even a school year.  Just keep moving forward, get curious - practice self-reflection, research new information, don’t be afraid of change, and keep evolving as an educator, parent, guardian, homeschooler, specialist.  When you know better, do better!

I’m not here to tell you that I’ve figured it all out.  I’m here to learn right along with you and to share what I’ve learned. I’ve invited other educators and specialists to share more knowledge with all of us because the goal is to grow and change together so that we can continue to make an impact in the lives of the children we know and love.

So where am I today? 

I now have my own business called My Literacy Space, a tutoring and consulting company in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  For over a decade, I have supported students from PK-Grade 6, I create learning resources and I provide professional development workshops and webinars to people all over the world. One of my favourite literacy quotes, “reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body” - helping children become strong readers enables them to grow in confidence and knowledge, and watching this happen is one of the greatest joys.  

What to expect in the upcoming episodes

In my upcoming posts, we will be looking more closely at structured literacy and some quick tips and tricks of where to begin.  I’ll share my top 5 books that have impacted my reading instruction, we’ll discuss the importance of using a multisensory approach with children and I’ll be sharing some amazing books that were published in 2021 and new titles coming out in 2022.

Now go find a good book, curl up in your favourite reading space and take care!