Episode 4: Structured Literacy and Purposeful Assessment with Kate Winn

The Reading Symphony Podcast helps families and caregivers understand how reading develops and what truly supports reading success, with clarity, compassion, and evidence-based guidance. Host Katie Megrian (educator, parent, and literacy advocate) interviews experts who translate research into practical next steps for home and school.

In this episode, Katie is joined by Kate Winn, an Ontario educator, literacy advocate, and co-author of Reading Assessment Done Right: Tools and Techniques for Data-Driven Instruction. With 25+ years of experience across K–8, Kate breaks down what structured literacy looks like in real classrooms and how families can spot strong instruction.

They cover the essentials of evidence-based reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing), green flags parents can look for (explicit phonics, decodable texts, letter-sound practice, rich read-alouds), and red flags to avoid (predictable/leveled readers that encourage guessing, and level-based assessment language). Kate also explains a clear K–3 assessment system—universal screening, diagnostic assessment, and progress monitoring—and offers time-efficient ways families can support reading at home, including oral language, read-alouds, and short practice routines.

Books mentioned: Zoe and Sassafras series; Dog in Boots by Greg Gormley
Find Kate: Instagram @katethismomloves; Reading Road Trip podcast (IDA Ontario)
More from Katie: Substack katiemegrian.substack.com; Instagram @thereadingsymphony

Transcript

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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. Hi everyone. I'm so excited that you're here to tune in to the episode with Kate Winn. Kate is an Ontario educator literacy advocate and co-author of Reading Assessment done right, tools and Techniques for Data-Driven Instruction, which just hit the shelves. She has 25 years of classroom experience, including literacy instruction, in K to eight. Kate hosts and co-produces the Popular Reading Road Trip podcast from IDA Ontario and presents widely across North America on evidence-based reading instruction and assessment. Kate serves as content lead for Onlit and is an Acadience Reading mentor dedicated to advancing structured literacy through teaching, training, and advocacy. Kate, we're so lucky to have you on here. You are on the ground doing the work every day and I know we're gonna learn a lot so would just love to start by asking you to share a little bit about the arc of your career and how you ended up where you are today. Sure. Yes. So I am currently in my 26th year teaching here in Ontario, Canada. I started out teaching French as a second language and then I spent a few years working in gifted education. And then I moved to my current school 18 or so years ago, and I've worked my way down grade 5, 4, 3, 2 to kindergarten. And I actually did a year of teaching literacy on Rotary in grade seven, eight as well. I had a friend with a science background, so he taught my two three science, and I taught literacy in the seven eights, and it was a great deal that year. And then I moved to kindergarten. So this is now my 10th year in kindergarten. It's actually what in the states would usually be considered pre-K and K put together. So the four year olds and the five year olds mixed in the same class. However, they don't have to have turned four and five until December 31st. So when they come in, in September. I usually have several three year olds. I think this year we started with six three year olds who were going to have their fourth birthdays throughout the fall. So yeah, it's quite a range. And how many students in the class. 32 this year. Wow. Kate. With a partner in Ontario. Teachers are paired with early childhood educator partners but yes, 32 kids this year. So I'd just like to know a little bit more what makes you so passionate about helping all kids become confident readers? I think broadly just the idea that literacy is huge, right? Like literacy impacts every other school. Subject literacy impacts life trajectories. When it comes to education, I'm not sure that anything's really more important than literacy. Maybe I'm biased. Because it's my area of passion, as you said. But I there's just the fact that it's so important. I think personally for me, realizing that I had been doing it wrong, and of course we're not going to blame teachers for what they didn't know, but I'm taking responsibility for the fact that I know I was taught and trained to do things that I now realize weren't effective. So there's a piece of trying to make up for that. And I think if we are going to get personal on your show, I think also just the fact that. I feel like I've been blessed in a couple of ways that have allowed me to delve into this work. So, for example, I have two daughters. They're now 19 and 17, and they learn to read easily. Okay. And I think I did the right things at home, but I have also learned that parents can do the right things at home and still have struggling readers. Right. And we might talk about that more too, but just the idea that we had luck of the draw there. I was not sitting at the dining room table with children in tears and helping with homework for hours. I was not driving to tutors and paying for tutors and all of that. I think I had some time and energy. A lot of parents don't have that I could then throw a little more into this. Which I think has formed part of what I've done. And I think also back in 2020 I was diagnosed with breast cancer so having gone through all of that and come out the other side, I think also there's that element of feeling like, you know, I'm lucky and I'm grateful and let's do something with this life that I've got left. And, that piece too that I think really over the last five years has motivated me a lot as well. Thank you so much for sharing both of those stories and I'm so glad that you're well now. It truly is a gift that you've been able to come through and continue to share your magic and wisdom. Thank you. And what you said about you can be doing all of the things, all of the early literacy skills like phonemic awareness and, let's rhyme, let's tap out the sounds that you hear. And I did that with both of my girls. And they were two very different readers. My older one is reading now, but it has been a much rockier road and she's needed a lot of extra dosage. And my younger child, my 5-year-old just took off right away and with all that I know about teaching reading, it's still really hard to figure out what to do sometimes and how to know also went to step back see how I can enable her teachers to be doing the support.'cause I just wanna swoop in all the time. So it's so interesting being a teacher mom for so many reasons. So you mentioned learning or unlearning some ways of teaching reading that didn't necessarily work. And in 2021, you wrote a very important and brave article titled,"I am a Kindergarten teacher and the way I've been teaching is wrong." So I at the time had been writing a lot for national women's and parenting magazines, that sort of thing. I loved to write, but the content had been broader lifestyle kind of stuff, not necessarily that education niche. And then I realized this would be a valuable thing I think for the parents to read that magazine to know. And so I think some key learnings in terms of the fact that I had students who weren't reading and when I got to kindergarten, I didn't actually know how to teach it from scratch. I mean, even going down from grade two to kindergarten was such a big difference because someone had already done the teaching from scratch piece. Right. And then the kids came to me at a range of abilities. But realizing what I didn't know was important, thinking about what parents need to know. It's funny, even the title, what the editor wanted was"The way we've been teaching reading is wrong." Mm-hmm. And I said, no, I can't do it. Can we please change that? Because I don't want it to look like I am accusing my colleagues of anything. Let me just take the hit and once people read it, they'll see themselves in it and they'll get it. But it's not a title that's going to automatically, put people on the defensive. But I think really just the key is I discovered that we had been trained in balanced literacy and I realized that was not supported by research, not supported by evidence. It was more, philosophies and vibes based. And that the way we needed to go was structured literacy. So let's talk a little bit more about structured literacy. Our audience is a mostly parent facing caregiver audience, and so that term can feel a little abstract and would love for you to talk a little bit more about what it is and what it should look like. So there are a few key components to a structured literacy approach. The States did a report back in 2000, which coincidentally is the year I started teaching but it's not that this research was done in 2000. They were looking at research that had been done for decades. Prior, right. And then in 2000, they came out with these recommendations. And so some categories that they recommended are phonemic awareness. And so that's just the ability to discern and manipulate sounds of oral language. Just what are the sounds in a word and that sort of thing, which, at its purest, most basic form is done even without print. You know, tell me the first sound you hear in this word, or what are the sounds in sun? That sort of thing. That's the phonemic awareness. And then once we've got that print piece in there, then we're doing phonics. So we're still going to be blending sounds and segmenting sounds, but with letters in there too. And just the fact that. Just undisputable evidence that teaching students letter sound correspondences phonics is the best way for most students. And it's not necessarily that there's a better way than phonics for some students. It's just that some students need less phonics. They're going to pick up the patterns faster. It's going to click way easier. They don't need as much explicitness. But for the vast majority of our students, they do. They need that explicit and systematic introduction. And it's not, we're studying dinosaurs. So today we're gonna learn the letter D. It's, oh no, here's the scope and sequence saying we're gonna start with a spells add, then we're gonna go to M spells. Mm. And this is how we're going to do it throughout the year. It's all planned. A lot of people think that structured literacy is just about phonics. And it's not. But I know here in Ontario where we had our Ontario Human Rights Commissions Right to read Inquiry phonics, the whole idea of that word reading piece is where we really were failing a lot of kids. Like we definitely needed to make some changes there, but it is not the only element. We have fluency. Is something else that's really important. We want students to build their accuracy in reading and also their automaticity. A lot of assessments we see done have fluency in the name of them, like for sound fluency or oral reading fluency, because it's not just about being accurate. Students who are more automatic. And we're not talking about trying to get kids to be speed readers, but we're talking about kids to read at an appropriate speed so that we know that they're able to focus on the meaning while they're reading. They're not focusing just on trudging through the decoding of the words. So the fluency piece really important. We've got vocabulary is mentioned a lot as well, and then comprehension. And it's funny because a lot of people people have called these the five pillars and then some people push back and say, oh, I don't really like the pillars model'cause it sounds like they're all these separate things holding up literacy, but they're all these separate things. Really this is all weaved together in a strong program That's one of the reasons why I named this podcast, the Reading Symphony, is that idea of it's not just about one instrument. It's about how all of these pieces come together. If we were to step inside your kindergarten classroom, let's bring it to life a little bit. Can you walk us through what structured literacy actually looks like? So in kindergarten, we do use an explicit and systematic phonics program. And so part of the time is the students sitting at the carpet with the teacher instructing them. And it's not just the kids who seem ready for it or just the kids who are interested. This is where we get into equity issues. So we're going make sure we're hitting everybody. When we think about models like the simple view of reading or the reading rope, you've got the word reading piece. We want kids to read words and that's where the phonics is really getting us. But we also have the language comprehension side of things too. And in kindergarten, they do start reading decodable texts like I've got some, like Dad is Sad and that sort of thing. So sure we can talk about maybe why dad might be sad, but it's not really rich material. Whereas we're also going to be reading Rich Picture books, doing nonfiction studies, doing all sorts of different things where, kids have a chance to talk about comprehension and to learn. And we do some explicit vocabulary that goes with the things that we're studying. Back to that fluency piece. Once the kids have some phonics background, we start doing some partner reading so that they are that more automaticity. I have decodable texts that are sent home for the students once they're ready as well. So they keep it for a week. They read the same text to their grownup for a week and then return it, read it to me, get the next one. So that's kindergarten level. Even with fluency, we're building fluency in terms of naming letters. Fluency in terms of letter sounds. It's not necessarily just about reading connected text. That fluency piece starts very, very early. And then of course we're just talking about reading, but there's the writing aspect too, right? So within phonics, we are learning letter formation. We are learning spelling to actually encode when they have something to write. How do they know which letters they need? And then I use the think SRSD approach as well in terms of some composition and in terms of kids knowing that when you're writing you need a topic and you need details, and you need an end. And we do that orally with our show and share. So that oral language so important. And I love how you're using Symphony as your terminology because it really is true the way everything has to work together. And that's what we try to do in our program. So for families we send our kids off to school and if you don't have a reading background, you're just kinda hoping that everything's gonna go well for your kid in the classroom. What are some of the green flags that that structured literacy is alive and well in the classroom? Well, you may even see in newsletters or emails or things like that the term structured literacy being used, which would be great. When we're talking about our earliest readers, like I said, those letter sound correspondences. And so, in our class. I would be sending home a sheet with the letter, like a big printed letter that they can cut out. Like, okay, this week we learned T spell, so cut it out and then every night practice t spell, that sort of thing. So you know if that's the kind of thing you're seeing, then yes. We're talking about letters and sounds. Now there is such a thing as heart words, is what we call them, but the idea of those high frequency words that might not necessarily sound out directly with the phonics the students are learning. And so if, for example, the word,"said", comes home on a card, what I would do is with the heart word approach, there'd be a little line under the s and a little line under the D because the S does spell and the D does spell. But the AI does not spell what we learned. So there's a heart over top of it to show we need to remember that part by heart and we need to practice. And so we try to tell parents we don't want like memorizing sight words in these drills by sight and that sort of thing. This is slightly different, that there are some words that they will have to practice, but again, using some letters, down correspondences, but just those trickier pieces. So you may see something like that coming home too. Once the child is able to decode seeing decodable texts. So right now we're focused on the green flags, so I won't talk about the alternative yet, but seeing decodable texts come home, meaning that the words in those books are words that the students have learned the letter sound correspondences for, and there may be some of those words like."Said" or"the", or"was" like a few of those heart words that the students have learned because you can't read much rich text without the right. So yes, we are gonna practice like we haven't done TH yet, and the E does not spell what it's supposed to spell. And so we're practicing that word. But other than that, they should be should be sounding out. And then you might not see it as much as the kids just may be talking about it, but of course you want to hear about read alouds being done and you know this funny story or interesting story, or I learned this about plants today. Or, those sorts of things that we're not just talking about letter sound drills. That's not all reading is, we've got that other aspect as well that you want to make sure, happening. And then just the idea of the letter formation piece. Maybe you're seeing printing practice sheets come home. I don't send them home to be done, but we send them home in our package of finished work. So you would see, oh, they printed,"m", and"s" this week. I can see that sort of thing. So that you know that explicit letter formation is happening and then just that progression from the letter names and sounds, and to reading some words, to reading maybe short sentences, and then getting into things that look more like books and texts, and that sort of thing as they progress. But being able to decode what's there is really key. And so on the flip side, what are some things parents should be on the lookout for that are not evidence-based practices for early literacy? So I would say it would be that alternative to decodable text, which is those leveled, predictable readers. And I sent those home for my first few years of teaching kindergarten. And so the idea is that typically there's a pattern. So maybe they're at the child's at the zoo in the book and it's, I see a gorilla. ICA kangaroo, ICA zebra. The students have not learned how to actually use the letter in sound correspondences. To decode those words, they learn. Oh, the pattern is, I see a, and then I'm gonna flip the page. Look at the picture. I don't need to look at the word I know that's a kangaroo. I'm just gonna say kangaroo, right. That's not reading. No, we were told that that was reading. Yes. And we were told, I remember even saying to parents, oh, if they say kangaroo and they look at the word like, that's just still going to help them. And then I realized, no, that's not what the science tells us actually at all. But looking at the whole word kangaroo, while they say kangaroo is not going to help them the next time they see that word. So really, and I would love to say, well, no, I can say that I think across Canada and the US we're doing better. But I can also say I still know a lot of places those books are being used. Yes. Sometimes because of teacher knowledge, still building. Sometimes because the decodable books aren't there. So people who work on parent councils and have any sort of influence supporting purchases and that sort of thing. Sometimes teachers will say to me, I don't have any decodables yet and I wanna send home something. And I have to try to tell them, yeah, this is not better than. Like nothing would be better Yes. Than sending these home and having kids create bad habits. Right. But there things you can print online, free decodable books, things like that, that are better. And then connected to that another red flag is just the idea of assessments based on those old levels. So if your child's teacher is saying, well, your child is at a D and they're supposed to be at an f. Then they're using a non-evidence based system of assessment. Still sometimes it's the number system. We used a system that was numbered at our school. So I remember the kids coming into grade three. They were supposed to start at 25 and then go to 26 and then end the year at 27 which we know now, we won't get into it here, but are just arbitrary from publishers and not actually helpful. So that's not the kind of assessment information you want to be getting either. If the teacher is saying, well they're at a J so here's some J books, that's not helpful. And it's hard because, if you're a parent listening to this podcast, it's possible you might be better informed then the educator on something like this. And you need to be really careful, right? You wanna have that relationship. And so assuming good intentions, so important, you can always say something like, oh, I was listening to this podcast, or I read this article, they were saying something about maybe how the level of readers aren't so helpful. Now I heard about Decodables, wondering if you had anything like that. But I do feel like in Ontario now, for example, when the right to Read came out, it was February, 2022. So we are well beyond people being able to say they don't know. So I feel like you can start gently. But then if a teacher says, oh no, this is best, they just look at the picture and they say the word, then that's a bit of a problem. And those were the books my daughters had sent home and they were young and they were okay. But for a lot of kids, that is not going to be okay. And so you might need to, oh, would it be okay if I came in to chat'cause maybe you just started with a little email, but now you're gonna go to a phone call or a chat. And I think parents always worry about being that parent. And some parents are that parent, please don't be that parent because that parent sees a leveled book and writes a letter to the newspaper and don't like post on Facebook. That's not the best way to work together. So you just start small, you start soft. But there always is a progression that if you've gone back and forth with the teacher, and you're realizing, oh, they really don't understand this whole leveled book thing, you may need to then go to the vice principal or principal, whoever the next person is that you need to talk to so I do feel like you work your way up if need be, because this is pretty important. If you've never taught in the classroom particularly 32 little three to five year olds there are so many things happening in a classroom, and I truly believe every teacher wants to be there because they love kids and they want to help. And so just assuming the best and knowing there's a lot going on. Any other ideas for our parents who are listening who have a young reader, ways that they can support their children that are time efficient, evidence-based? So the oral language piece, and we know that the idea of back and forth conversations with your child, right? Like even when they just start making noises like they grunt and you say, oh, you must like those beans, right? Like you're just talking back and forth. Yeah. Narrating your day. All of those things are important. The read alouds. The read alouds, it's almost starting to get a bad rap now because we're trying to explain to parents that you can read aloud to kids and do all of this stuff and they still might struggle to read words, but don't stop reading loud, because it's so important for so many other reasons, like picking up that vocabulary and background knowledge and syntax and the rhythm of writing and just enjoying books with a loved one is so important. It might not teach them how to read the words, but you are helping them grow as readers. By doing that. So please continue the read alouds. But even when it comes to vocab and background knowledge, just exposure to things. Right. And it doesn't have to be like fancy trips on a plane somewhere. It can just be out in your community and talking about things you're seeing and introducing them to new terms, new ideas, answering questions. You know, they ask like, why? Does thunder sound like that? And you're thinking, I don't know why thunder sounds like that, but I'm gonna Google it and then we can talk about it. Right? That sort of thing, right? All of that just really helps. And I think in terms of the word reading piece, certainly before kids come into school knowing letter names, and it's funny because as soon as they hit me in kindergarten, we are on lowercase. We are only using uppercase for the first letter of their name, and so I always stay with my welcome to kindergarten package'cause some well-meaning parents always get started on writing their names and that sort of thing. Only the first letter, uppercase please. Everything else, lowercase. And the other printing. The other writing they're doing is all going to be lowercase, but naming letters, knowing the most common sound to go with letters. It's our job to teach it. We're teachers. This is our profession, this is what we're trained for. We are, we know better now than we did in the past But certainly, any help from parents with some of that background is great. And then, really, I think what I love is just seeing parents supporting what the teacher sent home. So if I am sending home a pack with those letters and sounds, and honestly, like I always say five minutes, like literally I'm not exaggerating. I only truly mean five minutes to just review those. And I'll have parents say we can't get to till after dinner and so we've worked on things like setting a timer and then when the timer goes off, that's when they get whatever something that they can look forward to because. I don't like those ideas about paying kids to read or rewarding kids for how many books they've read. Like we want that intrinsic motivation, but learning letter sound correspondences is work. Like it really is, the payoff is going to come when they can enjoy reading themselves. But if they need a little incentive to get through that part I think that's fine. And if the teacher sends home a decodable book and says, can you please take five minutes a night to read it? That's really important. Please do it. and if you are having trouble, English isn't your first language. You don't understand how to what are you supposed to do when your kid makes a mistake, you don't know how to prompt them, ask. Hopefully the teacher shares that kind of information, but if you don't know, ask. So really, I feel like there's some things you can do before they come to set them up and to keep on building. And even once they're in school, keep reading aloud and keep talking about vocab and all of those things. Even when they are reading, keep reading aloud to them. But I think part of what I really want from parents is if you can support the pieces that the teacher thinks are good for practice at home, then that's really great too. You and Dr. Stephanie Stollar just wrote a book that has not come out yet, but I truly cannot wait. If you could just tell us generally what are the types of assessments that are helpful for students who are in that K to three range, and of course there are assessments for older students as well, but let's focus on that early elementary piece. And how do you use that data to allow you to differentiate instruction and to support your kids? So this is probably my favorite reading subtopic right now because I've spent a couple years immersed in writing this book. But happy to speak about it to a parent audience. So one thing that we definitely wanna see assessment wise happening K to three is a universal screener. So the analogy is like a thermometer for a wellness checkup. We're just going to take everybody's temperature. It's fast, it's easy, it's cheap. We're just going to figure out, does anybody have a fever? And so basically what we're asking is anybody at risk of reading difficulty? So we have little measures. In kindergarten, we would have the letter naming fluency first sound fluency. Can you tell me the first sound you hear in this word? Phoning, segmentation, fluency. Can you tell me the different sounds you hear in this word we get into something called nonsense word fluency, where there are little words. Like mip, MIP, that are not real words, but we see if kids can read them because we can assume they've never seen these words before. They're not real, they don't have them memorized. We're watching their decoding process, right? So all of those screening measures, and then once they get into grade one, we can add in actual texts, like oral reading fluency. So these are all timed because as I mentioned earlier, accuracy matters and once accuracy is there, then we want automaticity. We want that rate to be appropriate. So we screen for those things, we screen everybody and then moving on from there, students who show up as at risk based on the benchmarks for whatever screener we're using, we may want to then move on to some sort of diagnostic assessment. So in kindergarten, if you are below benchmark on the screener, I know exactly what to work on, the thing that you did low on, on the screener. But if you are in grade two, second grade, and you're low on your oral reading fluency. We need to figure out why. So the diagnostic kind of analogy we use is it's more like, okay, you had a fever, something's going on, so now we're gonna maybe take some blood, do an x-ray, might need an MRI write something a little more intensive just for the students who need it. For example, a phonics diagnostic would go through all of the phonics patterns a student should have learned by grade two and see, okay, where's the problem? Like, okay, they're fine with the consonants and short vowels. Oh, vowel teams. Yep. They're having a lot of trouble with vowel teams, so now I know what instruction they need. So we don't do assessments just so we can tick off boxes and say, yeah, I did diagnostic. I did a diagnostic. I found that this child is struggling with vowel teams. So now I'm going to teach them vowel teams and check in and make sure that they've learned vowel teams right? And so that's for particular students. And then when we are targeting our instruction for kids who were below benchmark, we want to make sure we're progress monitoring. And that's a really important piece because we can compare their screener scores. Usually, whatever screener you use has progress monitoring measures as well, so you can keep checking in on a regular basis to see is the student increasing? Are they getting closer to the benchmark? Are they increasing quickly enough? That we think they'll meet the benchmark by the end of the year or whatever your time goal is. So those are all really important. There are less formal classroom assessments that are used. So, for example, if I'm teaching first grade and I need to give a reading mark on the report card, one of the things I'm definitely doing is having them read me a decodable book. That gives you a bit of an idea. But the sort of assessment process of the screening, the diagnostic as necessary, and the progress monitoring as necessary, really important. So we wanna screen everybody at the beginning of the year. Screen everybody at the middle of year, not just the ones who didn't meet Benchmark at the beginning. Everybody because sometimes new screener measures are introduced, there's something harder, harder expectations. We also wanna know how systems are working, right? So if we're not screening the strong kids, we really don't know what percentage of the class is reading at Benchmark and that sort of thing. And then again, at the end of the year. So that kind of thermometer, temperature taking three times a year. But the diagnostic and progress monitoring for the kids who need it in between. That was such a comprehensive answer in a very short amount of time. Sounds like you just wrote a book on it. So what does a conversation sound like with a family member to help give them the information they need that's productive and honest. Yeah. Well, I think the earlier we get to this, the better. Right? So when I'm talking to kindergarten parents, we can get on this and intervene and get them where they need to be. So I think definitely, if it's an email or a letter that has come home. Read it carefully. Make sure you're understanding it correctly, but don't hesitate to ask questions. At benchmark means that at this point it looks like your child will continue meeting benchmarks as they go. So if you just hit that benchmark number, we call that the lowest level of, okay, so you hit the benchmark, usually it's green, if there's a color coding system green, and then maybe there's blue even for above benchmarks. That's the, we think you're pretty safe zone. But the yellow is for below benchmark, and basically it means that based on your child's score on that particular screener, and remember, that could have been one minute in time on a given day. A good teacher will know to make sure that if they had their glasses and if necessary they had taken any medication, and they were in a quiet spot, if they needed to write all of that, you're going to ensure that it's a valid score. But by the time it's communicated to you, hopefully it's clear that yes, that child is scoring below where we would want them to be. So that's showing that they are at some risk of reading difficulty in the future. And if they are well below Benchmark, that's usually a red zone. Then that shows even more risk. So we say the ones in the yellow zone need more targeted support. The ones in the red zone may need more intensive support. So it should certainly be communicated to you factually. So you're aware of how this data came about and you're aware where your child is. But really ideally it's also coming to you with the plan from the school. So I would never email or call a parent without saying your child was slightly below. So what I'm going to do is take them three days a week for 10 minutes and we're going to work on those letter sounds et cetera. But then hopefully there's also that piece where, and here's what you could do at home. So hopefully you can feel better knowing the school is on this, but also feel empowered yourself. And so if you don't have those pieces of information, what is the school going to do and what can you do ask? And then for any student who was below or well below benchmark, they should be getting extra support at school. And they should also have be having their progress monitored so that within a few weeks they should be able to say, they were reading at 61 words correct per minute. We want them at 90 by the end of the year, but now they're at 70. So this is progress. So this is good. And the thing for teachers with progress monitoring is if we can see the numbers aren't climbing. Then it tells us, okay, what I have do, what I've been doing for instruction is not working or it's not working quickly enough, right? Maybe they need to be in a smaller group. Maybe I need a different resource. All of those sorts of things. So you want to make sure you're asking about progress monitoring too. Like when will I know if what we're doing is working is also another key question there. And I think also. We don't freak out if it's too early. So I have, like I said, that whole pre-K k kind of age group, so I use a pre-K screener. September of pre-K, half of them are red. But when these kids are with me all year. By the time we get to kindergarten. Beginning of year, nobody's red. Right. And so, and even when we talk about English learners, so a child might move in third grade from the Ukraine and they speak no English. Now maybe they are fully fluent reading, writing, speaking their home language, but their very first English screener, they're going to bomb it. And so we need to. Take all of that information into account and make sure they're getting great English language instruction and extra support. But we're not going to look at that and think, oh, dyslexia. Because it's their first time doing something in English. So we just wanna be careful at the very, very beginning. We're certainly going to address it and target instruction, but like you said. These screeners, although they can send us down the road to identifying dyslexia as necessary. It's not, you have dyslexia, you're gonna need special education. We're gonna throw a label on you. Yeah. That's not what this is about. This is a, Ooh, this number means you might be at risk, so I'm going to give you extra support now so that you're not. I'm just so glad that so many states in the us have moved toward this system'cause you don't know what to do if you don't have the data. It makes me think of something Dr. Stollar, I heard her say recently about how something else that these screeners allow us to do is figure out if it's more than 20% of the class that are in the red or even in the yellow, that really is a prompt to look at your tier one curriculum. Mm-hmm. Because then it keeps that tier two and tier three support manageable and higher impact when it's fewer students. These particular types of assessments are so purposeful and give us so much information and if we use that information well, we're gonna see a huge reversal, in some of the reading trends we have nationally. Well, that's what I love is just being able to use that data has completely changed my instruction and when I have data where, oh, one of my students was yellow. Well, great. I've got time to take one student. Yes. Every day I can take that one student and then after a few weeks they're not yellow anymore. As opposed to when we're not using a structured literacy approach, when that tier one instruction, like you said, maybe isn't happening the way it should be. Could be teacher knowledge, a training, a resources piece. There's so many reasons, but if you have so many kids who aren't meeting Benchmark, then there might be something we need to do whole class to to help and to ease the load of who needs small group support. Do you have any students who are off the charts in the blue above benchmark really early on, and if so do you have any insights on how you, push them? It's interesting. I actually had a podcast interview with Amanda Nickerson. She did a whole doctoral dissertation about advanced phonics work for advanced students which was interesting. And it's just been, it's just been published actually by a journal, which is exciting. And so just because students are strong readers and they might be all the benchmarks on these screeners doesn't mean that necessarily you need to jump them way ahead into something else. So I have had a couple of students in my time in kindergarten come to me reading books already. So without that instruction, they were reading books. However, they still benefited from letter formation. They still benefited from the spelling that went along with the kindergarten. Phonics, right? They couldn't necessarily spell the words. They were reading multi-syllabic words, but couldn't spell CVC words. And so we don't wanna say, oh, well he's reading an early chapter book, so I might as well just give him grade two phonics. Yeah. Because there could be gaps. Right. And so what Dr. Nickerson did with her study is she used assessment to see where this. Students were and then move them on from there. So I have done that, like using a diagnostic with one of those students to see, okay, what phonics does the child know? And so then for reading, we could then move on to some more advanced reading. Always making sure I'm not sending home"Dad is Sad" decodable books with kids who are fluently reading. Making sure that their reading material is appropriate for them and challenging them and that sort of thing, but it doesn't mean they don't still benefit from some of the letter formation and spelling stuff that we're doing in class. So I think really it's just making sure that we've got both of those pieces. We're meeting them instructionally. And everybody deserves to grow in a year of education, right? So even if you're already reading grades ahead, it doesn't mean, oh, you're fine. I'm just gonna leave you sitting in the corner while I teach these other kids. Everyone deserves to grow and move on and then just making sure that they have the reading material that they need to do that. So it can be trickier cases when you're trying to, do those different things with them. But I have had students like that and it definitely can be done. So if parents of early readers walk away with one to two key takeaways, what would those be? I think one would be that we are partners, so you know, please ask questions and converse with us. Support what we're doing at school as best you can and do your part at home if you're able to be reading those books and exposing your child to things and we can really work together. I feel like that partnership is just so key and not just when it comes to literacy, when it comes to everything, right? Like, I mean, we're working as partners with parents where we're still talking about toilet training. We're working together. It's not an adversarial relationship at all. We're a team. And then I think the second piece would be if your child struggles to read, it's not your fault. I really want parents to know that. It's funny because a lot of the early adopters in terms of teachers figuring out what the science of reading was and structured literacy. It's because they had a child at home that struggled to learn to read and they knew they were the ones there. They knew they were reading to them and doing the alphabet song, like they were doing all of that and it wasn't clicking. And then they realized, okay, what is going on here? Right. And so I think for parents to know, because I think sometimes there can be shame in that there can be parents who don't wanna talk about it. But just the fact that it is not your fault for some students learning to read will be a struggle. If it is dyslexia that's not your fault. It's not something that you caused and it's something that we wanna be able to support. So tying back to the partnership piece, please, let's work together and there's no shame and no blame in that. We just all want kids to read well. That, that really hit home because I still remember that moment when I opened up my child's reading report and her literacy specialist mom is looking at this red and did blame myself at first. And what's so beautiful is that there's so many complex unsolvable problems in this world, and illiteracy is one that we can solve for most kids. Mm-hmm. If we know where the gaps are and we can fill them and if we just work together. My last question for you, one of my favorite things about listening to your podcast is how you highlight different beautiful books What is a recent favorite book that you have for your students? So I have a chapter book and a picture book that I'd like to mention. So a chapter book would be the Zoe and Sassafras series. So Zoe has a magical power where she can help these animals, these magical animals that come to her barn. And there's a thread of science that runs through them all. So she always does some sort of experiment and hypothesis gets thrown in there. So I love to read chapter books to the kids at snack time. So Zoe and Sassafras, that whole series, I really recommend and a picture book, a really cute one. I just used this recently. It's called Dog In Boots by Greg Gormley. And it's about this dog that keeps going back to the shoe store, wanting different footwear and just isn't happy. So wants something better for swimming and gets flippers, but then can't really scratch very well with the flippers so it goes back and wants something to scratch and gets high-heeled shoes. Well, they're good for scratching, but not for running. But then by the end, he realizes his paws actually do everything that he needs. And that goes over some of the kids' heads, but, it's still a really cute picture book. Thank you for those suggestions. And if our listeners want to find out more about you, where can they find your work and all of your influence? I would say Instagram's probably the best starting spot at@katethismomloves. It used to be my family and friends account, but then as I do more presentations and things, I keep getting teacher followers there. So now it's become more education. And then of course, The Reading Road Trip Podcast. And we have our new reading assessment book coming out. I'm not going to lie and say that parents are probably going to want to dig too deeply in, but parents could recommend a'teachers great teacher gift Reading Assessment Done Right is my new book with Dr. Stephanie Stollar. So exciting, Kate, what a gift you are to the classroom and to our field, and I feel so grateful to have gotten an hour of your time. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a thrill of great conversation and always happy to support parents. 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 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.