Reading Realities

Teaching is a Verb: Rethinking Kindergarten Reading Instruction feat. Caitlin Lucas

• Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz • Season 1 • Episode 1

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 25:56

In this first episode of Reading Realities, host Rose Else-Mitchell talks with Caitlin Lucas, a kindergarten teacher and literacy specialist in Pittsburgh, PA, to unpack her journey from familiar routines to research-aligned reading instruction.

Through the disruption of the pandemic, Caitlin began rethinking everything—what mattered, what didn’t, and how to better support young learners. She shares how shifting toward explicit instruction, phonemic awareness, and intentional language modeling transformed her teaching and her students’ outcomes.

This conversation goes beyond instructional strategies to discuss what it feels like to question your practice, embrace vulnerability, and make meaningful change in the classroom.

References and Resources:

Credits:

  • Guest: Caitlin Lucas, Kindergarten Teacher, Literacy Specialist, and Goyen Literacy Fellow based in Pittsburgh, PA
  • Host: Rose Else-Mitchell, Executive Director of the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz
  • Produced by the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz, Rose Else-Mitchell, and Onalee Smith
  • Original music and audio editing by Ross Gentry

***

Keywords: science of reading, kindergarten reading instruction, phonemic awareness activities, early literacy strategies, structured literacy, phonics instruction, teaching kids to read, literacy coaching, kindergarten classroom strategies, reading intervention, post-pandemic education, explicit instruction, early reading development

***

Get in Touch:

Have a question or topic you’d like us to cover? Interested in being on a future episode of Reading Realities? 

Contact us at scienceofreading@newpaltz.edu. 

If this episode resonated with you, please:

  • Follow Reading Realities
  • Leave a rating and review
  • Share with a colleague or educator in your network

Visit our website to learn more.

Introduction to Reading Realities

Rose Else-Mitchell

Welcome to Reading Realities, a podcast about what it really takes to change how we teach reading. This show is for teachers who are experiencing that shift, trying new things, rethinking old habits, and figuring out what actually works in your classroom. Each episode, I'll talk with an educator about the instructional changes they've made or they're making, what's been challenging, what's been surprising, what they're still learning along the way, and importantly, how they feel about it. Because the truth is changing how you teach reading is not simple. It's complex, it's ongoing, and it can feel really overwhelming. And no one should have to figure it out alone. I'm your host, Rose Else- Mitchell. I'm the executive director of the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz, and I've spent my career in education as a teacher, a learning and product designer, a professional developer, and a role-supporting schools and districts and systems around the world. What's always mattered to me is how we take what we know about how our brains learn, most specifically, how children learn to read, which is a unique process for humans. Most importantly, how do you make it practical and sustainable to do in school every day as a teacher? That's what this podcast is about. Today I'm joined by Caitlin Lucas, a kindergarten teacher and literacy specialist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In our conversation, Caitlin shares how her thinking shifted from relying on familiar routines and materials to focusing on explicit instruction, phonemic awareness, and as she puts it, my mouth really matters. We talk about what it takes to teach five-year-olds to read today, from helping them to build attention and independence to just sit on the rug, to navigating the lasting impact of the pandemic. Caitlin also shares what it looks like and feels like to be vulnerable as a teacher, to question your own practice, to make small but meaningful changes, and stay focused on what actually helps. Let's get started.

The Importance of Attention in Kindergarten

Rose Else-Mitchell

Thank you so much for being here, Caitlin. Welcome to Reading Realities.

Caitlin Lucas

Thank you so much for having me.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Learning to read is one of the most extraordinary things that humans can do, and probably one of the most extraordinary things that teachers can do is to teach kids to read. But we also know it's hard, it's messy, and over the last couple of decades, there's been real swings and changes in the how of what teachers do and the expectations and parents' engagement. And some of it's pretty confusing. So what do you think is the most important thing that a kindergartner should do and be able to do? And what you might tell parents of a their first child who's going into kindergarten, you know, in that first of an upcoming kindergartner.

Caitlin Lucas

If they can sit, they they're good. I tell parents all the time they do not need to know a letter, they don't need to know a sound, they don't need to know anything. If they can walk into my classroom and just sit there for 30 seconds, then I can do anything else with them. It's really changed a lot over the last few years. Um and that attention span is something that it's very, very difficult for those five and six-year-olds. I have a five-year-old at home. It's very difficult for them. Um but if they can just sit and give their attention to something for a couple minutes, then they're golden. We can, I can teach all of the hard things. They just they just have to teach those those life skills and we're good.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Right. So the hardest skill, the hard thing to do is is the sitting still. Yeah, for sure. And of course, kindergartners today. COVID kids, right?

Caitlin Lucas

Yeah, we're even a little bit past that now. Yeah, we are our COVID babies were about two years ago. It's pretty been a pretty interesting journey to see that the differences in the kids over the last few years. They've definitely changed. It's not necessarily for worse. Just definitely a different climate of kids between, you know, the way that their houses are now. A lot of parents work from home now. So the clientele coming in, I like to say they're they're definitely different. Um, their socialization skills are definitely different than they used to be there, which is a totally different conversation. But their um, you know, their technology use is higher than it used to be. So a lot of the first days of school are kind of like weaning them away from, you know, parents and also technology and you know, just getting them used to being eight hours a day with just peers and playing and you know, someone that's not a parent, which they do. They end up doing it very nicely, but it is definitely different than it used to be a couple of years ago.

Rose Else-Mitchell

It's a lot, right? I mean, that is a real shift. It's a lot for them to do new and different, isn't it?

Caitlin Lucas

Yes. And they're amazing. And I think that sometimes even as adults, we sometimes treat kids as mini adults and they're not mini adult. They are five and six. And I do think sometimes as teachers, it's an important thing for us to remember that they do deserve that grace of, especially in those beginning days, that you know, they are gonna be able to get through this and they're gonna be able to do it. And if we just kind of extend that patience to them, they'll feed off of us and they'll they'll be able to do those things.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Caitlin's Journey in Teaching Reading

Rose Else-Mitchell

Well, I love, I love the positivity. You can do hard things. Uh it's true for teachers and true for kindergartners, right? So let's switch a little into talking about your journey teaching reading. You know, I uh it's often said that first grade is the most important year for teaching reading because you're really learning a lot of the sound spellings there. It's a it's a real make or break decoding year. But but none of that works um unless uh there's a great foundation in kindergarten. So maybe you could just tell us a little bit about your current role as it pertains to teaching reading and and then your experience in the past given you started in second grade. Sure.

Caitlin Lucas

So I actually started out in a completely different lane. My undergraduate degree is in speech pathology. And I graduated early. I had an internship and I called my mom crying and I said, I cannot do this. I said, R's and S's forever are not for me. Um, I give every speech pathologist in the world all of my love and attention. I tried it and it's very daunting. I was luckily at the same time kind of working as a behavioral specialist with students with autism, and I kind of got more of the whole child that way. I was kind of touching a little bit more of my bases. So I really sat down and tried to figure out what would give me all of the joy enjoyment that I needed fulfilled. So I did decide to go back to get my master's in teaching. My first job was a long-term subposition. I landed a job right away, which is I was very fortunate in second grade. And then I got a reading specialist job because I have that degree too, and a reading recovery role. Um, it was right around the height of the common core rollout. So everybody was like, yes, we have a basil, no one uses it, don't touch it, don't look at it, let it sit in your closet, only look at what the standards are. I jumped right into it and the kids came with their little bags with their little reading recovery bags. And we, you know, we did the explicit work with that right after, did that for about a year, and then I transitioned into kindergarten. So there was a lot of pieces there that I, you know, was able to build into my repertoire, but my shift really didn't happen in my own classroom. My daughter actually was in four-year-old preschool at the time when I started my kindergarten role here. I mean, she was my first kid, and I could see all of her letters look beautiful, all of the things look great. And then she went to kindergarten the next year, and I was, you know, at home teaching her. And I could see the things that I learned through my speech pathology degree were working for her better than the way that I was teaching and also the way she was being taught. She goes to school in the same district that I teach in. So all of the things I was doing all day, I was coming home and doing them again with her at night, which was its own challenge. But I kind of had to undo what she was being taught. So she went to school doing all of her name and all uppercase letters. And I went, oh, we don't write our name like that. But I realized to myself, I'm actually teaching all uppercase letters first. Maybe I shouldn't do that. And then when she would go to spell words, she wasn't using the right sounds. And I kind of realized that if these things aren't working for my daughter, they're probably not the way that I should be teaching everybody either. So that was kind of my first like, this probably isn't the right way for everybody. Because I want if I want what's best for my kid, I'm sure everybody else wants what's best for real.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah. So no one, no one kind of identified compared with these kind of different approaches. You just thought this was the way that reading was taught. But because of your speech pathology background, you were able to kind of work out that there was a better, there was a different way.

Caitlin Lucas

Correct. Um and it's like I said, it was very fortunate that I did have this background. My kids, we always said the alphabet, we always said the sounds, we always had that articulation approach, but I didn't put too much emphasis on it. Um, because I just didn't really see the value of it until I had my own kid and I realized the differences in my own house of what really made it work. So my first big change was really small, actually. I just called it word games, like mouth word games, and they waited and could not wait for that big blue book word game to come out once a week. And then COVID hit. And those word games went virtual because we had to still record ourselves. I mean, I that was the one thing that I stuck with, and I still recorded and I emailed to parents and I said, if you do nothing else, please just show this to them amongst your chaos. But that was kind of a big step for me to see, okay, that was something that worked. I don't know why it worked because I wasn't too sure yet, but I knew that that was something that, you know, started to work. So yeah, so then the next year I was graced with by the short straw, being the district's online COVID kindergarten teacher. And I cried because I said, How am I going to teach 28 kids how to read online? So that's when I big ask. That was my biggest aha moment when I realized that everything I thought that I needed, and everything I thought I was doing right in this practice, and all of the systems that I thought were important were gone and they weren't important. And everything those kids needed was me, a whiteboard, students, and honestly, my mouth. So they had devices, they had a whiteboard, and I would do drop offs once a week of what I they essentially needed, and everything else in my room I didn't touch.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Right.

The Impact of COVID on Teaching Practices

Caitlin Lucas

But my mouth mattered and articulation mattered. And then being able to write those sounds individually on a whiteboard mattered. And all of those kids to this date, they're in fifth grade now, not one of them ever needed title support. They all are reading, and it is my proudest to cry, like proudest thing I've ever done, because I sat there crying and said, I will never be able to teach these kids how to read, and all of them can read. And I remember ending that year looking at all of the things that just wasted time and remember being like, that was a waste of time. These kids didn't need any of those things. Like they need, they needed direct instruction and they needed me and they needed my brain and they needed phonics and they needed, yeah, my mouth, and they needed things that, you know, they don't, they didn't need crafts, and they did, they really just needed me.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Tell me a little bit about when you say articulation, what did that look like when you were online?

Caitlin Lucas

So I had literally just taught them screened up as close as I can, and then I had little printables that showed them exactly how their mouth should be moving for each sound. And because of my background in speech, I had always done that. I just I I learned early through all of the speech pathologists that told me that if the teachers intervene early, you need less speech referrals. And I it was true. Like I have kids now who cannot make the the like they try to make the TH sound and they constantly are making the F sound instead. And with a little bit of little bit of help and some focus and some mirrors, they actually can change those sounds around. So I really, really worked hard and tried to do that with the kids and they they can do it. And I think that a lot of that is it helps their spelling and it does help them understand the sounds and being able to see that and practice it. And they think it's fun. You know, tongue [depressors] are fun, mirrors are fun. All of those things that you can use for that stuff is fun. And it doesn't have to be directed to a speech pathologist. Like we we should be able to know how those sounds are produced. Um, and that is stuff I would have never five years ago ever would have taught them. Right. Um so I think that exposure in kindergarten really is so important.

Rose Else-Mitchell

And of course, the total physical response, which is that their bodies are completely engaged and that physical connection with their minds and and the patterning. So you do that at the beginning of kindergarten. Sounds like you do it every year. And what what do you notice as you get more and more experienced and expert at this? How has that changed and what have you been able to refine?

Caitlin Lucas

So the program that we use now, the sounds kind of continue the whole time. So I I do it throughout the year.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah, yeah.

Caitlin Lucas

I don't I think that the kids' speech honestly has been getting worse since COVID. And this is probably the most speech referrals I had coming in. And I don't think that the kids have a lot of awareness of their mouth either. I mean, I think that's just a natural thing. So sometimes when things are really hard, they just give

Articulation and Phonemic Awareness

Caitlin Lucas

up. But if I show them and they're forced and they have a mirror, and like I said, if you make it fun, it's good. And sometimes it's not fun. I tell them all the time, like sometimes things are boring. And my favorite Bluey quote is boring things are still important. Like brushing your teeth is boring, you still have to do it. Like boring things are still important and they do matter. And it does matter that you say these sounds correctly because then you're not gonna be able to spell. And if you can't spell, like there's so many, it trickles down. But they do buy in. The buy-in is huge. Um like I I'm a runner, I run all the time, and I tell them, like, it it is like a workout for your brain.

Rose Else-Mitchell

I'm wondering when you were changing your practice, where else were you getting information about what to do and how to do it?

Caitlin Lucas

So when I started our first full year back after we were online, um I walked back into my classroom and everything kind of just felt off and stale. And I knew I got to make a choice. I could go backwards to what I knew wasn't necessarily correct, but it was easy and it was familiar, or I could do it a harder way. I mean, it was a very vulnerable situation that I put myself in. And that was one of, you know, my favorite things that I say to teachers and about teachers is that you have to be vulnerable sometimes. And I started reading and I just started connecting with other other educators, and that was something that really benefited me at that time. Um, and I realized, like, okay, I'm on to something. Like, there's clearly a missing piece in my practice that other people are identifying, and there's something that can be done here. I am very, very fortunate to work in a school district that our curriculum leader, and she's also our assistant superintendent, is very, very on board with all of this. She was seeing the same things that I was at the same time. So I got a discussion with her and she was like, I'm ahead of you, I'm on it. And she was. And that didn't mean everybody was on board though. I will say that was that was a hard swing to the right. That was a um people had been doing stuff a certain way. So I kind of just focused on what I could control. Um, I started to make small changes within my room. I just stayed consistent and I focused on my own students. Um, and it was uncomfortable. And I still do. I think that that is it's a hard thing for you to know that it's the right thing. And sometimes it's easier to do the wrong thing. It's an easier path, but it got vulnerability of saying, like, okay, this is hard. Am I making the best decisions for my students? Am I, you know, and keeping the all of those decisions student-centered is where my my mind and my practice usually ends up going. My classroom now was very intentional. I do have a strong phonemic awareness daily. Um, it's not occasionally, it's daily. The students know exactly what they're doing every single morning. It's part of my calendar.

Rose Else-Mitchell

So when you look back at things that you did

Vulnerability in Teaching

Rose Else-Mitchell

and planning, you know, lots and lots of planning that you did, do you see a difference? And and what was that difference in terms of how maybe more validated curriculum felt versus what what you were doing before?

Caitlin Lucas

I have always been a very, and I will proudfully say a very, very good teacher. I think that my kids, no matter where my educational level that I was, always got the best version of where I was. I will personally bash myself though, and say that the amount that I relied on maybe untrusted sources was high because you do panic. Um, sure. You want to supplement and you want to, you know, make sure that they're getting what they should be getting. And I just had a conversation with a colleague the other day about, you know, this is the first curriculum that I have that teaches blends specifically and teaches digraphs specifically. Now, I've always taught blends and digraphs in kindergarten, but I taught them. So for me to teach them is totally different than the way the person next to me was teaching them and totally different than the way the person down the hall was teaching them. And if you have a curriculum that is saying this is the way that we're going to have them taught, everybody's gonna learn them the same way. You then can, you know, supplement or you can change them or you can come up with your own activities if you feed deem it necessary, but you don't have to because it is already in the program. Like you don't need those extra things. The kids also don't need them, they don't need the fluff. The other day I literally put up a picture of a missing vowel on my whiteboard and I just had them draw what they thought the answer, like they filled in the vowel and then they drew the picture, and you would have thought that it was like the the most exciting thing ever because they got to draw on the whiteboard. And they they think it's fun. And like I said earlier, it is okay for some things to be boring, and it's okay if the one part of their day that's school is a little bit boring. It's okay. Like it's just purposeful. It's okay to have some purposeful stuff in their day. What about?

Rose Else-Mitchell

I mean, it sounds like you were incredibly rigorous about ensuring that every child learned to read and suddenly learn their sounds in kindergarten. But you, you know, there are kids sometimes, whether it's speech delays or, as you say, multilingual learners, um, newcomers. How do you see some of those challenges come up? And and how do you or your school or the structures support additional or intensive or early intervention?

Caitlin Lucas

We do have a pretty strong MTSS program here. We have data meetings once a month where I'm in a Title I school. So we do have a Title I program for kindergarten as well for that have uh reading specialists that come. I work very closely with our reading specialists in kindergarten. I feel like I know my students sometimes better than I own, know my own kids. The amount of data that I have collected on them, and it doesn't feel like I don't want to say unpurposeful data, but I there was a couple of years ago where I was like, I am gathering all this data and I'm doing nothing with it. And I needed that. And now I feel anything that I'm doing with them, it is for a purpose. If I know that a kid knows all their sounds, I'm not testing them on their sounds. If I know that a kid knows all of these letters, there's no reason for me to do it. But it's more of the ones who I can see the struggle. I need to see identify exactly where it is, I need to find a prescription that helps them. I do think that it's the hardest part of kindergarten is that the abilities that come in are so vastly varied. It's very hard to be identified with anything before kindergarten and also in kindergarten. I think a lot of people just want to wait.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Caitlin Lucas

I think that the trust level of the educator is very low in kindergarten, which is no matter what district you're in, it's really hard to say. And they just want to keep giving kids time.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Yeah.

Caitlin Lucas

Like now's the time to start to come up with a plan or some testing or something like that. And usually I I do have enough support that they'll be like, okay, like, you know, we we trust that you've done done what you can do.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Done everything that you can do. Yeah. I and it's tricky, isn't it? I mean, you feel that as a parent too. But I think the data's pretty clear, the research about what isn't happening and and what indications and only indications you have that, you know, that child might need other intervention. And, you know, better to intervene

Data-Driven Instruction and Early Intervention

Rose Else-Mitchell

to prevent, right? Teach to prevent rather than intervene latest. What's something that you might tell a teacher who is newer to this or just kind of has heard the bumper sticker science of reading, and and that's really it?

Caitlin Lucas

You really do have to be really vulnerable. Change is not gonna happen when you find the perfect program. I record myself a lot. That's very helpful. Especially if you're a new teacher, record yourself and hear the way that you say your sounds. I thought for a long time I was saying my sounds correctly and I wasn't. Um, so so record yourself, reflect on yourself. So and it's also okay to ask somebody. And that's hard. It's hard to say, hey, I don't know enough about this. Can you help me? Or hey, you're actually doing a much better job at this than I am. Like I'm really struggling with this. And as a teacher, we want to be the one that knows better than everybody else. And I got this, I got this, I can do it. We don't want to show a weakness and we want to be the one that's best for our kids. And it's hard to be the one that's like, hey, I'm actually not doing the best at this. Um, but you have to in order to grow. So it's not gonna happen with the perfect program and it's not gonna happen with the perfect group of kids because it's the those things are unrealistic. It really happens whenever you sometimes get it wrong, and you're willing to just admit that and focus on your students. Um, you know, we are gonna do whatever these kids need because I'm gonna teach like my hair is on fire, and then they're gonna go home. So I think that remembering that like you, that's it's a verb. Like we're we're teaching here, we're not just teachers. Um, and yeah, it's a lot easier.

Rose Else-Mitchell

That is a great point. Before we close, I'd love it if there's a particular student that you can think of where you you've really been able to see the the lights turn on and and reading happen, or

The Role of Teacher Reflection

Rose Else-Mitchell

alternatively, where they were really challenged and and you were challenged to, you know, dig deeper.

Caitlin Lucas

Yeah, there was one and they had a very difficult home life. And that was something that has really been hard for me to kind of get rid of my, I want to say heroism at Savior Complex. And that was the year that I said it doesn't matter what their house is like, I have to teach them how to read. And I had to kind of come to the terms with, you know, the best thing I can do for this kid is to teach them how to read. Um, no matter how many days a week he shows up, uh, no matter, you know, what district support I have, no matter what parent support I have, my only job here is to, you know, teach them how to read. Um and for background, he could not tell me a color, didn't know what crayon was. It was a very, very difficult start to the year. But, you know, the exposure that they come in with is not my responsibility. And what they go home to, you know, I can't judge. It's that's not my job. My role is to teach. And he came in with the lowest scores I probably have ever had and left not on blue, but he left on green. And I stayed before school, I came after school sometimes. And it wasn't me, it was he wanted to do it. So it was a lot of combativeness at the beginning. This is too hard. This is too hard. This is too hard. Um, and then just with that encouragement of you can do hard things, bud. You got this. And then all of a sudden, like when the light bulbs would slowly turn on, yeah. I would see like the okay, like his mouth is moving for you know, phonemic awareness now. Okay, like he's participating, he's writing his name now. You know, it it's amazing to see that the kids. They they want to do it. They do. They like school. They want to like school. They want to learn. That eagerness is so deep inside of them to learn and to develop and to be here and to participate and to know the answers. It's human. It's human.

Rose Else-Mitchell

And making sure they can feel that humanity. Yeah. I well, I love that that story shows not only do you have faith in every child, you also have faith in yourself to do the work that, you know, you're put there to do. You're right. Obviously, we all care about students and we want the best for them, understanding the things that you can change and the things that you can't. And, you know, what a gift to be able to unlock, unlock reading, unlock learning. There's nothing, nothing more amazing. So thank you for all that you do. Last question before we go, which is what's a book, either a personal book or or a professional book that you would recommend to other teachers?

Caitlin Lucas

If you've not read the knowledge gap yet, that's still always my first go-to. That was actually gifted

The Knowledge Gap and Its Implications

Caitlin Lucas

to me by my assistant superintendent. And I think I've read it three times now, but I still always go back to that because they do think it's so important for us to realize that kids are just missing knowledge. And it's so difficult for them to really, you know, just have conversations into there's things that they can't even answer questions about anymore because they're just missing all of these huge gaps. Almost like they just don't have conversations anymore. So just to read that through was so enlightening to me and honestly helped me really like bring back that comprehension piece and really focus back on vocabulary, which was something, again, I wasn't really spending too much time on, other than, you know, just the vocabulary that was mentioned kind of periodically throughout my instructions. And I allowed them to be curious and just those little moments of as much knowledge building about each other as we can get really has been such a nice part of my practice, too. That's been so reflective. But that really has been such a great personal book for me to read and then also a reflective one that I do think that every educator should have to read.

Rose Else-Mitchell

The Knowledge Gap by Natalie Wexler.

Caitlin Lucas

Yeah.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Thank you so much for spending time with us today and sharing your story and for the work you do every day for kids.

Caitlin Lucas

Thank you so much for having me.

Rose Else-Mitchell

Thank you for joining us on this first episode of Reading Realities. And thank you again to Caitlin for sharing her story and her practices with us. There's so much in this conversation that connects directly to what we know from research, the importance of explicit instruction, the role of phonemic awareness, and how foundational those early skills are for everything that comes next in reading. But what I appreciate most is how clearly Caitlin brings all of that to life in the classroom, the tiny changes, the persistence, the frustration, and the willingness to try to be vulnerable and to keep learning from others. If you're listening today and you're in the middle of your own shift, we hope this conversation gives you something practical to take back to your classroom. But most importantly, a reminder that you're not alone. If you'd like to reach out, learn more about our work with educators, or even be part of a Reading Realities podcast, you can reach me, Rose, at scienceofreading [at] newpaltz.edu, which is in the show notes. If this episode resonated with you, please be sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. Or share it with a colleague, a teacher, or someone else who's on this journey too. And as we're just getting started, it would really help if you could please take a moment to rate and review the show. It helps us reach many more educators in this wonderful online community. We'll be back soon with more conversations and stories from educators doing this work to help kids learn to read every day. Thank you for listening.