Episode 2: Making Words Stick in the Brain and Leveraging Read Alouds with Dr. Molly Ness

🎙 Episode: Making Words Stick and Read-Alouds for All Learners (with Dr. Molly Ness)

In this episode of The Reading Symphony Podcast, Katie Megrian sits down with Dr. Molly Ness, former classroom teacher, reading researcher, teacher educator, and author of six books (with a seventh on the way). Molly is known for translating research into practical, usable moves for teachers and families, and this conversation is packed with exactly that.

Together, Katie and Molly dig into two big questions families ask all the time:

1. How do we help words actually “stick” so kids become fluent readers?
2. What can we do at home to build language and comprehension in ways that feel doable?

You’ll learn why memorizing word lists often fails, what “orthographic mapping” really means in plain language, and how read-alouds can be one of the highest-leverage tools for building vocabulary, knowledge, and comprehension at any age.

In this episode, we cover:

• Molly’s path from Teach For America to reading research and why she’s passionate about closing the research-to-classroom gap
• The concept of orthographic mapping and why it matters for fluency and comprehension
• Why flashcards and rote memorization often don’t lead to lasting word learning
• The difference between sight words, high-frequency words, and heart words, and how to think about them at home
• Why spelling is one of the best windows into a child’s literacy development
• A parent-friendly way to support tricky patterns, including r-controlled vowels
• How to talk to teachers with curiosity, not conflict, when homework or instruction doesn’t feel aligned
• Molly’s best read-aloud advice for families, including:
  • The “decline at nine” and why you should keep reading aloud well past third grade
  • Why reading informational text matters more than most people realize
  • How to use think-alouds (instead of constant questions) to model comprehension
• Why kids benefit when we expand beyond the books we loved growing up and how to find high-quality diverse book recommendations
• Molly’s simple framework for getting kids to read more: ARC (Access, Relevance, Choice)

Book and author shout-outs from the conversation:

• Making Words Stick (Molly Ness & Katie Pace Miles)
• Read Alouds for All Learners (Molly Ness)
• Authors mentioned: Matt de la Peña, Chris Van Dusen, Jarrett Lerner

Connect with Dr. Molly Ness:

Molly’s website: mollyness.com (resources, videos, and contact info)

Want more support from Katie?

📩 Subscribe to Katie’s free weekly Substack: katiemegrian.substack.com
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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Reading Symphony Podcast, the place where clarity meets compassion. This is where families and caregivers get evidence-based trustworthy information about how reading develops, how to understand reading progress, and how to turn overwhelming information into simple, actionable steps that help every child thrive. I'm your host, Katie Megrian educator, parent, and relentless advocate for helping every child become a joyful, confident reader. Let's get started. Welcome everybody to this episode of the Reading Symphony. We have such an incredible guest today, Dr. Molly Ness, who is a former classroom teacher, a reading researcher, and a teacher educator. She earned a doctorate in reading education at the University of Virginia and spent 16 years as an associate professor at Fordham University in New York City. The author of six books, Molly sits on the board of the World Literacy Foundation. Dr. Ness has extensive experience in reading clinics, consulting with school districts leading professional development and advising school systems on research-based reading instruction. She provided literacy leadership for nationally recognized literacy nonprofits, as well as major educational publishers. When she's not reading and writing about reading and writing, Dr. Ness is driving her hockey obsessed teenage daughter to the rink, learning how to fish or hiking with her poorly behaved golden doodle, who I feel like I need to know your Golden Doodle name. My golden doodle name is Fozzy and he is like 70 pounds, but thinks he's like 15 and is really emotionally needy. Like just, it can't not be by your side. He's a total sweetheart, but I always say he's like such a joke of an animal because he's just so emotionally needy. You just describe my five-year-old clementine there. Um, well, I am just personally so glad you're here. I have learned so much from you over the years, even though we've never met, I have always respected the way that you take the research from the lab or the the ivory towers of research journals and universities. And you bring it to the ground through your modeling and you're in schools and you're just making the research bite-sized concrete in the way that you speak about it and write about it. So I just feel so lucky to be talking to you today and I know our parent community caregiver community is gonna learn a ton from our conversation. Well, thank you for having me. Yeah. It makes me crazy that research lives in this sort of, even a paywall. You find an article that you wanna read and, you know, click here for your credit card number and we'll give you the article for$40. And as somebody who has written those articles, I don't see a penny of the$40. So I really see a lot of my work as translating research to the people who need it most. And we actually know that there's about a 17 year gap between when research is published and when it makes its way into the hands of classroom practitioners and teachers and so I really see a lot of my work as closing that gap and making it more accessible to people who need it, whether they are book programs or school leaders or teacher educators or parent communities or whomever they are because we gotta get the research to the people who need it. I hadn't heard about the 17 year gap. Yeah, it's wild. The big irony, and I always joke about this is my sister's actually a copyright lawyer. So whenever I tell people that if they want the research, email me, I'll happily violate copyright law and send out these PDFs. My sister in my, in the back of my head is like, I'm gonna send you to copyright prison and I can't believe you're doing this. And, our holiday meals are interesting as I tell people that I'm disseminating this research and she's like shaking her copyright lawyer head. I know you are not the only educator that does that, that's for sure. I won't say anything else though. Well, I would love just for you to start by giving our audience a brief background on how your teaching career started and what's continued to fuel your passion for this work. Sure. So I have always been somebody who was really social justice oriented. Even when I was in high school. I was the kid that was fundraising and volunteering and just doing what I saw as addressing the injustices all around my community, so not too much of a surprise that right upon graduating from college, I joined Teach for America, which, for folks who are not familiar with it, is a national core of recent college graduates who commit two years to teaching in the nation's most underserved school districts. And so I was sent to Oakland, California. And taught in middle school thinking I was gonna use it as a resume builder before I headed off to law school. But really just realized that literacy and really education, public education, was the cause that I wanted to devote my life to, but I didn't know enough. So I taught for a little bit longer and then came back east to spend four years at the University of Virginia getting my doctorate in reading education. It was the most fantastic four years of my life. I was a fully funded doctoral student. It was my full-time job. So I was in schools, but I wasn't teaching, so I could really, really dive into reading, research and learning and learning from a fabulous group of professors. And when I left, my doctoral program recognized that I wanted to improve teacher knowledge and really do that work of translating the research to people in the field. And so took a position at the Graduate School of Education at Fordham University, which is. Smack in the middle of New York City and I was there for about 16 years working in a doctoral program, teaching pre-service and early career teachers. And right at that time, New York was a very balanced literacy landscape. And I had a long training in the clinical components of reading instruction and intervention. And I was trained in what we now know as the science of reading. Back when I was a doctoral student, we were calling it scientifically based reading research, but I was reading that d that body of research for 20 years now and got to New York City and was sort of like, wow, this is a totally different landscape. And I started getting really involved in the work to address literacy within New York City. And that is what allowed me to move on from higher education and do more work in schools, which is what I'm doing now. I've done work serving on state committees around dyslexia. I've worked in schools and districts who are moving away from balanced literacy and really trying to revamp instructional materials and improve teacher knowledge. And my real love is writing. I really love writing practitioner friendly books with the teacher that I was in mind, meaning when I sit down and write something, I think about myself 23 years old, what am I gonna do Tuesday afternoon in front of my 30 kids who are reading well below grade level? And yes, they're all grounded in research, but they have to be immediately practical and easy to implement. So I'm currently working on book number seven. My teenage daughter always likes to say nobody reads what you're writing, why are you starting another one? Because every time I write a book, I'm like, that's it never doing it again, but I keep coming back to it because we're in an exciting time in the literacy landscape. People are really wanting more. And it's been wild to see what has been going on for five years now, I would say. I think we're at this like pivotal time where people are looking under the hood and kicking the tires and doing that exciting work. So whatever I can do to support teachers and parents in that is really where my passion is. Wow. Gosh, you said so many things that resonated. We have a lot of points of intersection. I also was a core member for Teach for America 20 2004, and I was in Hunts Point and my. Orientation was at Fordham. And so I can still picture, it's seared into my memory, all those moments'cause I had no idea what I was doing and just thrown into it. So, and as you were talking about writing for your 23-year-old self as I was reading the making word stick book, I was just picturing myself,'cause it also brought me back to those moments where I were like, I just need to figure out what I'm doing tomorrow. And the balanced literacy landscape had just, I think maybe it was in, its like third year when I joined Teach for America in New York City. So, I imagine how wild that must have been, the cognitive dissonance that must have been going on as you were seeing some of the implementation and then knowing what you know about the reading science. I'm so curious. You, so you have a teenage daughter. Did you have to navigate your daughter as a reader getting balanced literacy? It's something I've been thinking about a lot as a mom. Yeah. It's, it's been kinda wild because I am very cognizant of if I as a parent came into your classroom for back to school meetings or teacher parent things like how intimidating it would be. So I've been very much hands off out of respect for teachers. The last thing I wanna do is question anybody's knowledge or authority. Was very fortunate that when my daughter, was a emerging reader, she was absolutely in a school and in a district and in materials that were very balanced literacy. But she had a kindergarten teacher who closed the door and provided explicit phonics instruction, she was using foundations at the time, and I have a very distinct memory. You would think that somebody with my knowledge and training would be doing a lot of that support at home. And I really didn't either because I knew she was getting it at school or because I wanted to keep my mom hat on and not put my reading research hat on, but I have a very distinct memory of coming home in the middle of kindergarten, I was teaching at Fordham and came home that night and my daughter pulled out the classic children's book are you my mother? And she read it to me in the middle of January of her kindergarten year. And I remember very, very cognizant at that time, like she's reading now, because of what she was getting. It's been interesting to see that where I am living in New York, a lot of the districts are calling on me now to say, Hey, we gotta adopt new instructional materials. We gotta do a whole slew of changes because what I think a lot of people are doing are like taking text levels off of classroom libraries. Mm-hmm. And, that's the easy work and people are starting to see like, okay, now we're just plugging holes because what does that mean for the data that we reflect? What does it mean for our small group instruction? It's this whole domino effect of changes. And so I've been doing some long-term work in schools implementing and it's been really interesting to see. Yeah. Yeah. Really getting to the root of it. So I've alluded to making words stick and I know you're onto Book seven, but I am curious what led you and Dr. Katie Pace Miles to write that book together? Because there's stuff on orthographic mapping, so like why this book? Yeah. Yeah. So orthographic mapping is not a new concept. It was written about in the mid nineties by Lyne Ehri, who we all stand on our shoulders. Not only is she the most brilliant researcher, she is the nicest woman you will ever meet. Every time you see her, she, what's amazing is she'll sit in the audience of a lecture or conference and she'll take copious notes by hand and you're like, wait, what can be new to you that's worth you like writing on your legal pad? But it just shows that she's truly a lifelong learner. So Katie actually was Linnea's doctoral student and we had been, both of us in the New York City landscape doing teacher education through universities and really we're seeing some things, some instructional practices that just did not align with the science. And some of it was this sort of wall of Linnea's writing that was out there in the nineties had not yet made its way into commonplace language and instructional practices. So Katie and I decided, let's take this term, orthographic mapping, which is not a friendly term, it's intimidating, and really help people understand what it means and why it matters really. And so Katie is an absolutely brilliant researcher, but this was her first experience really writing for practitioners, and so we had this vision that we were gonna write the book. We were gonna, lock ourselves away for three or four days with no parenting responsibilities and no professional work. And we were just gonna sit in a mountain cabin and knock out this book. And of course, that never happened. We wrote the entire thing on Google Docs. And what was, I always joke with Katie, she would write a brilliant sentence about the research that Linnea would have loved, and I would delete it and rewrite it in a like let's write it for that 23-year-old teacher. And I hope we struck the chord, but it's been wild to see more conversations about orthographic mapping emerge. I assume it's just because my radar is attuned to it, but people are starting to understand why it matters and what we can do instead of flashcards and instead of rote memorization of spelling words and those sorts of things. And for our parent community who are like I don't know what orthographic mapping is, could you explain it in that Sure. Really clear concrete language that feels a lot less abstract. Yeah. So orthographic mapping is a cognitive process, and by that I mean it is bes behind the scenes, it's happening in our brain. So it's not an active thing. We would never say to kids, let's orthographically map this word. Right? Yeah. So orthographic mapping is the cognitive process by which all words are stored in our long term memory. So, the factoid that I always use is, as adult readers, we all have about 50,000 words that we instantly recognize. If you think about if you're a, an adult listening to this, what you've encountered on a daily basis, you decode almost nothing. You instantly recognize words. You're not spending any effort decoding words. Maybe you're driving to a new town to take your kid to a soccer tournament, or maybe you're looking at, you know, the last name of a kid in your kid's class, and you're decoding that. The vast majority of words that we encounter, we've already instantly stored them. So orthographic mapping helps us understand how those words got into our long-term memory. And it's really a trifecta. It's three things that we need. We need how the word looks. So it's representation on the page, it's spelling or orthography, how the word sounds, and then what the word means or how to use the word. So it's that triangle of three things coming together that lets us store words in our long-term memory. And the so what of it is the more words that we have orthographically mapped, the more we free up cognitive energy to get to comprehension. So I'm doing all this work now in middle schools where teachers are saying to me my kids can't understand the seventh grade social studies book or the eighth grade biology text. Give me a comprehension strategy to address that, and I'm sort of like, Hmm, you actually don't really wanna hear what I'm gonna say, because it would be easy to teach the comprehension strategy. But really that's like a bandaid on a gaping wound. The gaping wound is that most kids don't have enough words that they instantly recognize, and because of that, they're spending that precious cognitive energy decoding, which then takes away from their ability to comprehend. So our aim is for kids to leave upper elementary school going into middle school with about 10,000 words that they instantly recognize so that we free up energy and cognitive ability to get to comprehension. So when I was a teacher, I did the whole, here are your spelling words, or here are your high frequency words. Put them on an index card. Let's flashcard them. Or let's write the spelling words three times. And as somebody with classroom experience yourself, I'm sure you had this experience, kids would get them on the test on Friday, or they'd get them on the index card when you were doing your flashcards. Mm-hmm. But when it was time for them to use them next week, or to take that word that was a high frequency word on the index card and attach it to print. They did not stick, and the reason they don't stick that way is because we're not getting at all of the components of the word that are necessary for it to be orthographically mapped. We're not getting at the, sound-spelling correspondence. We're not getting at the usage and the application of the word. And so, the term making words stick, obviously the title of the book is how do we make sure that words really are sticking to go into the long-term memory to improve fluency and therefore comprehension. Wow. Such a helpful definition. Thank you for walking us through that. And I absolutely did that I would like to say like my first couple of years of teaching, but was longer than that. And thinking about the parent angle here too, I always thought like, oh, this is something really concrete. I can send home this baggie of words. Sure. And just say, if you do nothing else, help them memorize these words. And that's something I've been thinking about a lot, how with small tweaks to parent communication and education, that is such a high leverage way to create more coherence for kids. Because we are fluent readers as adults for the most part. And, we don't think about that process. And so it can be easy if our child gets stuck on a word, to just to say, okay, just let's memorize this. I'm just gonna throw this on a flashcard. And so it's so helpful to understand the science as that's really just a bandaid. The spelling piece is the whole other thing too that I think your book has really reignited and if a child's struggling with a particular word, how important it is and helpful it is to expose them to other words that are spelled in that way. And I think spelling in particular is one of the thing that parents ask the most about it'cause it's the most visible thing in reading and writing development. Like most parents don't understand or have the knowledge of what is phonemic awareness. But a parent can look over a kid's shoulder and say that word is spelled wrong. And I'm actually excited that spelling is coming back into style. I, as a doctoral student, I went to University of Virginia, which is really like the birth place of a lot of the work around spelling and why it's so important in terms of predicting kids' literacy knowledge. There's a lovely meta-analysis about spelling that just came out this past year. There's all these conversations about moving away from typing and from word processing to actual pen or pencil in hand to enhance some of these sort of foundational skills like spelling. So now that we understand it more, we're gonna see a return of it because spelling really is the best window into a kid's understanding of the linguistic system. I always say that if you hand in me random 10-year-old and you said, here's a kid, you've got three minutes. Tell me what you can find out about their reading and writing development. And the number one thing I would do is a spelling inventory. Because it shows you so much, it shows you, I can basically predict their fluency, their comprehension, all of these things just from a spelling inventory. And yeah, I totally did the same thing. I have vivid memories of my Teach for America classroom. On Monday, you got the 10 words that were not necessarily connected by a linguistic pattern. I had just looked at my kids' writing and these were the most common spelling errors. Monday night homework was write them three times. They'd use'em in a sentence, they'd do a crossword puzzle, and I remember being really proud of myself. That my spelling instruction was quiet, like if the principal walked by my classroom door and looked in the little window, like it looked like everybody was working, which meant I had good classroom management. Yeah. But what I was depriving my kids of was the sound work that needs to happen in spelling. We know that you have to have the phonology of the word or the explicit connection between the letters and the sounds. You know, we'd study the long E and a kid would point out, well, miss Ness, the word love. It has a long E but it doesn't make the Long o sound. And you know what gives, why is that? And I would do the perpetuating. Oh, you know, English is just such a crazy language. Mm-hmm. It's so irregular, you just have to memorize it. Yeah. And a lot of that was because I didn't have the linguistic understanding. And I think that's pretty common with with many teachers out there, most teachers are not taking courses in linguistics and don't really have the ability to say, well, the, actually in English, we never end a word in V. And so the E is there to preserve, but it does take a level of knowledge, and, some discomfort and bravery in saying, I need to know more to be able to serve my kids well. Yeah. I find that piece the saying I don't know, is incredibly hard. Sure. I think that teachers may worry, and I'll speak for myself, when I wasn't sure how to teach a particular math concept, I thought it meant that I wasn't smart enough, you know? And so asking for that help was really hard. And something that I try to do when I'm training teachers now is to always start with some of these things I'm just learning too. I was 40 years old when I learned about the words don't end in V rule. Like I knew it in my brain, but I didn't know that. And is it J too V and j? You know, so, so, but I think that that really helps disarm and make it feel okay to not know. And the other thing I think is super exciting about this moment in the literacy landscape is as people have states and professional development and all this work is happening in around the science of reading, there is an acceptance and there is a welcoming of like, okay, you didn't get that knowledge in your teacher training or, I respect that you've been in your classroom for 26 years and have all the degrees and the certifications and all that, but by no fault of your own, you didn't get this. So let me share some knowledge with you. I've been really amazed to see that there has never been, at least in the work that I am generally saying, I'm sure it's happening somewhere, There hasn't been a ton of teacher shaming or blaming. It's just sort of been like, okay, we didn't provide people with this knowledge. Welcome to this Facebook group or welcome to this PD community. Let me tell you what I know and we'll, we will improve knowledge together. So I'm really grateful that people have been brave enough to say I need more. And we're doing it in a way that is welcoming everybody wherever they are on their learning curve. Absolutely. Yeah. So something else that might be helpful, there are a couple terms that parents may hear. So, heart words, sight words, high frequency words. And I loved this part of your book where you dove into that to try to clarify, because even sometimes I have to just reground myself in that, the Venn diagram of it all. Sure. And so could you just clarify those three words? Um, okay. So let's, and when you, it sounds so simple to say, like the name tells you exactly what it is. So I will try to do it in a way that makes it a little bit more contextualized. Okay. So, um, sight words are any word that you recognize by sight. Now, these are highly personal, meaning I'm coming you to you today from my, home in Maine. The name of my town in Maine is Daramiscota, which is a long word. It has a Native American background. Most people, when they come up here, they mispronounce it because it's not orthographically mapped. I know that word because it is a sight word for me. Just like I also know the word Shavasana. I do yoga. The time that you're at the end of the class relaxing in corpse pose, those words are orthographically mapped for me because of my knowledge, my life experiences, my contextualized world. So those are sight words. I never have to decode them. I instantly recognize them. High frequency words are the words that appear most commonly in text. Now, those are universal. The most common high frequency words are either the dolch list or the fry list. These were created, I can't exactly remember the date, but sometime in like the thirties or forties by reading researchers who literally, this to me is like mind blowingly, numb, painstaking research, but they actually literally went through the books then that were most commonly read and tallied up how many times does the word because appear, like to come up with those words. On a little bit of a side note, but I think it's interesting. An article came out about two years ago that basically said, okay, the fry list and the dolch list, those words were the body of literature that was read 80 years ago, 90 years ago. Now that body of literature has changed to 2024. Are those words the same? And so they actually recalculated them, and I can't remember which words were like bumped off the list and which were okay, but it's this wild idea that the high frequency words should change and evolve. One of the author's last names is green, so you to that research team who took those on. So we've covered high frequency words. We've covered sight words. Remember those are the ones that are like personal to me. My sight word vocabulary different from your site word vocabulary, but it's all those words that we recognize by site. We don't have to decode them. We want that number to be as high as possible. There's this misconception that the high frequency word list, we have to memorize them because they are so irregular and break the rules of linguistics and phonics patterns when they actually are fairly regular. So one of the things that, whenever I'm looking at instructional materials, I first look at our high frequency words taught in the phonics scope and sequence that aligns meaning are you teaching a kindergartner that they just need to memorize the word can? Well, can is a CVC word. Why would we teach kids to memorize that as a whole unit when it's actually applying that linguistic pattern? Now, lots of those high frequency words are temporarily irregular. And what that means is it means kids have not yet learned the phonics feature to help them decode that or there are parts of the word that don't make the sound that they're supposed to. And those are what we call those"heart" words. So let's take the word love,'cause we were talking about it before. So normally what we would do is we would say the word love. It's a rule breaker. English is so funky, you just gotta memorize it. When really what we can do is say, okay, the L makes the sound. It should, the V makes the sound that it should. But let's take a look at the O and the E. Normally when we see that silent E marker, that makes the o say the long sound, but here it doesn't, it breaks the rules. This is the part of the word that we have to memorize by heart. And so if your kids are coming home with these words that they have like a little heart above the letter that's meant to demonstrate to kids that this part of the word does not follow the pattern, it should. The great thing about those high free, those heart word instruction is we're building phone graphene correspondence there. That's just a sophisticated way to say letter sound correspondence. Yeah. So what we're doing is we're saying, okay, we're not just gonna randomly memorize this word as a unit, which is highly ineffective. And actually you can never memorize the number of words that we're aiming to get to in terms of orthographic mapping. But instead, what we can do is call kids attention to the part of the word that is a rule breaker. And so we're really explicitly building that letter sound correspondence through those heart word patterns. And every program has a different scope and sequence for what their phonics rules are. Some people teach blends before digraphs. Some teach people teach the ar URIR before you know it, and there's no one set that is the be all and end all, but one of the things we should look for is making sure that our high frequency words are taught as closely with whatever phonics pattern kids are working on. At Brooke, where I work, in the last three, four years, we've been realigning our kindergarten through second grade scope and sequence. And that was one of the key changes we made. Once we've taught kindergartners, the short I and the t, then we introduce it. And it used to absolutely just be something 20 years ago when I was teaching kindergarten just to throw it in a baggie and, and say memorize it. And that's actually the follow up book that Katie and I are now working on. It takes a lot of linguistic knowledge for you and your team of teachers to do that. And how many people are doing that all over the country in their little pockets. It's time consuming. Absolutely, so we're doing that and helping also connect it to morphology as well. And then, helping people have the language to know what to say, because a lot of people struggle with like, I can't tell you why love ends in an E, so here's the language if I did not get that training to tell to kids so we can improve, like teacher confidence and knowledge around that. So we're working on that with the goal of getting that out in early 2027. That is so exciting. I can't wait. And just a funny story. So I went to Bates College as you know, and I when you said Daramiscota, I remember reading the word as DAR-miscota. Mm-hmm. I didn't even see it just was more natural that it was a RM to me. And so I had, I had been saying it wrong. I went to Bates for four years and I had been saying Dhar, mascota, like embarrassingly the entire time. And so it is just such a great example and I'm a pretty proficient reader, but my brain is programmed for that particular order of letters, a RM for some reason. Yeah, that's, I love it. Yep. Something, I'm curious what you think about this. But when my daughter, I was looking at her Christmas list the other day, which she made for me on Christmas Eve, and I was like, oh, your shopping's done, by the way. But anyway, I noticed there was there, she's not solid on some r controlled words, particularly ar and so she was reversing and she was doing RA sometimes. So what, what I tried to do was I came up with a list of a few other words with that same pattern. I can't even remember what the initial word was, but farm barn, and is that something that's high leverage that parents could do just to help them make that association with other words? Absolutely. Or I'm even thinking you use the word love, that's tricky. So like, I'm thinking glove shove, to help generate a list of words that are similar that will help him stick. That is great. And, here's where I say, AI is your best resource. And actually Katie and I are using it as we're writing the book. We're like, generate a list of AR words because you need to think of'em, you can't. Yep. And actually those r-controlled are really, really tricky. Lots of people call them the boss. CR Yes. Yeah. That, um. The r robs the preceding vowel of, its sound like the word bat. The A does not make the sound, same sound as in the word bar. Um, and I remember very distinctly, my sixth graders in Oakland, California, the word was girl and they, oh, spell GRIL. It was a high frequency word and I was like, what gives, this is a word that you should have mastered in second grade. And so what would I do? I would have them write it three times rather than doing the, okay, let's explore why sometimes it's an IR versus a UR versus an ER versus an ar. To be honest, I don't love the R control stuff. This is really complicated. Yeah, that is definitely something that's a thorn in the side for a lot of teachers. I'm thinking a lot about what you said with respecting the teacher's expertise and, nobody wants to be that parent in quotes saying, but the research says don't do this. So do you have recommendations if if a listener's like, oh, but my first grader has a whole stack of words that they're supposed to memorize, and I don't see anything about hearts or anything like that. And so I think this might be being taught the old way. Do you have any suggestions for how a parent might approach that? Yeah, so I always start with any of those contentious feeling conversations. I always start with a place of curiosity, so help me understand this. Help me understand how this aligns with what we know is much less confrontational than you're doing this wrong. You're doing something that does not align with the science. So I always start with curiosity to open conversations and, I also think we're at a point where school boards are also really getting proactive and I'm in no way saying that your first grade kid is coming home with memorize these words and you march right to the school board. But lots of times school boards are starting with things like Emily Hanford's podcast sold a story and it's opening the doors to this entire level of learning because what we're talking specifically about orthographic mapping and high frequency words is one tiny little area of this whole larger umbrella of structured literacy and the science of reading. And so if we're starting to see evidence of instructional practices that don't align, then you come into a place of curiosity with what is the larger eco substructure or ecosystem, that these are resting in. Because certainly there are programs that are not aligned with the science that continue to be used. And then that's where we have to help school leaders and school boards, understand, points of change and and things that we need to address in terms of teacher knowledge. I love the idea of approaching with curiosity. Hey, I was listening to this podcast. I have this question. And also thinking about the larger ecosystem of how teachers are being supported and trained and what materials are being provided. That's such a great lens to think about it. So another one of my favorite books of yours is Read alouds for All Learners. I have it right next to me, I love it. In this book you include so many incredible ways for teachers across content areas and age groups to leverage read alouds as a way to boost comprehension and oral language and I just see so many ideas that parents can steal in this. I write a weekly substack and after rereading this, I put a few of those ideas in writing for parents. But I would just love if you could give an example of what a really high leverage read aloud could look like at home knowing full well that nobody's gonna sit down and write a lesson plan for a read aloud, and we're not asking anybody to do that. Well, there's three things that I, recommend to parents around read alouds. And I'm so glad to shift conversations to read alouds because we've been talking so much about the word identification and language comprehension is this whole other part of reading, which has not gotten enough attention. And the great news is that the best way to build kids' language comprehension, whether at home or in the classroom, is through read alouds. And most of us love doing them. Most kids love read alouds. So this is very much a yes, they align with the science of reading and yes, they are in absolutely imperative. So my three points of advice. Number one for parents is be aware of what we call the decline at nine. And the decline at nine is this phenomenon in the research that shows that most parents stop reading to kids. And it's actually true for teachers, right when kids hit around nine years old. So somewhere. Third ish to fourth ish grade. And the reasons why are many parents think it's too baby-ish for their kids or they can read on their own. They don't need me anymore. And so we see this huge decline, hence the decline at nine. But what's really cool is when you dig into the research, kids say, I wish my parent kept reading to me. I wish those read alouds kept going on. So this is a time, I remember working with a school principal and I'm talking about this research. I'm showing the graph, and his jaw drops. He was like, oh my God, my kid is nine years old. I'm not reading anyone. Next time I saw him, he was like, I got my nine journal. We're back into reading and now we're reading chapter books and we're reading things that are more sort of juicy life conversations. So be aware of the decline at nine as a natural sort of stopping point, but we don't age out of read alouds. So keep reading aloud as kids are in middle school and high school. Number two, this is a little bit more geared towards parents of young kids, read aloud from informational text, which is like a sort of subset of non-fiction texts. Informational text is the kind of texts that is about science or the natural world. It doesn't have a beginning, middle, and end, meaning it's everything you wanna know about snakes or everything you wanna know about dump trucks or whatever. And the reason I say this is we've got some clear data that most of us don't read to young children from informational texts, both in school and at home. It's not necessarily as cozy to read a book about plant life or what have you as a bedtime story. But here's the catch. Kids are not getting that in preschool. They're not getting it at home. And then they come to school and they're using information text all the time, and they don't know how to navigate through it. So, this is where I say tie the text choice into whatever's going on in your life. I will never forget when my kid was in, gosh, she was like five, we had a winter that we had a ton of snowstorms, and we'd sit in front of our picture window and wait for the plows to come. And so it was, all right, let's go to the public library and look for books about snowplows. There actually are books about snowplows as informational texts, different curves of snowplows. And so this was a, we're seizing on a natural moment and for you it might be, Hey, we're gonna the pumpkin patch, or, Hey, you have a field trip to the farm. Let's learn about cows, or whatever it is. So, let those text choices come from what's ever interesting. And then, the big number three. Is to move the language that we use away from asking questions to modeling what you are doing to understand a text through something called a think aloud. A think aloud is first person narrative, conversational language to show what you as a proficient reader are doing to make sense of the text. So typically what we do when we read aloud in the classroom or at home is we ask kids questions. Where did the boy go next? What do you think might happen? And those questions really us. Assess kids understanding, but they don't build it well. I wanna build my kids' understanding. I wanna make them better at understanding texts. If that's the case, then I have to show them what I am doing to understand the text. So it's, hmm, I'm noticing here that the boy is feeling sad, or I wish I could ask the author, or I'm getting the sense to model making an inference. And so anything that has that eye as the sort of crux of the language is a think aloud. When I work with kids, both at home and in the classroom, I like giving them a visual signal. So I will literally say to kids before the read aloud, I've done this with three year olds. And I'll say, sometimes you're gonna see my finger on the side of my head, and when my finger is there, I'm telling you what's going on in my brain to understand this book. If my finger's not there. I'm just reading the book. Hmm. And the reason I do that is to differentiate with that visual cue when it's language in the book versus language in the head. Mm-hmm. Otherwise. Mm-hmm. It's just all language. Mm-hmm. It can't differentiate. And what's wild is, so I did this work in some, pre-K classrooms and 3-year-old classrooms in Queens, New York. And I would go in and I'd model, I'd choose whatever book and I'd do a think aloud. And then you would see kids later in their own little reading things like literally pointing to their head which they're getting that reading is thinking. It's an active thought process where you're constructing understanding. So we do think alouds all the time. When we teach kids things, if you've taught a kindergartner to tie shoelaces and said, first I'm gonna make bunny ears, that's a think aloud. So now we're just doing it with actual text to show what we are doing to understand'cause children's books are full of inferences and they're full of vocabulary and they're so many opportunities. We just have to shift our language just a touch and shy away from some of those questions, and move into modeling. Yeah. I'm just thinking with your suggestion to focus on non-fiction, all the different, like oh, I see that this word is bolded, so I'm going to go to the glossary because that will help me. Or Absolutely. I know. I wanna find out about my daughter's really into dodo birds right now, my 8-year-old, and, so we went to the library and we couldn't find any kids' books. So we picked this adult book, 10 Birds that changed the World. And so modeling to her, we don't wanna read every chapter, we're gonna read the dodo bird chapter. And then in that chapter it started with a quote from, some type of scientist. And then there was this portion that was in italic italics was narrative nonfiction. And then it was normal text underneath, and so we were talking about how sometimes, writers will include text in italics if it's like a journal entry. Mm-hmm. And so, and she had done a huge first grade unit on birds with her knowledge building curriculum el. And she's like, oh mom, that's so interesting, so if this book was about dinosaurs, a paleontologist might have been the one that wrote that part in italics, but since this is a bird book, it must be an ornithologist but if we had just read it as it was just in that text, she wouldn't have known what was happening. But even just making those three parts of one page a little bit more, deconstructing them a little bit more. Sure. Really did open it up and and you can do stuff like, here's the picture of the dodo bird and the tiny little print under it is the caption. It lets me know what I'm gonna see. So all of that any parent can do at home. Yeah. Oh, we're looking at a map. I'm gonna show you how I read the map. I love that. And is your kid getting great, vocabulary. Yes. I did not teach her ornithologist, that's for sure. So one thing that I thought was great from this book that really made me think both as a teacher, but also for my own child, is that as adults, we tend to pick the books that were most special to us as a kid. And there is a beauty to that sharing books that we love, and it really then eliminates a lot of beautiful literature out there. So can you talk a little bit about the importance of expanding horizons for kids beyond books that we loved? Yeah, so there's some pretty compelling research that shows that most of us choose books that we loved. Everybody loves corduroy. Everybody loves where the wild things are, and in no way am I putting down those books. But the research shows that the books are on average, about 25 years old. They are pretty narrow in their slice of inclusion. They, are not necessarily reflecting the realities of our culture, our world, and the challenges and realities that kids today are facing. So, I think yes, absolutely there is a beauty of sharing the books that we loved, but there's also a beauty of having books that are more representative of what kids face today and what the world looks like in 2025. And I will say that there is a fantastic community of kid lit folks who their passion is exploring and reading all of the children's books. For parents who are saying wow, I think about my bookshelf and it's all corduroy, it's all Anna Green Gables. There are so many resources out there. My favorite one is We need Diverse Books, which is an amazing website that you can go on and you can say, I've got a 5-year-old, he loved, Henry and Mudge. What should I read in addition to that? So, this is not one of those things that parents should feel intimidated about because publishing houses today are really intentionally putting out high quality children's literature that opens and expands conversations in a way that don't always happen with books that were published in 1977. And so I think there's a value of including both, and knowing that it's very likely that in schools, kids are not getting as many diverse books as they can. So where can we supplement and have control? As parents, we can continue to have those conversations outside of school. So finding out what kids are exposed to in school. And if you're finding that your kid is only reading, this slice of stuff, well, what can you add to your bookshelf, as a parent? And again, there's great book selection choices out there. We all know the Caldecott Awards. There are probably 25 different book awards that are for everything from newly emerging authors and illustrators, the authors and illustrators reflecting the realities of African American children. So there's so many out there that people can take advantage of and use your children's book librarian in your public library. They have specific degrees in training and are meant to be current. So I think that's a great way to expand what is being read at home. Great. Thank you so much for those tips. Thinking of all the books that are out there, has there been one recently that's just hot off the presses or more recently written that you're like, Ooh, this is a great kids book? That's a really hard question. So in terms of picture books I really, really love, Matt Dela Pena who writes gorgeous books about stark realities. His book, Milo Imagines the World follows this little boy who's on a public bus and you don't know where he's going on the bus and you get to the end of the book and he is going to a soup kitchen. Another one of his books follows a little a child going to visit their mother in prison. So I just think the combination of his imagery and his language choice and the topics that he writes about are just beautiful. And they're books that can be read with so many different layers. I also really like actually a Maine based author named Chris Van Dusen. And it's D-U-S-E-N. Probably my favorite children's book is called The Circus Ship. It is a narrative nonfiction picture book about a ship that was carrying circus animals that sunk off the coast of Maine. And he imagines what happened to these animals and these animals in his imagination crawl to this island. And, the island people are so happy with the animals living amongst them that they hide them. And there is an amazing double page spread where you can have your kids hunt for the 10 different animals that are hidden. And, somebody's wearing a boa constrictor as a scarf and there's a gorilla or there's a zebra that is camouflage with the laundry line. So kids love it. And his ability to write rhyme is unbelievable. Like he will take, A word like menagerie and make it rhyme with this whole other, so it's the language comprehension in that is great. And he has a series about a character named Mr. McGee and his little dog d And then, if I built a school, if I built a house, if I built a car, I just think his stuff is so fun. And he's an author illustrator and I'm always amazed by people who can write I know amazing books and also do unbelievable artwork. He's a fun one that isn't as familiar. And then, I can't not give a shout out to Jarret Lerner. Jarret Lerner is probably one of the best human beings in the world in his advocacy for children, for reading, for art. He writes books that are like about farting robots that are hysterical for kids. He's now writing decodable text. Oh, awesome. He's just totally worth looking into everything. He's an amazing illustrator as well, and kids just adore him. So he's somebody that I gift a lot of his books and just doing everything you want for teachers and for kids and for reading and art and inclusion and he's just a fantastic human being. Amazing. Wow. What great suggestions. Last question is if there's one message you hope every caregiver who's listening today takes away from the conversation, what would you pick? Ooh. Well, it's actually not related to something that I specifically touched upon, but, the number one thing that I get asked all the time when I'm out in my community, when I'm at my kids' hockey game and I'm on the sideline and people find out what I do, the number one question is, how can I get my kid to read more? And I always say. The acronym ARC A Standing for Access, meaning kids have access to all types of books. And that is everything from great literature like Anne of Green Gables to books about farting robots and books, the Dog Man books and the Wimpy Kid books. Number two in that acronym of ARC is relevance. So books that are relevant to kids. And the C stands for choice. So choice of where to read, what to read, how to read, digital reading, audio books. So to me that acronym is so telling. And then the other thing that I always say to parents is, how much does your kid see you read? And I don't mean reading on a device, yes, many of us have a Kindle or an Audible on our phone, but kids don't always assume, oh, she's reading, they assume we're doing Candy Crush. So does your child see you reading a book, sending the value? That reading matters in our house and it's a part of the fabric of our household. So, having print rich homes, I think there's so many ways that parents can do that as well. Like in my family, every gift is somehow book related. So if you're going to a birthday party, your gift is, you get a gift certificate to the independent bookstore, or, when our kids were turning like fourth grade, their Christmas presents were magazine subscriptions. Mm-hmm. Or we're gonna read the book and then we're gonna have a movie night and watch the film adaptation of the book. I think there's so many ways to show that literacy and reading is a part of the culture of our household, and it matters to us. So beautiful. Wow. Where can people find you if they want to learn a little bit more? My website, Molly Ness, M-O-L-L-Y Ness, NESS, like the Loch Ness monster. I got all that a lot as the kid as the insult, the playground insult. If you go to molly ness.com, there's a part of the webpage that, will allow you to email me and I'll happily share any of these resources or direct people to find out more. Lovely. And there's some videos on that website too. There are videos aloud. Yep. Yes, yes. Great. I cannot wait to share this episode with all of our listeners, and I need to re-listen to it myself just to make sure that I'm extracting every piece of knowledge that you share. You are a gift to our community and to the field of education, and I cannot wait for that next book, and I'm sure there'll be more to come after that. When I think of you, I think of sharing- like you are such a sharer of knowledge. Well, thank you for everything you do to advocate literacy in the classroom, for parents, for teachers. Thank you for being a turnkey person and sharing that knowledge to your listeners as well. Absolutely. Thank you so much for listening to the Reading Symphony Podcast. My hope is that each episode leaves you with more clarity about what actually helps children become skilled, joyful readers. If today's conversation was helpful, I'd be so grateful if you would follow the show. Leave a quick five star rating or review and share this episode with a friend or teacher or another parent who cares deeply about kids. Those small actions make a big difference in helping this work reach more families. You can also found you can also find resources, deep dives and practical tools for families by subscribing to my free weekly substack newsletter at katiemegrian.substack.com And you can connect with me on Instagram thereadingsymphony Until next time, take care. And remember, reading doesn't happen by accident. It develops when the right parts come together.