Summer Series - Upper Primary Phonics Catch-Up Action Plan

In the past, when we had struggling readers in our class, we'd do a benchmark assessment, identify reading levels, and try to support these students in our small group rotations. But these days, with the growing awareness that guided reading, levelled texts and three queuing are no longer supported, upper primary teachers are asking exactly what they should do. Well, we here at Jocelyn Seamer Education have the answer. In today's episode, I share the 3 steps you need to take in your Upper Primary Phonics Catch-up plan.

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Transcript

00.00
Introduction
Welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. It is time for another episode. My name is Jocelyn, and I'm so pleased to welcome you.

In 2023, we are so pleased to be able to begin providing information and support for upper primary teachers who are looking to bring principles of structured literacy to their classroom.

As our collective knowledge of the required skills for effective reading grows, more and more teachers are recognizing a troubling and often challenging situation. That is children arriving in years three to six not having developed adequate code knowledge to confidently read and spell.

00.41
Why do upper primary students struggle?
Now this happens for a variety of reasons, sometimes a school is early in their structured literacy journey, and their early year students have had really great teaching, but the three to six s haven't come through with those strong foundations yet. Sometimes children come from disadvantaged backgrounds, which means that it takes them longer to get the ball rolling on literacy, or they come from other schools. There's lots of reasons, and we really need to stay out of judgment about why this occurs.

In the past, when we had struggling readers in our class, we'd do a benchmark assessment, identify reading level, and try to support these students in our small group rotations. They may have gone off for some interventions and reading recovery or something else that went on as well. But these days, with the growing awareness that guided reading, levelled texts and three queuing are no longer supported, upper primary teachers are asking themselves, exactly what am I supposed to do? Well, we here at Jocelyn Seamer Education are here to help.

The first thing to realize is that there are two main reasons children reach upper primary, that's year three to six without foundational skills. Either they are instructional casualties who just need to be taught, they haven't learned it yet, and we can just teach them, or they have an underlying learning-related difficulty.

The tricky thing is that when children are being or have been taught with an un-explicit, non-evidence-informed approach, we can't always tell who is who or which is which. The good news is that the initial steps to support students are the same for everyone.

02.22
Step number one - collect some data.
Step number one in this action plan is to collect some data. Now, we don't want benchmark reading assessment data. We want data related to the foundational skills around phonics and word-level reading. Now, when I say phonics and word-level reading, that's going to incorporate phonemic awareness.

There are three aspects of assessment to consider, and so the first one is that the assessment that will give you the broadest and quickest picture of where students are up to is a simple spelling test. We can actually get quite a bit of information about our student's development from looking at spelling because if a student can spell words, you can be reasonably sure that they're also reading them. This can be done whole class, which saves you time and instead of using an actual spelling test, you can use the phonics monitoring assessment from your school's program if you have one.

Make sure you include the non-words and do ask them to write the graphemes as well, and non-words of those alien words or pseudowords, often called nonsense words as well. What this will do is it'll give you a great idea of where students are up to and inform your teaching focus.

Now, if you don't have a phonics program in your school or a phonics level assessment, you can find one on our website, and there'll be a link to one in the show notes.

Once you see where students are up to with this spelling assessment whole class, you can dig a little deeper where you need to. If the students could correctly spell most of the words that were in that phonic-based spelling test or the reading assessment we're using as a spelling test, then you don't need to do anything further, they've got what they need, and you can move on to do other things.

But if they couldn't spell them, then it's time to see if they actually know the sounds and graphemes or the phoneme-grapheme correspondence when they're asked to read them. But only do this with students who couldn't spell accurately, if they could spell accurately, including the non-words, then you don't need to usually take the time to do this from a reading perspective.

04.36
The types of Upper Primary strugglers
What you may find is that students can read words but not spell them, and this is really common. If this happens, students fall into this category of being wobbly rather than not having the knowledge. This comes about because in the early years of school or in their previous years of school, the focus has been largely on reading with phonics rather than on teaching both reading and spelling or decoding and encoding at the same time to take advantage of developing these reciprocal processes. It's really common,  and a little bit of catch-up work will be of benefit to these students.

But what you may also find is that students can't recognize phonemes or graphemes or read words, and some students will know the basic code but not the complex code. Some will be able to read some words with the extended or complex code but not actually be able to read the graphemes in isolation or confidently read the non-words.

This comes about because those students will have mapped some of these common words, and they don't know how to use the knowledge of that word level reading to extend to other things. These students are often the ones that look okay on a benchmark reading assessment, but that can have a spectacular crash in learning in the upper primary because they had enough to get by when there were pictures that they could rely on to decode, but then when the pictures go away, and the words become more complex, they don't know what to do.

06.04
None. Nothing. Zip. Zero.
Then there are the students who get to upper primary without even having the basic code, and I'm sorry to say that this absolutely happens. These students are the most likely to have a learning difficulty of some sort, and it's not our job as a teacher to diagnose what that is, but we do need to recommend referral because we've recognized that students are in real trouble and further investigation does need to happen.

Now they will already likely have a learning plan in place and probably have participated in some school-based intervention. Unfortunately, for many students, though, the intervention they've received is likely to have been reading recovery or some other balanced literacy-based program that is actually highly ineffective but has found its way into many Australian schools. For these students and the students who could read the real words but not graphemes in isolation or non-words, it's important to go deeper with the investigation.

07.05
Check How I Process (CHIP)
Now, Read3, which is an Australian company started by Robin and Kate,  who are, speech therapists and communication specialists,  have a free screener and it's called the CHIP, which stands for Check How I Process. This screener looks at phonemic awareness and phonics, but also rapid automized naming and phonological working memory, and it will help you answer the question is this child's difficulty caused by a learning difficulty or have they just not learned what they needed to?

Now obviously, there will be further investigation required for some children, but this will help you to develop a more comprehensive picture of where this student is sitting. We'll link to that CHIP screener in the show notes on our website. The screener is designed for children up to 10 years old.

07.56
How can I make change happen?
It's great to do some investigation, but please remember that most teachers are not speech therapists. We are like the GP we can support up to a point, but you wouldn't have a heart condition and go to your GP to perform heart surgery you'd be referred to a cardiologist and then a specialist surgeon, and they would do that work. In the classroom situation. The speeches are the specialist. We're the GP, they're the specialist, so don't feel like you have to be an expert in speech, language and reading,  disorders or difficulties. That's actually what their specialized knowledge is for, so if you have data to indicate a speech and or language difficulty,   make a referral for clinical assessment and support.

08.41
Step two - Teaching
That all brings us to step two of the action plan, which is actually the teaching. So step one was to investigate what's going on, step two is about the teaching. If students have arrived in years three to six, or even the secondary grades, without the required phonics knowledge to read and spell at a basic level, we need to give it to them. But just as it's not a one size fits all approach in the early years, it's not a one size fits all approach in the older grades either . Students who fit into that wobbly category can be supported at a whole class level with some revision or consolidation lessons.

Now our third Reading Success in Action book would be perfect for this. It works from a phoneme focus, examining the what, how, why, and when of using alternate spellings and phonemes and links to spelling and morphology detours to teach concepts like spelling rules and suffixes in conventions. It's all age-appropriate for older grades, but it's got the phonics revision that so many students also need. Our books all come with QR codes that take you straight to videos of me explaining how to use things. But if you have a phonics program in your school already, try and use as much of that as you can. don't go buying new things if you don't need to. You can take what you're using and adapt it for your upper primary students.

But what about those students who need to actually be taught from scratch? Now, personally, I think that this is a broader conversation involving more people than just a classroom teacher because, as an upper primary classroom teacher, you still need to teach all of the age-appropriate content. You can't possibly be expected to teach foundational skills on your own as well. it's highly unlikely that the whole class will need this learning. So how do you manage it? Well, sure, you could split students into groups in the classroom, but that means a significant loss of instructional time. You could try and manage whole class, but it is nigh on impossible to deliver a lesson whole class that will provide the targeted support needed by our strugglers and also engage everyone else. And we're talking about phonics and foundational skills here, not top-of-the-rope language. After all, if our strugglers could learn well from a bit of revision or some light touch phonics, they wouldn't be strugglers. These students need the intensive targeted work that's going to meet them exactly where they're up to.

Now, how this is managed will vary from school to school. There really are no perfect solutions to this quandary, but there are workable solutions,  and each school has to make those decisions based on their context, based on the resources they have available in terms of programs or tools based on how many people there are available and the knowledge of staff. All of these things come into play now.

11.41
Help, please!
If you want some help with this, you can reach out. If you're a resource room member or an Evergreen teacher member, reach out in the forum. Or if you're looking for some more personalized support, we can help you just get in touch.

The other issue around this is the resourcing when it comes to our students who need intensive work. what do we actually need to support our strugglers in the upper primary? Well, as with the early years, you can teach children to read with a stick in the dirt if you have to, but we don't have to resort to that. When it comes to providing intervention, it's incredibly important that teaching follows the evidence of structured literacy. That is, we are teaching phoneme-grapheme correspondence explicitly, we are building phonemic skills through blending and segmenting with known graphemes, and we're aligning this work with decodable texts. It's not enough just to have these things in the mix, and everything's done in a little bit hodgepodge. There needs to be a clear line of. From what we are learning to how we're practising.

The good news here is that you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on stuff to support strugglers. As I've already said, if you have a phonics program, you can use that, but please just make sure that whatever you use isn't perceived as baby-ish by the students, you may need some different decodable text, such as those that are written specifically for kids age between eight and 14,  such as Totem and Talisman that whole phonic books have, they've got some really great ranges, and there's more and more things coming out too. Alison Clark's,  Phonics with Feeling, that you'll find on the spelfabet website, they're fantastic as well.

It's really important that we protect the dignity of our older students when we're working with them, but that doesn't mean they don't like games for practice as much as anybody else. If you don't have something simple and easy to use, you might like to look at book number one and two of reading Success in Action. I regularly use them with year five, six students in tutoring. I still tutor regularly,  and I see no reason why you couldn't even use them up into secondary.

13.43
Step 3 - Monitor student progress
Now the third step in your action plan is to monitor student progress and evaluate how the students have responded to the intervention work. It's called a response to intervention model because we have to evaluate how well what we've been delivering is serving those students and when they might need something more. Once you've been working in a targeted, explicit way with regular review and practice, you should start to see positive growth in phoneme-grapheme correspondence and word-level blending within a few weeks at the latest, and if you aren't seeing that, it's important to take things a step further with referral to specialist support.

Our speeches in our systems are very often overworked, and do not have the capacity or the time,  to actually be delivering this work in an ongoing way. So if you have students who are not responding to explicit instruction, consider getting in touch with someone like Read3 or Katherine Thorburn at Language and Learning because there are a small number of children who will need something a little different at times, but we need to go through those processes first, seeing whether they will respond well to the targeted explicit work in phoneme-grapheme correspondence with some picture mnemonics, reading words and writing words before we decide that their tier three students.

Some students, though, will have learning and medical profiles that help you identify straight away that they're gonna need something special. But these are the students who will already probably have quite a lot to do with speeches, and there will probably be some pretty specific plans in place for them.

So let's review the three steps to our action plan in supporting phonics catchup in the upper primary. Number one, assess students. Do that whole class spelling assessment using graphemes, real and non-words. And as I said, if you have a phonics program in place, just use that. Don't go and find something different if you don't have one. Look on the show notes for this episode. From there, investigate whether students who can't spell can actually read, and if they can't do that, then keep investigating with something like  CHIP, the check how I process screener

Step number two. In this plan, teach from the data and be really targeted in your focus for struggling students. You might address wobbly knowledge with whole class review and consolidation, but students learning from scratch will need more intensive, more targeted work. Please make sure that whoever's doing this work with students has some training and they are equipped with knowledge. If your school is an Evergreen Teacher Member School, you already have access to a course called Supporting Struggling Readers, as well as all of our other courses around building foundational skills in students.

Step number three, monitor progress and identify students who aren't responding so that you can seek out alternatives.

16.49
Consider your own well-being.
Finally, I want to remind you that you can't keep adding things to your literacy block without impacting on your well-being and that of the students. When you add something, you must take something out or shuffle things around, and if you find yourself needing to provide whole class phonics consolidation work, It won't last forever. Yes, you may need to pull back on some time spent on morphology or the text-based work for a term or two, but doing so will pay dividends for years to come for your students.

17.22
In conclusion, you are not alone in this.
Year three to six teachers. I know that filling the phonics gaps can be daunting and may feel really overwhelming, particularly if you've not been trained or supported in learning about how these foundational skills work. But please know that you aren't alone in this work. If you are a member of the Resource room or the Evergreen teacher,  you already have many tools and avenues of support that you might need to support your students. We even have a training called Getting Started with Phonics there ready to go right now for you. 

It's never too late to help children build strong foundational skills, whether they're in year three, year six, or year nine. It is within our control to help, and we must help them. We have to do this so that no more children leave school not being able to read and write. Remember that the speechy working with your school is an absolute ally in this work, they want to hear from you, they want to support you, so reach out and ask them.

Happy teaching everyone. See you in the next episode.