In this conversation, Becky Pallone and Michael Hart discuss how their phonemic awareness instruction has evolved over time. They emphasize the importance of blending and segmenting as key skills in phonemic awareness and highlight the benefits of incorporating letters in phonemic awareness instruction. They will also provide practical tips for you!
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
In this conversation, Becky Pallone and Michael Hart discuss how their phonemic awareness instruction has evolved over time. They emphasize the importance of blending and segmenting as key skills in phonemic awareness and highlight the benefits of incorporating letters in phonemic awareness instruction. They will also provide practical tips for you!
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You're listening to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Today we'll be talking to two teachers and they are going to share how they teach phonemic awareness, including a ton of practical tips on the amount of time and which skills to teach, and much more. Stay tuned to learn more about what phonemic awareness instruction looks like in two different classrooms.
Lori:Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who won the best for all kids, and we know you do too.
Melissa:We work together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.
Lori:We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.
Melissa:Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Lori:Hi everyone. Today we are so excited because we are talking to two teachers about how they teach phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken language can be broken down into individual speech sounds or phonemes. Students benefit from explicit instruction in how phonemes or sounds connected to graphemes or letters. That was a whole lot of information. Melissa, you want to tell us who our guests are today?
Melissa:Yeah, because we have two teachers who are going to break down all that information for us today, very practically. So we're here with Becky Pallone she was a longtime first grade teacher turned kindergarten teacher and then Michael Hart, who was a longtime second grade teacher, turned first grade teacher and now an instructional coach, and they're here to talk to us today about their phonemic awareness instruction and specifically how it changed over time as they kept learning more about it. So welcome Becky and Michael. We're so excited to talk to you today.
Becky Pallone:Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here and to talk about one of my favorite foundational skills phonemic awareness.
Michael Hart:Absolutely. I'm excited to be here as well.
Lori:Yeah, and Becky, since you teach kindergarten, we thought we would start with your story first. Can you share an overview of how and what you learned about phonemic awareness over the course of your teaching career, which I think is about the same as mine and Melissa's? I think we're about 20 years in right?
Becky Pallone:Yes, yeah, oh, my gosh, I would love to. Yeah, this is my 19th year of teaching. I was in first grade for 15 years and this is my fourth year in kindergarten and the crazy thing is, guys, I didn't even know what phonemic awareness was or phonological awareness, until about five years ago.
Melissa:I don't think you're alone.
Becky Pallone:It's heartbreaking actually. But I was lucky enough to get there kind of before the curve and everything that was happening in my district. I was like really frustrated. Teaching first grade and we were using a balanced literacy program, I was doing guided reading in small group and I would just have like four to five kids every year and they weren't reading, they weren't catching on and you know, I would go down to the reading specialist and here I was a reading specialist too and I would like chat with her. Like what else can I do? Like what are you thinking? And you guys are gonna you're gonna find this crazy. I actually thought it was more fun to send Pinel. I was like we need their whole group program. Maybe this is what it is, maybe it's just two disconnected pieces. And she was. She said to me, was like the end of the year, she's like Becky. You know, a long time ago she was a veteran teacher getting ready to retire. She was like I think you would enjoy being going to letters training. You should check to see if our local intermediate unit is offering it. And I was like, sure, yeah, anything that will help.
Becky Pallone:So the following fall, I you know, was I took the three modules that fall and I was blown away. I was learning stuff that I had never even like heard of before. And the big focus those first couple modules was phonemic awareness, the science of reading, structured literacy, letter sound acquisition. And right away I knew I didn't have a whole lot of resources. I did have foundations, which was great, and that was the very first year we'd be using foundations. So I knew that at least we had this phonics piece that we had never had before in my district. So I decided to purchase Hegerty. It was mentioned at the training and I was like, okay, you know, I'll start something. And Hegerty, you know, was a great resource for me because I didn't know what phonological awareness was and by doing all of their activities I was learning, like the different components, you know, rhyming and isolating sounds and blending, segmenting, adding, deleting, substituting, all of that.
Becky Pallone:But as the journey continued, you know I started using that in my first grade classroom, covid hit and I was then at home with my three girls and my middle one and my youngest, you know, crawling all over me constantly, and my middle one was in first grade and she too was having a hard time reading and you know I was like, okay, let me try some of this phonemic awareness with her. And as I was just like sitting down and kind of giving her the past assessment that I'd also come across from David Kilpatrick and I was asking her to delete sounds and she couldn't do it, but yet my four-year-old, sitting next to her was giving me the correct answer, so like right there I knew something was off and I was like, okay, what's like, what's going on? So because we were a home and I had like a little bit more free time, I started. I found, came across Pam Castner and she has this wakelet with all sorts of resources and I went into a phonemic awareness portion that she has and I started watching a whole bunch of videos, some from the reading league. I watched one of you know, dr David Kilpatrick, and he really emphasized phony awareness, not phonological awareness, so manipulating the individual's bounce of spoken language.
Becky Pallone:So I knew I had to get there with my daughter and I knew, going back the following school year, that's where I was going to focus for the kindergarten class that I was going to have. That would be my first year in kindergarten. So from there I actually started using a little bit of Hegerty and a little bit of Equip, first Access. And you know, in the beginning of the school year I did start with Compound. I actually didn't go to Rhyme at all because I knew that really, based on the research that I had read and watched, it really wasn't going to affect them. So I really stuck to blending, segmenting, adding to leading and substituting. And as that first kindergarten year went, it was taking us a little while to get to the phoneme level. And when I had introduced all the letters in the sound and yet my kids weren't able to decode because they didn't have the blending skills yet, like I'm asking them to decode three sounds but they can't orally blend three sounds, I hadn't shown them that yet in phoneme acrobaric. So again, I knew something was off. I'm like okay, so some things you know not right here, my timeline isn't right, my scope and sequence isn't right.
Becky Pallone:Back on to scouring the internet again, finding more resources. And that's when I became pretty active on Twitter and I came across this big debate on phonemic awareness in the dark, phonemic awareness orally. And from there I learned that, okay, I need to be using letters when I'm teaching these kids to blend and segment add, delete and substitute, and it is crucial for me to get to that phoneme level. The question was, okay, how do I get five year old there? You know I need to get them there faster, but like, how can you do this?
Becky Pallone:And again, while I was on Twitter and you know, coming across different webinars and conferences and stuff, I was introduced to Anita Archer and I started, I went onto her explicit instruction website, which is a gold mine If you haven't been on it, like when I watch her videos, I just want, I want to be Anita Archer. She's so structured, yeah, and those kids just learned because of the way her classroom is set up. So I took her I do, we do, you do and started implementing that with my phonemic awareness in order to get them to move faster. So I thought to myself, okay, I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to show them how to do compounds, blend and segment and we're going to do a cup, we're going to do a couple days of it, a week of it and if they have it, boom, I'm moving on. And while I was doing that, like the compound, like a week of compounds and then a week of syllables, I was actually kind of doing two things. I was setting up the structure of how we blend and segment, like using our cone and boxes and using cubes to manipulate and stuff, but also getting them used to hearing sounds and hearing these big pieces of sound that they could hold in their working memory a lot easier than, you know, individual phoneme.
Becky Pallone:So I spent this year, in the past year, two weeks that was it on compounds and syllables and by that third and fourth week I had moved on to body coda. Now I had read a paper and watched a webinar by Selena Gonzalez Frye about continuous blending and I don't know if it was called continuous blending, it's continuous phonation. And she talked about you know the working memory and sliding that first sound with the vowel. So I thought to myself hey, let's get the body coda, which I'll give you an example of. It is putting the first two sounds together before tacking on the final sound. So I'm going to do the word stat for you. It goes stat and my kids could hold on to that S and that A sound, the stat, and then put it with it and come up with stat. If I would have went S at some of them, that S sound would have left their working memory already.
Becky Pallone:So I was trying to warm them up to hear three sounds by starting with body coda. So that's how I then decided okay. But based on this article and this webinar, I saw all the research affected what I did in my classroom. I'll do some body coda For this year. We did about two weeks of body coda before I felt that they were independent with it. Then, right from there, I went to two sounds. It was really particular about how I was going to teach two sounds. I was going to use the knee disarchers I do, we do, you do. I was going to have them echo me. So I would say, like two In a garden state, two, watch me, two, your turn Two. And we did a ton of that back and forth until finally they were showing some independence of that.
Becky Pallone:But as we were doing those two sounds, I came across like a list again on the internet. I'm always scouring for when I don't have an answer to something, I'm always looking for more where they broke up these two sound words according to like difficulty. So we know that the alphabet is made up of continuous sounds and stop sounds, so continuous sounds being sounds like ssss, ooo, mm, er. So this list had all of those continuous sounds that you can drag out first and then it had a vowel. So, for example, one of the very first words on the list was off, you can go off and you can hold those two sounds. So it was easier for my kids to blend and segment with those words because it didn't disappear right away. It was still there in the forefront of what they were hearing. That's interesting, yeah.
Becky Pallone:So I kind of like would start making my own list.
Becky Pallone:I kind of put, you know, the two curriculums that I had aside, although I wouldn't call them a curriculum or like a resource. I put them aside and was like, okay, I know they have great words in here, so I would just find certain words that I wanted to use and then create a list of 10 to 12 words that I was going to use that day in my phonemic awareness practice. And then, once I felt they had that if we were starting with two continuous sounds, I would kind of like bump them up a level. I'd like, okay, we'll do our first sound continuous and maybe our second sound would be. Well, can't really do that because that's a consonant, but slowly, you know, make each list a little bit harder. And so we got to three sounds and then finally, right now in kindergarten, like middle December, we're working on blends with them. So yeah, it has been like quite a journey of like trial and error and looking for finding more resources to kind of tweak the practices that I'm doing in my room.
Melissa:That's so exciting and I have so many questions for you about what you did. But I've seen Michael nodding throughout your whole story. So I am going to turn it over to Michael to hear how his journey may have been similar or different from yours, becky, and then I think we'll come back around to kind of dig into some of those things you mentioned so we can give teachers some really practical ways to use things in the classroom. So, michael, we're going to hear from you Absolutely.
Michael Hart:So I was nodding a lot because as she was speaking, I was just reflecting on my experience as a secondary teacher, but specifically a second grade teacher, coming right back to school after being out for COVID. So I had a lot of secondary students who, developmentally, were kind of at that kind of level. So, as she was describing the, okay, let me start with two sounds and let me teach you how to actually blend. I will you know, I you know really related to that and I recorded that down while we were talking. But my journey is like a little bit different. So I haven't been teaching for 15, 20 years. I'm still very easy. You know, at the start of my journey I would say you know. So I've been teaching for about six or seven, seven years. But I've been in my district as an intern. I did all my internships in my district. So I started really learning about foundational skills because I had a very seasoned teacher for my senior internship in second and she had been a first grade teacher. So she was I call her the queen of phonics. So this concept of phonics is something that I saw her really pulling kids and actually teaching them to read using sounds. She had been teaching a long time so I was like, hmm, what is this? So I actually got to learn a lot about foundational skills from her and being at the school I was at, there were a lot of Spanish speakers who were not learning how to read. So that inspired me to learn more about evidence-based practices and I went and got my master's and I did have a program where I learned about phonemic awareness. But I did have a professor that said Phonemic Awareness can be done in the dark. So when you said that, I was like that is like word for word what I was taught in that program. But you know, since you know, evolving from that and knowing again letters, incorporating the letters, absolutely more impactful.
Michael Hart:So my district, I would say at the time, had journeys, so we didn't really have a strong phonemic awareness program. And it was last year where I decided to take the plunge. I'm like, let me go down. I've taught second grade, I taught third grade, let me see first grade. Like you know, a lot of people say first grade is a grade you learn how to read. So I'm like, okay, let me go to first grade and see what this is about. And that's where I was officially introduced to Hagerty because it is a part of their first grade whole group, tier one curriculum.
Michael Hart:And something that I reflected on, you know, is that Hagerty was a step, like she said. It was a step in the right direction, because prior to Hagerty we had just a journey. So it was a step in the right direction and, like she said, it exposed me to different things. But there were a lot of things there, like you know, as reporting to the research okay, this not as critical. We need to focus on, like we talked about at the start of the episode, blending and segmenting. So, again, that's something that I've really been focusing in on and it's something that I work with Now. I teach a second grade group, I teach a fourth grade group, I teach a third grade group. It's the blending and segmenting and incorporating of letters. So very similar journeys but also very different journeys.
Melissa:I wanted to ask both of you about you know you both mentioned this, like focusing in on segmenting and blending, so can we talk a little bit about? You mentioned it, but let's dig in even more, like what were the skills that you felt like you didn't need to do? Or you learned from research you didn't need to do, or you learned from watching your kids that it wasn't necessary to spend so much time on. And then what? Let's dig back into the even segmenting and blending, or saying those are the most important. What did you do for those and what was what was most helpful for your students, so we can give some really practical tips to teachers.
Michael Hart:Yeah. So as I again, having taught second grade and third grade, you know it was having that lens and knowing. Okay, you know, if I want my kids to start knowing how to read faster, there are certain skills I'm like this isn't really important. You know, haggerty, you know, like I said, stepping in the right direction but doing thumbs up, thumbs down, whether the word rhymes or not, isn't really helping us learn how to read the word.
Michael Hart:And I remember being in second grade and I had students struggling to read two letter words. The word was at and they couldn't read it. So just getting them to attend to the letter sound correspondence was really something that really pulled me into more focusing more on the blending and segmenting and kind of working with words at the phoning level, because then I knew that they could be, they would be able to apply that to other words. Even now, when I'm working with third graders, I'm like, okay, you messed up on this word. Let's look at the sounds and I'm drawing dots under the sounds. Like that sounded out C and K together can represent or can spell what sounds. So you know, I'm still really getting trying to get students to attend to those individual sounds so they can try to carry and apply that knowledge to new words that they may encounter.
Melissa:You can jump in Becky.
Becky Pallone:Yeah Well, the first thing that I was having a difficulty with at first was it was taking me 12 to 15 minute to get through the phonemic awareness, and for five year olds that's just not doable.
Melissa:And that was just to clarify completely audit doing every piece.
Becky Pallone:Yeah, completely auditory. I mean I would use manipulatives up on my whiteboard to give them, and they weren't really using anything besides some hand motions. So when I came across the National Reading Panel report it was in a webinar that I watched that they really said it's blending and segmenting that leads to decoding and encoding, to reading and spelling. So I was kind of like, yay, I can cut out at least a good 10 minutes and really nail down. Hey, these are the two skills that we're going to work on. That kind of makes sense. You know, when you can hear those sounds orally and put them together, you're decoding. Now we just need the letter sound acquisition. And when you can take sounds apart again that's spelling you just have to have the letter sound correspondence right there. So now it like runs about four to five minutes. You know, maybe even less for the blending and the segmenting. And I make it really simple.
Becky Pallone:The kids are up on the carpet with me and I just write the word. So if the word is cab, I'll quickly write it and I'll, you know. I say to the kids all right, say cab, cab. And I'm taking my mark and I'm pointing to each letter and we're saying kuh, ah, buh, and then I quickly erased it and, you know, write up another one real quick and like point to each letter as we go to segmenting. Same thing with blending. I'll write the whole word up on the board first. Again, if the word you know is 10, I write it up there and I point to each letter as they say the sound, and then have them put together Eh, what's the word? And they say 10. So they're getting they're seeing that phoneme, grapheme, correspondence, while also doing a blending and the segmenting, and it's only taking us three to four minutes. And then, boom, we've moved on to, you know, our next skill, which is letter sound typically.
Lori:Is there anything about any of this that surprised you?
Becky Pallone:I think I was like you know surprised because for like over a year I thought they needed all of these skills and I had seen, like it's, you know, it's adding, it's deleting, it's substituting, it's rhyming, it's, you know, identifying the first sound, the middle sound, the last sound.
Becky Pallone:And when I thought to myself, okay, well, if you think, if you can segment, you can find the first sound and you can, you know, figure out the middle sound and the last sound.
Becky Pallone:And if you're doing like a list, say you're doing a list of words and you're segmenting cab, dab, jab tab, you are kind of working on rhyming at the same time, you like it can be incorporated in there. But it was so easy and clear, melissa and Lori, to see the transfer to the decoding and the encoding. It's just if, pretty much, if they were able to blend and knew, had that automaticity with their letter sounds, they were able to do start decoding words with three sound. And then for the encoding, if they were able to segment and had, okay, I know what that you know sound just looks like and they could write it, they were able to spell those three sound words. And that's where we are right now. Currently in kindergarten, we're all blending word, cdc words and we're all writing CDC words like with ease because our letter sound correspondence is very automatic and our blending and segmenting is so strong.
Melissa:Yeah, it makes so much sense. We just talked to a researcher who said you know, basically you know, even though you see all those skills under phonological awareness, like you said, becky, it's like you see them under that umbrella and you're like, oh gosh, okay, we got to do all of these. But he said that you know, there's research that shows that even if a student can't rhyme well, that doesn't predict whether they can read well. So, like not to get caught up in that just because it's an easier skill, move on to that segmenting and blending and, you know, go back to the rhyming if you need to, but you don't have to spend a ton of time there. And the same with those advanced skills that those advanced skills like deleting and reversing and those ones is it's not really, it's not as necessary for actually learning how to read and the segmenting and blending is. So I'm glad to hear that you two found that same thing through practice as the researchers did.
Becky Pallone:Yeah, and I think you just said something so important, like it's so hard to take the research and what's out there and start putting that into practice in your classroom if you're not aware of their research. You know, I feel like I've been fortunate enough to have the ability to, you know, have some time to be, you know, an active participant on Twitter and come across so much that's there, that's free and that's accessible. That allows me to constantly keep up to date and to change my practices. But I even think back to, like my letters, training, or the resources, the curriculums that our school gives us. And if you don't know, you pick up this resource or this curriculum and you think, yeah, I'm doing the right thing here, like this, I'm doing the blending, the segmenting, the rhyming, de-adding, the deleting, the substituting.
Becky Pallone:You know, and this must be it, but unless we're constantly you know that constant professional development is there and unless our district is keeping up, you know it's not out there. And as a teacher like I'm fortunate enough to like have like a close knit of K1-2 at my building and we do talk about it, we're very interested in it and so we change our practices for what's best for kids. But that impact, even in my school district, is not district-wide, it's kind of just my secular building and I feel like there's probably so many out there that have that feeling. They just we all were in this for a reason. We all want to do it fast, just don't always know what that is.
Melissa:Yeah, and you said, becky, like you were lucky to have even that. I know no one's lucky for the COVID time, but you were able to have that time to like sit back and reflect and do a little research and practice with your daughters. And Michael, you got really lucky with having a teacher who taught you some things, because we weren't all that lucky to have people that were able to teach us that right from the start. So, yeah, you guys are both very lucky to have those times, and not just lucky, but you know both have really open mindsets, which is also a big deal too. You know, especially no offense, michael, you're new, but Becky, being so far in and still being so open to changing year after year after year is really big deal. So kudos to both of you. All right.
Melissa:So I do have another question that because we brought this up a couple of times already, but I'm just going to let's dig into it. Michael, you said you had a professor that said about teaching letters or phonemic awareness should be done in the dark. And Becky, you brought that, that lineup too. And you know the researcher we just talked to as well, he also brought that up, and so it's just an interesting one because I know that I think for some people, especially with Hagerty, it feels really safe because it's like you know you're doing phonemic awareness because it's it's auditory, so you know you're just dealing with the sounds and I think there's some like like hesitation to add in letters because then it feels like you're not doing phonemic awareness anymore. Does that make sense? Does that resonate at all with either of you?
Michael Hart:I think guys came across something like that on Twitter. There was a discussion about that like, oh, once you add letters, it's phonics. But then I think someone said, well, that just because it's phonics doesn't also doesn't mean it's not phonemic awareness right. Ideally, good phonics and spelling instruction will still continue to reinforce phonemic awareness In my. That's what I feel.
Becky Pallone:Yeah, bottom line, we're trying to get them to read and if we can strengthen that letter sound correspondence through using letters, why not?
Becky Pallone:I do try to control like the letter sounds that I'm using. You know, since my kids were reading CVC words, those are the words that I'm choosing to blend and segment with when I go to use actual letters. Doesn't mean like we don't segment irregular words, because you know we do have irregular word instructions, like we're doing the word the. Well, you know that is not a CVC word but you know we take the time to talk about you know the th, which they have learned, but how you have that irregular e. So, as far as using the letters, I don't always go into other patterns that the kids haven't seen yet. I kind of keep those patterns controlled until we're learning that particular skill in phonics Because I like my examples of that. Becky, yeah, I like my phonemic awareness to go with whatever I'm doing in phonics. So as a kindergarten teacher I spend the bulk of you know first five to seven no, not five seven first one to seven weeks of school. You know, teaching the letters and sounds. You know no letter a week or letter a day, it's about like two to three you know letters a week. So say, if there were I'm doing D, all of my word that I choose to blend and segment with will have a D as the initial sound or a D as the final sound. So before I even introduce that letter, my kids have heard it come out of my mouth probably 24 times, if my list have like 12 words on them. So they're already prepared and they caught on to this pattern.
Becky Pallone:By the time I got to one of my final letters, which was J and I'm doing okay, ready, they're like jab, jet, jet and they're like oh, we know the letter, mrs Polo, it's going to be J Because they got used to that structure. So I try to stay within. You know, whatever the phonics skill is, that's what I choose to do for the phonemic awareness. So, using the letters, I'm not introducing like these crazy patterns to them that they're not going to understand.
Becky Pallone:Like, for example, if I was doing J, then using the word gen, because it's a soft G, like, so I wouldn't put that word in there because then I would have to stop and they would look at that. And now I've just confused and look, wait a second, I thought G we represented it with or the good sound, so they would be all confused. So I think if you're going to use letters, you can take a deep breath and you can just think to yourself hey, what exactly am I teaching in phonics? I can create a list based off of my phonics skill that I'm working on, because by using letters and with the phonemic awareness, I'm just going to be reinforcing what I'm going to step to next during my phonics instruction or when we're doing our blending or decoding or encoding. And I think that it takes a lift or like a weight off the teacher's shoulders that they're not going to expose them to all these crazy patterns and it's a little bit more structured in control.
Melissa:It reminds me of a bit. Laurie and I talk a lot about how we used to have writing time separate from our reading time and we used to separate those things out. And now we're like why would we do that? We should be writing as we're reading, they should be so connected. And phonemic awareness and phonics feel like the same to me. I think some people are having separate phonemic awareness time and then later they get to their phonics time and it feels like they're so interconnected that why would we not be doing it together?
Becky Pallone:That's a great point, it just makes sense. It's just more exposures for the students, more opportunities, they say, with letters, sound acquisition. It could take up to 100 exposures. I mean not all kids, but that's a lot of times that they have to see that letter and hear that sound. So why not do it in your phonemic awareness and give them those 24 extra exposures before your letter, of that you're doing, that day starts?
Lori:That's such a neat way to think about it. I love that. It reminds me of the practice of interleaving, where we're coming back around to teach in a I think of it like a cyclical manner. We're coming back to teach something explicitly and review, review, review that we've already taught. But I also, just, more commonly, it makes me think of a dance, where we're stepping forward and stepping back, stepping forward and stepping back, and how we're supporting the phonics with the phonemic awareness. I'm wondering, becky or Michael, if there's a specific order. I know you're following that scope and sequence, but is there a skill to focus on in a particular order? Is there anything you want to elaborate in terms of organization?
Michael Hart:I think what Becky described when she noticed when she was talking about the continuous sounds. So really I think that was something powerful that I saw, even again being in second grade and coming back. I did two years in third grade and then I went back in person and I had a lot of things who couldn't read and what she described I find it fascinating because I was experiencing it with my second graders and I had never experienced it where, okay, here's this three-letter word and we would do, hmm at at, I'm like whoa, you had like. Even if they knew the sounds, like she said, they would forget by the time they got to the end. So the continuous sounds was a buildup, but before that, starting with those two-letter words, first I think it's powerful and then the continuous sounds have been always things that helps a lot of my students doing those continuous sounds, hearing it, being able to stretch it out and not always separating them as well, I think I've always found with developing readers.
Becky Pallone:And that's why I think kind of creating your own list at time makes sense, or at least you can look through the resource that you have and you can say to yourself okay, you know, here is the two or three weeks where they do two sounds.
Becky Pallone:I'm just going to go through and I'm going to highlight all of the words that start with a vowel, a continuous sound, or start with one of our continuous sounds L, m, n, r, s, z, any of those and I'm going to work on those ones first and then, when I think they have acquired that and can pretty much apply independently, I'm going to stay with those two sounds, but I'll just go back and grab all of those other words that my resource has that maybe start with the stop sound, like the word boo you know that B is a stop boo and then it has your vowel and it's just.
Becky Pallone:I think it's just a little bit of like being thoughtful with your resource and it's not necessarily that kids can't do two sounds. Maybe they're just not ready for the sequence of letters that you're using for them. And then, you know, continue with that pattern through the three sounds. Hey, you know what probably going to start with, like, again words that start with an S and maybe end also end with a continuous sound, like the word Sam, you know, starts with this and with the M and both of them can be held out and I think getting them to blend those sounds will be a little bit easier. Before we get into a word like tip, where the T is already gone if and then the P is already gone, it's a little bit harder for them to hear, hold in their working memory and kind of slide those sounds together.
Melissa:You know, what I love about what you both are saying is there's always this like pitting of teacher knowledge and curriculum against each other, like, oh, it's just about the curriculum or oh, it's just about teacher knowledge. And what I'm hearing so clearly from both of you is that it's both right, because if you don't have the teacher knowledge, then you're just following those right and it's maybe not best for your kids or it's not maximizing your time as efficiently as you'd like to. But you know, if you don't have the curriculum at all, the resource to pull from, you know, then you're starting from scratch and even if you have the knowledge, it's a lot of work to then go make all those lists for every single day of which words and so and I just love the way you guys are speaking about it you know it really takes both of those to be able to say, okay, here I have this resource, it has some good stuff in it, but I'm going to make my choices of what I need for my students.
Becky Pallone:Yeah, and you know, with that, even if your district doesn't have a resource yet, I mean a simple you know search on Google I can put in you know CVC word list and it gave brought me to a website that measured mom and I printed out like a whole bunch of CVC words and all I did was go through and highlight which of those words started with a continuous sound. So when I was ready to go to three sounds, I'd simply like pulled out this one page paper and new hey, start with the words you highlighted in yellow, because those are all continue. They all start with a continuous sound. So I didn't have to think of anything, you know, in the rush of the day, and all I had to do really was use a highlighter, which we know all teachers like to use anyway.
Melissa:Yeah, and shout out to Anna Geiger measured mom, yeah, fellow podcaster.
Michael Hart:And, if I could add, also the University of Florida, the Literacy Institute. They've done a lot of good work as well. They have a lot of free resources. They have an actual manual now for their program that we're actually using this year for the first time and I know the phonemic awareness portion is like what she said is like one or two minutes and it's just blending, it's segmenting, it's including the is connected to the phonics skill of the lesson. That's gets spelling, practicing those encoding strategies as well, and the manual is only like $70.
Michael Hart:But online they have a lot of free. They already have the word list. They have their own scope and secrets. You can find a lot of things on there as well. So a lot of things. They've done a lot of heavy lifting now, but I know when a lot of people have started or even just me being seven years in a lot of these things were not there and we had kind of peace and learn together, learn together and on our own as well. But there are some things coming down the pipeline that people are starting to really put a lot of energy and focus on. You know, evidence-based practices, all right.
Melissa:So to close us out, I think we'll just ask a general question If you guys could give any, whether it's a tip for the classroom, for teachers teaching phonemic awareness or a resource that you would really send them to. You guys mentioned a couple already, I don't want to repeat those, but any other resources or just anything else like a big takeaway about this topic that you want to share? This is your time to give a last plug, or all of the above.
Michael Hart:I will say, you know, no matter where you are in your journey or whatever resource you have, I would say just prioritizing the blending and segmenting. Because even when I would teach Haggerty, I'm like, okay, I'm going to really focus, I'm going to spend most of this time selecting the blending and segmenting activities, you know. So they have them there, you know. Just prioritize that. So even you know, if you're, you know, being mandated to do certain things, because we know different level, different teaching contexts, but just try to prioritize the blending and segmenting, prioritizing kind of at that phoneme level.
Becky Pallone:I think my tip would be to, you know, find some of those free resources out there, and I'm, you know, talking more about professional development. Like I know, amplify has a lot on their website the reading like. There are so many dyslexia organizations out there that offer free webinars, that just sign up for them. They're free and even if you can't attend, they usually send you the recording that you can watch on your own time. And I actually just plug it in in my car and listen to them then, even though I'm not actually, you know, watching the webinar.
Becky Pallone:And then Michael and I were a part of a fellowship at the Goyen Foundation and they are at Science of Reading Classroom on Twitter and a lot of you know what Michael and I do and the you know the research that we read and the things that we watch.
Becky Pallone:We try to apply that in our own classroom and if you, you know, follow them on Twitter, you're going to see a lot of wonderful, different teachers putting these practices in their classroom, like in front of kids, like real life, not just us telling you about it, but you actually get to see it and then you can like, mimic and model and practice in your own classroom. I think that's like a very valuable resource out there. On Twitter and X, sorry, and it's definitely worth, you know, getting a Twitter or an X handle. I can't transfer over to that, it's just, it's just hard. I mean, that's how I found you guys and started listening to your podcast and that's how I've listened to a bunch of podcasts. It was just, you know, through cruising through Twitter and starting to follow more people and recommendations and everything, and there's so much, so much on there for you. Yeah.
Melissa:And thank you so much for bringing up the Goyen Fellowship and the website and their social media, but I forgot to introduce you all as Goyen Fellows and I'm so sorry because that is such an accomplishment for you all in your career, so I apologize for not bringing that up earlier and congratulations to both of you on that. Yeah, all right. Well, thank you both so much for being with us today and thank you for sharing your I mean being able, vulnerable, to share your learning journeys with us and where you've been and where you are now, and just such practical classroom tips for teachers on what to do for Phinemic Awareness Instruction. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Becky Pallone:No, thank you for having me. This was, I'm not going to lie. It's kind of like a dream come true, being able to talk to the two of you. I've listened to so many episodes and like I imagine myself being there, like talking and listening, but I actually wasn't. So this, this was amazing.
Michael Hart:Thank you so so much. I can talk about reading and literacy all day long, so thank you so so much for having me.
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Lori:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.