i'm as close as you are you're just short so excited to learn from you lyndon michael thank you for doing this awesome uh donna you want to start letting people in from the waiting room then i just did all right um amy and mary you want to introduce yourselves sure just let me know when it's time one minute okay amy i'll go and then you can go okay and then we'll turn it back over to jeannie jeannie are you why don't you take care of can you admit people sure you should be able to disable the waiting room yeah i'll do that i can do that thanks amy [Music] there you go i knew she should be a co-host how do you do that i've never done that oh it's easy just go to the three little dots underneath the participant section and you click enable which really means disable the waiting room i don't see that yeah it's where you're if you go under where the names are you'll see it says invite mute all and then there'll be three little dots if you click on the three little dots you'll see enable waiting room and it's not checked it's just been disabled hmm okay good to know because that's annoying all right as is all right i am going to hop off my audio is not working for katie all right i suppose at 6 30 go ahead there mary okay it's time to start my name welcome everybody yeah welcome i'm so glad that looks like we have um 213 participants at the moment which is really exciting my name is mary newton i'm the president of the reading league wisconsin and genie chop who is also involved with the science of reading facebook group from wisconsin is also on our board of directors so we frequently do um events together and so that's what we're doing tonight so i'm pleased to have her on here with me i just i'm going to be putting up a link in the chat for those of you who need a certificate of attendance um toward the end of the presentation i'll post that in the chat box and then it'll be a link to a form uh all you need to do is click on there fill out the form and submit it and then we'll be sending out certificates later in october via emails so you'll get that in your email inbox so look for that and it'll be coming from uh reading league wisconsin um so i want to introduce my um other board member colleague amy mcgovern amy hello hi everyone my goodness 242 and climbing so glad you're all here i'm not the vice president of the wisconsin chapter can you all hear me okay yeah so i'm really glad to be here and we're excited to learn from uh linda and michael and if we're ready we should turn it over to them unless anyone else needs to introduce yeah i'll get a chance okay good so um i'm jeannie schapp i'm a reading specialist in sturgeon based school district i am the administrator of wisconsin uh wisconsin science reading facebook page um literacy task force and as mary said i'm also a board member of the reading league wisconsin so i have the honor to introduce our special guests tonight linda farrell and michael hunter they are founding partners of the readsters in alexandria virginia they work nationally in schools helping educators implement instruction that ensures all students learn to read the process always starts with using the right data to select appropriate instruction their favorite work is modeling in the classroom and coaching teachers linda and michael have presented workshops about effective instruction for beginning and struggling readers for more than 20 years they have written phonics curricula for struggling readers and diagnostic assessments to pinpoint decoding difficulties linda is instructor and looking at reading interventions on the reading rockets website michael is featured in videos used to demonstrate effective teaching techniques and letters modules in the last several years linda and michael have worked in west africa developing early reading curricula for children to learn to read in seven african languages with transparent orthographies and they don't speak any of the languages so here's linda and michael the fantastic duo that's going to help us understand decodables and when to use leveled readers so bring it on linda michael jeannie thank you that was a very nice introduction um well we are going to talk about decodable and leveled readers and for me i can hardly say hello in an hour so we're going to get started right now if you happen to download the slides that are on the i think donna put them up someplace if you happen to download the slides you won't have in the packet that we sent any slides that have the red headers on them because you don't need them or their answer slides so that's just to let you know that if the header up here is in purple then you will have that slide and we do have some objectives um i'm not going to read these because you can read these but the main objective we have is for you to walk out of here being able confidently to know the differences between decodable and leveled readers what what purposes they serve for early reading and then just maybe some guidelines about when to use them or not that's that's it if you better understand the difference between decodable and leveled readers and how they can be used for early readers we'll be happy right so um this is a warning when there are leveled readers all the way up to high school just to let you know when we're talking about what we're talking about today is for early reading instruction and when i should really have emphasized instruction and the reason is that we are not when we say used to quotable readers we are not saying don't ever let a kid touch a book that isn't decodable michael do you want to elaborate on that well fundamentally what we're going to be talking about with the decodables is decodables have a particular purpose in instruction and you'll see that level readers have a particular use in instruction and they're different and they should be used in the appropriate manner and that's what we're going to outline and when we talk about using decodable readers for instruction we're talking about for phonics instruction for teaching children the decoding side of the simple view of reading and there are times to use it but one more thought on that just real quickly is that we do what we're saying is we kids can pick up any book they want to pick up at any time other than during instruction and then of course we encourage that we're not trying to limit what kids are looking at so um let's start out with leveled readers just we'll talk about well somebody has their um microphone off or on can we make sure i just muted everyone linda and michael if you want to unmute you'll be good to go thank you very much okay we're going to start out with leveled readers and everybody's heard of leveled readers you've seen leveled readers most people have worked with leveled readers but we're going to get a little deeper into leveled readers now again when we talked about this when we're talking about decodable and leveled readers we're talking about leveled readers at the lower end of levels not talking about z or y according to fontes and pinell if you're looking at fontes and benel we're really going to be suggesting that you rely more on decodable readers all the way up to about level j if you have to give fontes and pinell um lots of schools have to give up onto the banel or a leveled reading and we want you to be very aware that below level j in our experience no research behind this just our experience is that the children are very likely to still need some decoding instruction and if they're in levels a b c or d they're they do need decoding instruction that's that's just a rule so um if you don't use spontaneous empanel then what you might use are some others and there are lots of different levels so this is just one chart from houghton mifflin showing the different comparison levels if you're using dra this is another one from reading a to z i know a lot of people use leveled readers from reading a to z comparing them one thing i find interesting is that you can see on the reading a to z level um this is the reading a to z and then this is oh like this is fontis and pennell and they have fontes and vanilla level j as grade one but if you look here they have um fantasy as grades one and two so one of the things that you're going to find is that there isn't consistency in leveled readers now we'll start talking about what are level readers how do you describe a level reader well we went to different websites to find out how level reader publishers describe leveled readers and they are predictable they're often predictable about familiar subjects they have strong support for the text from the pictures they may and most often do include a number of high frequency words these are early level readers and they repeat words with support from the pictures for the repeated for the i'm sorry with support for the pictures for the words that the children may not know the leveled readers how do they get the level what what do they do to get a leveled reader well basically what they do is they count the words in the whole reader they count the words in sentences the shorter the sentences the lower the level they look at the length of words as part of their criteria so the shorter the words the lower they also try to be about stories or subjects that are interesting to students so because remember when you're doing balanced literacy which leveled readers are at the core of balanced literacy then it's always your reading for meaning enjoyment etc and then a few um some leveled readers will have word banks and they will only use a certain number of words in level a and then they'll move to level b and add some more words so that they're not using a a huge corpus of words and that allows the students to memorize those words because they've seen them over and over and over is the theory in fact let's look at the theory or the premise behind leveled readers do you want to talk about this do you want me to sure um so the premise for level readers is fundamentally that students are going to learn to read words by just being exposed to the repeated exposure repeated exposure uh when they get to a word they don't know or haven't seen before they're encouraged to use the pictures that are in the book or the context around the word what the words they do know to yes the new word um because guessing is sort of at the core of all of this accuracy is not as important as uh comprehension or getting to the meaning yes the key uh with with the premise level of the leveled readers excuse me is that as long as the students get the gist they understand what's going on they're getting the meaning that's considered reading and that's behind the premise there um sometimes they do recognize phonics patterns and um encourage students to look at the letters to figure out words they don't already know but first the first two options are to use your context and use your pictures to guess what the words are and if that fails you then you might actually look at the letters in the words and uh we've talked about that they're interesting content because interesting content is what the students already know about which gives them the context to be able to guess any of the words that they don't know how to read and also that they want to in guided reading which is where you use these leveled books they want to be able to have discussions about them it's very important to have discussions afterward so i want you to look at this and then we're going to go to the next one which is what are the criteria for leveling books well we went to the website and uh for fountain menel and what we found is that these are what they used as the criteria for leveling books how long is the book how what's the size of the type and the layout of the print is it easy on the eye or is it more uh dense what kind of vocabulary and concepts the harder the vocabulary the harder the concepts to understand maybe something that would be new to the student the higher the level language structure and um i'm gonna i don't know exactly what they meant by that but i think that you can put language structure and predictability and pattern of language together is it easy to understand um how easy is the text structure how easy is the genre and supportive illustrations so that if the children don't know the word or they don't get it they can look at the picture even and figure out what's going on in the story they don't really even have to read the book to understand the story because it's all about getting to the comprehension now we went to reading a to z and we looked at their criteria now um bountis and bennell are the grandparents they're the originators of our leveled reading and what we find is that a to z and a number of other level readers they have to have more criteria because they have to differentiate themselves and what i would like to do is give you guys about 10 seconds to read this and see if you find anything that has to do with um phonics with with different spelling patterns could you find it michael i've never been able to find it if anybody nobody can find anything that has to do with spelling patterns that we want to have simple spelling patterns could you please unmute and show me where it is oh what a surprise we have at least 230 people and no one can find it because it's not there it's never a consideration that they have short vowels or that they um which are one letter one sound yeah and in fact it's real interesting i was up in connecticut speaking to some teachers and they were insistent that leveled readers were working but they'd given a survey to show that their children didn't know short battles that were having difficulty with short vowels so they wanted to know which leveled readers should they use to teach short vowels that only had short vowels and i had to explain i i can't give you a leveled reader for that because that isn't how leveled readers are put together um they can't read vowels there are no level readers without vowels except the picture books yeah if you're in this group you know that short vowels more more words have short vowel patterns than any other pattern except schwa and you can't you can't read if you don't understand you can't decode if you don't understand short bells so just very interesting i want to read this to you from um flint cooter which is an informal reading inventory book and they are talking about in their book guided reading levels a to d and this is what they say about them michael would you read that please assumption at this level when students encounter an unknown word in print they can easily use context from known words and illustrations along with language pattern cues and early word analysis skills for successful decoding so you can see that um flint cooter is referencing referencing fountains and pinell levels a to d a to d and they're saying don't expect the kids to read they use other were other ways they use contacts other strategies they use context they use illustrations pictures and early word analysis if i didn't put take this we didn't take this out of the book but early word analysis means looking at the first letter that's what early word analysis is um so we're not making this up you all this is what leveled readers are about here is an example of an early whoops an early emergent leveled reader from houghton mifflin and you can see that says this is an orange and if you don't know the word orange look at the picture this is a banana if you don't know the word banana you look at the picture and presumably they will get this is an or this is a because they're repeated on every page and remember michael told you that children are going to learn by exposure so they're going to know this is bam they don't have to know orange now i have children who tell me miss linda i don't even have to look at the words to read this book and that's what it's meant to be it's meant to be if you don't know how to read the words there are lots of other ways that you can figure out there are three other ways that you can figure out what's on the page and just out of curiosity um i'm just going to call on someone because i can see their name mary newton could you unmute please okay okay the next picture is of apples what do you think and lots of apples and one apple what do you think the page says i think it probably says this is an apple well you read it and you can't even see it yeah isn't that okay thank you very much um the weird thing is is one of the pages has an egg yeah they're all fruits except then there's an egg and we never really figure that out the last cage is an egg otherwise you could talk about fruits um okay this is an emergent love this is the next level up and michael why don't you talk about this and i'll talk about teaching okay um so the book is a mosquito buzzed and you may be hard for you to see but the mosquito is over top of the the baby bear's head there and there's the word buzz is covered up by this text box here but buzz goes across the spread of the page and that goes across every every time you open a spread like this the mosquito buzzes across the page uh um what else do you want me to tell you well i'm not sure okay and so this page remember this is the next level up so can you see that there's more text on the page and one of the things that that happens is it's still repeated because every page has this same verbage except instead of baby bear it's mama bear or papa bear on the next two pages and then something similar gets repeated and repeated now my favorite part of this is that this book is from houghton mifflin houghton mifflin does have phonics lessons and then they have guided reading lessons where they use the liberal books this book would be used when they're teaching short vowels and i just want you to imagine that maybe the day that they're using this book they taught cue you in um their phonics lesson so they talk to you and you've got um tommy turtle he's he's what we call we have sally skills and tommy turtle and you've got tommy turtle who really struggles oh my gosh she struggles with phonics it quit it's so hard for him to blend those letter sounds and then he comes over and the teacher and the teachers taught cue you over there so there's a q u word here and he's reading and he reads he can't read these words but he goes and the teacher can say oh look over here what kind of which bear is this and he goes oh baby bear so she's encouraging him to look at the picture and guess so over the and tommy's pretty bright over there it's really hard for him to decode but here oh baby bear was sleeping and then he doesn't know that words [Music] and she says snore oh it's norris nor snore so she's giving him hints to guess the words now i just want you to know think about tommy when he's on his own and he's looking it's he's looking at a book on his own do you think that he's gonna guess because it's easy or sound out words because it's hard well of course he's gonna guess because that's easy for him and he's developing a bad habit right there so even if we're teaching decoding we're negating our decoding when we go to teach these strategies of um teach these strategies of guessing and then i want you to notice there's a q u here in mosquito now i'm not even going to tell you that tommy would notice the q u but if tommy did you notice the q u what sound does q u spell in mosquito not as we've taught him over in our phonics lesson i also want you know we're we're trying to get tommy to look at patterns when we're in the short vowel uh in our in teaching patterns do you want to talk about the patterns um so okay thomas in phonics he's learning that you you know you pay attention to the letters and that there's spelling patterns and maybe uh buzz you know he's buzz would be a word he could actually uh decode possibly um but i want you to look at this and notice that there's another pattern ear and we see it actually uh three times in this text so in baby bear what is the ear spell air right okay and so we got it there and oh boy i picked up a bit when i get down here this next word has that ear so i'll read ner it's not it's what near oh and over here we've got it by itself and it's ear again so which is it is it ear or air and again if they're just not set up to encourage systematic learning of decoding uh in fact they're set up to discourage it or at least at the very least convert confusion um so we've talked about leveled readers now we're going to talk about decodable readers and did i go too far okay did it again okay decodable readers they you guys you know this if you're in this workshop but i'm going to go over it anyhow because these are the contrasts that exist between decodable and leveled readers decodable readers they only have words with phonics patterns that have been taught and some high frequency words that have been talked now it doesn't mean every word has been taught for example if the children know the short e and all the consonants single consonant sounds they can read fez they may not know what a fez is but they can read fez and if there's a picture of it then i can point to it and say but they don't look at the picture to figure out what the word is they read the word first and then if they don't know what it means we explain what it means um subject matter is secondary to the decodability of the words so you all in a leveled reader the first thing is they want an interesting subject you know if you if you've read decodable readers if you have fly leaf decodable readers they are lovely they have wonderful wonderful stories they're not all 100 decodable if you look at any other decodable books that we know about and geodes are good but they're only about 85 decodable we write them it's hard to write a good story with just short a and short i that that's very difficult um so subject matter is secondary to the decodability of the story they start with consonant vowel consonant short vowel words one syllable and move to more complex spelling patterns they the focus when you're reading in decodable readers is accurate decoding more than comprehension now people have say to me you don't care about comprehension of course i care about comprehension most children by far most children if they can read it accurately they can understand it so i will ask literal comprehension questions just a couple to make sure they're getting it but you guys i don't know about you if you've ever used these i've used decodable readers i've used power readers with children when i go into school as a model and i've had children who will say to me they're reading it to me and then the bell rings and so we have to move to the next ding ding move to the next but i want to know if the fish got the cat or the cat got the fish and i can't even remember that there's a fish in the story it's so boring but it's not boring to them because they can read it they can read it and they think it's cool that they get to read a story so it's about uh they can i don't have to talk a lot about whether the fish got the cat there's just not a lot of inference there um and the pictures if there are pictures they support the story but they're not specific to the words and i'm going to show you an example of what i mean about that so what's the premise for decodable readers remember the premise for leveled readers was that if you're exposed to reading and you see words over and over then you'll memorize those and if you don't know the word you can look at the picture and then because you'll get that word now you can memorize that word we all know the problem is they memorize the wrong word or they think they know the word and they don't know the word in decodable readers the reason that you use decodable readers is because students develop good habits at the beginning by utilizing all the letters in the word to read it they start with simple patterns and they get very good at that go ahead also the whole prim point of decoding and learning to decode is you are if you think about brain scans and what we've learned about the the brain and developing readers is you're you're setting the wiring that automat what hopefully will become an automatized wiring a neural pathway in the brain that makes the coding so easy you can do it without thinking about it because that's the goal and if you are um you have to start at the beginning work with the easy words to decode and that's where you learn how to pay attention to the letters to think about the sounds put them all together and it is effortful at first but then eventually with enough practice it becomes automatic and then you can increase the difficulty and increase the difficulty and the complexity of the spelling patterns not necessarily meaning and that's the point of the decodables and it's that that practice piece the decodables are not teaching you to read they're allowing you to practice the skill that you have to develop to that automaticity i love the way that michael i always forget to say this talks about developing those neural pathways so you don't have to think and you can think about when you've got your driver's license that when you first were practicing or you're teaching your children you're practicing i mean i can remember saying to my father i cannot look in the rear view mirror and put my foot on the brake at the same time i am sorry but that is just too much to do and oh now you want me to look at the side view you know that was all so hard at first now well my analogy is you don't have to answer this but how many of you drive and you do everything that you shouldn't be doing behind the wheel and you're still on the road and still driving so you're eating a big mac you're sweating at the kids in the back seat uh adjusting the radio i hope not texting at least but you know we all do stuff we shouldn't do behind the wheel and the reason we can do that now as opposed to when we were first learning to read is what we developed automatically you don't most of the time that you're driving you don't have to pay a lot of conscious attention you don't have to think about driving you just do it and it happens and occasionally something unusual happens and then you're suddenly like oh my gosh i really better pay attention but by that time your foot's already hit the brake you've already steered back in the lane without you even thinking about it and your your brain hasn't even caught up with what your automatic body has done probably driven this metaphor into the ground but i have one other thing to say about it and that is when i learned to drive my father took me to a parking lot and we drove in a parking lot and then we moved to go to drive on country roads that didn't so it was a protected environment so that i i could learn without having accidents and decodable books are your protected environment for those children so that they can do it right they don't they don't learn things that are going to get in the way later and i'm gonna leave that developing a habit of reading accurately should occur before fluency is expected so the first part of that sentence is what we were talking about don't worry about fluency don't worry about rate yeah the rate piece it will come for most kids once they become automatic um and then the other difference is that comprehension is taught when you're really teaching comprehension skills it's taught when the teacher reads aloud and the the teacher leads discussions that's when they're developing those nice comprehension skills when they can't [Music] read the um the more complex texts themselves we don't want to dummy down what we're teaching in comprehension because if the children can only read a very simple book we want to make sure that we're we're teaching comprehension that's equal to their language skills not just to their decoding skills so this is one of my favorite things that happened this is a a story from power readers we will uh disclose susan evers is a friend of ours but these are even if she weren't these are very good um very good decodable readers okay this is obviously to teach short you and i was in a class that was incorporating decodable readers into their guided reading and i was in the school observing and i happened to go in on friday and they had read this book they were now on friday so they had this small group instruction had read this book five days in a row this was the fifth day and then they talked about something every time so today the teacher asks some child um or maybe all of them why is gus in the tub and i don't know if you guys ever have this but do you have your thought bubble and you know don't let that come out your mouth right now but um my thought bubble was because she's obviously trying to get to have them think about the text now remember this is the fifth day i didn't see first days one two three and four and uh my thought bubble is well gus is in the tub that has mud because they all have short use that's why there's really there's nothing to talk about i mean there's certainly not five days of discussion about gus in the tub the way decodables work is not that you read them every day and talk about them you read them you read them until the children can read them 100 100 accuracy and then you move to the next one and then you move to the next one and then you move to the next one ask literal questions you can ask a literal question you know um is it do you think it's summer or winter uh and now you wouldn't ask that if you lived in southern california because the sun's out all the time in southern california but what i'm saying is ask some literal something easy to ask and then move on use your one half hour or 20 minutes or 40 minutes that you have for beginning reading instruction to teach the kids how to decode go talk about you can read wonderful stories later and ask the children all kinds of wonderful questions that are inferential that they have to talk about their experience i mean there you could they can learn about animals but this is not to learn about pigs you would not even want to say pigs like to be in mud uh did someone want to add something to that no okay uh you want to say anything else about the gut because there's nothing else to say linda there was a question okay um uh the question was can um how long should students stay in decodable text until they can when can they use something that's less controlled okay we are going to get to that that's going to stop yeah we'll get to that what i want you to know is as with every single thing in reading there is no answer there is no one answer there are guidelines and so whenever we're talking we're giving you guidelines you know michael said is for accuracy and decodable books are for accuracy but some children who read extremely slowly need to read once they can read the text accurately go back and read it so they they read with like they talk is what we say just read it like you talk might be the fifth time they've read it but we've got to make sure that they understand that reading is not a word by word reading i would say that's one out of 25 kids that i work with i mean it's not very many but um and sometimes you let them go back and read it again because they were a little stilted the first time and then that gives them exposure to these words and these patterns that's great and that is the art of teaching not the science of teaching the science of teaching is that you teach um you teach short vowels first so the art of teaching systematically explicitly the art is how long do you practice and even that can be a little bit science if you test for mastery um okay remember i told you i'd show you a decodable book with illustrations that don't give away the story the words in the story this says bet dan got big ben for me if the student looked up for a vet he would say doctor do you see how that that's not giving away the story now this says big ben can sit and maybe he they would look up but i'm telling you if they can read big band they're not going to have to look up and read sit can't sit and you guys another thing i don't think we have a slide on this but i think i'm going to just throw in one of the reasons for decodable readers versus level readers is to teach children to keep their eyes on the words when they're reading because they can read it they don't have to look up at you when kids have leveled we're reading leveled readers when they come to a book a word they don't know it's natural for them to look up and in fact if you start looking you'll see that lots of children do look up decodable readers teach them you keep your eyes on the words you don't have to look up to find a new word you can figure out that new word on your own um so now let's compare decodable and leveled readers we're gonna um we're okay on time but i do want to say don't go throw away all your leveled readers keep them they have very good purposes for early literacy just not teaching kids how to read print that is not that is something they should not be used for okay and one more question for you yeah um there was a question about how decodable should a decodable book be and i know um wiley blind blevins gives one answer a little bit less maybe but i'm curious the group is interested in how decodable you both feel they should be well i feel that at the short vowel level they should be 100 decodable um that and then as you build and i'm not talking about children who struggle learning to read i'm talking about um i'm talking about if you give dibbles or ames web i'm talking about the high the benchmark and above and then the middle of the strategic you know the yellow kids those kids are gonna they're by the time we're gonna show you this but by the time they know short vowels and a couple of other syllable patterns they're ready for non-non-decodable text or at least text that's 85 yeah not purely decodable and also just to be clear when linda says 100 decodable that does include some high frequency irregularly spelled words that they have been taught because you can't have pure decodable they're going to be some high frequency words that are not regular and you all i use decodable sometimes that don't fit the scope and sequence for what i'm for the school i'm in whatever their curriculum is if if the book which really good decodables at the cbc level at least will have all the words that are in the in the book these are the decodable words these are the if i think that they don't know one we might review all the high frequency words and then when they're reading if i haven't taught it to them then especially if it's a high frequency word like of then i might give it to them as if they haven't had that when they need it yeah if they need it the point is you don't hold them accountable i don't know accurately if they need help they get out johnny does that answer the question yes if our recommendation is 100 decodable at first you might only need that for two days with the kid but make sure they can read 100 decodable cbc before you move on to something else um okay let's talk about this because i do want you to know there are there is great value for leveled readers and i'm going to early level readers and the best value i think is for ell kids or low language kids you saw the book that we talked about that we showed you these are this is an apple this is a banana this is a grape this is whatever you guys that is those stories don't have them read them to an ell kid you can read them to them and they can learn what an orange is you can also talk about how an orange is in if you have spanish for example called a naranja and i think that's it in spanish and what i'm saying is that they are very good for developing oral language because that's what they're built for they're they're made to have interest be be useful for discussions so oral language especially for low language um native english speakers or or els english learners um and remember you can read the books to them yeah and the the nice thing is because they're leveled you you you can be sure that you know you're working at a language level that they can handle you can read the story you can read a sentence to them in one of the like say a a d or an e level read a sentence to the kids and have it put it their own words i mean they're just all kinds of things if you get creative that you can use those leveled books those are the things that are not what you would want to use decodable books for because they have stilted syntax oh my gosh often they have still been synthetic simple verbs tend to be irregular and it's really hard to write decodables without them so um and word identification strategies you guys this is a comparison decodable word decodable readers is sound out the word that's it that's your strategy where leveled readers they give you all kinds of options to what they call the big word is solve and it's it's solve the word we don't solve the word puzzles it's telling you that word is speaking to you it is telling you exactly what it is in a cbc word so um okay anybody else have a question anything else no there was one question earlier linda what about independent reading free choice reading can kids read a variety of books during free choice independence okay it's it's up i i un um yes they can but what i can tell you is that if i had children who couldn't read i would probably encourage them to get with a buddy and read a decodable reader together or but of course that's what we're saying this using only decodable readers is for decoding instruction it's for your small group instruction and your center work when you're working on that that's that's what we're talking about as far as decodable work for independent shoot we've taught kids we have a pretty good library for kids books and we teach kids who are working like third and fourth graders who are working on short vowels and they'll go over and pick up a book on dinosaurs or if it's a boy roman gladiators or something like that great they're looking at this book while telling us they don't care if they know how to read but um so does that answer the question that's an art for you as a teacher but certainly don't discourage kids from being excited about no we want them to be excited about books but we also wanted to be excited about learning how to read those books and the way we do that is teach them how to read them so and and again decodables is for practice and then the truth is once you know your letter names and letter sounds again blend uh three sounds at that point it is practice you don't have to teach them anything new particularly you know and then you get the digraphs and now you get to teach something new so independent reading is uh here i'm going to tell you what we do with our schools what we say is when there's independent reading if you have kids over behind you get those kids in a group and you work with those kids so then practice you have good it's just more practice for them and we have never had a teacher tell us that the kids mind because they want to learn to read even if they tell you they don't they do so that's that's what we advise but um just in general don't discourage kids from liking books okay so this is just a summary of um the usefulness of beginning decodable uses usefulness of the two types of books decodable readers are for practice reading phonics patterns and high frequency words they develop accuracy and literal comprehension if a child needs that most of the time they don't because decodable readers are just so easy to understand as far as language comprehension that's what leveled readers are for you can do read alouds sometimes i have uh schools who say we have to do guided reading okay you can do echo reading where they point to the word you know but don't have the kids practice incorrect uh those strategies that are look at the picture etc really good for oral discussion and i forgot to say this developing concepts of print if you have a kindergartner who doesn't hasn't read books at home teach them their spaces between words there's a period there's capital letter books start print starts from here to here they don't have to read to know that so they're really good for that uh but mostly and you can literally extend um what's in those books if you go back and think of that simple one about foods you could do a whole thing on shapes or a whole thing on colors you can there's there's meat of some sort there that you can work with from language for language all for language developing vocabulary and concepts and language orally okay and this next one is a lot of print that you have if you have the handouts to give you more detail on what we just talked about so let's talk about some general guidelines this is going to answer we're going to get to the answer to the question about when do you move away sure well we have guidelines and there are three basic guidelines here and first is you have to be able to demonstrate mastery of decoding real and nonsense cvc words so that's mastery and it needs to be moving towards automaticity really and it's in isolation thank you yes in isolation so that you're not having any context there to guide you to what the word should be you read it as it's written and nonsense words is a good way to assess that for that reason um students need to be able to decode two-syllable words uh and known three-syllable words in isolation again and then once you get to the multi-syllable you're going to have to start dealing with the schwa and these are short vowel all short vowel syllables but remember fifty percent almost fifty percent of the words in english are that short vowel spelling cdc that's cdc and i also say one reason we put this two syllable before you get to um before you can turn to independent reading and independent reading is generally considered leveled books um find a level book that doesn't have two syllable words in it they just they're just so few and far between so we want to make sure that children know how to attack a word with more than one syllable and we're not saying that they don't have to do unknown words but they should be able to attack known words maybe they haven't read it but it's in their vocabulary and then and then lastly that they can decode one and two syllable real words with our controlled vowels and the silent d pattern so this to me would be phonics pretty much what about three quarters of the way through first grade yeah in a typical scope and sequence but with good good solid mastery this is the typically developing reader which is different from the reader who needs to be taught everything um most of the time let's children know the simone and are controlled and they can read those quite easily they figured out the code and they get into what's called david shares self teaching hypothesis they now they can read and their brain is looking for patterns and they figure out the patterns on their own doesn't mean they don't need phonics instruction they still need it it just means that you don't have to use perfectly decodable books even when you're teaching it means that they will start then to learn unfamiliar words on their own because they have yeah and patterns because they have enough basis first in the automaticity of decoding understanding how it works and and being able to do it without a lot of thought and then next that they have a good basis uh in your handout there's a skills map and just real quickly i'm gonna we're not here to teach the skills but there are pre-reading skills that children need before they're ready for decoding but any decoding instruction and certainly before they're ready for uh to read decodable books and there are phonological skills and there are orthographic mainly letter sounds and a few high frequency words once they get to they know have all these down then they're ready to read and we start out and this is hard to see i know but we have um short vowel patterns and then we have some some fluency yeah you know the shortest phonics basically what we've done is we've gone down here and said okay now you're ready ready for non-decodable text once you've gotten to silent e you've got r controlled most of the time that would have open syllables before it and cvc now you're ready for non-controlled text what i would say if if you're still going to teach some vowel teams while you're teaching those vowel teams you want the kids to read some text that are heavy with the valid teams that you're teaching so but again that's doesn't have to be perfectly developed but it's helpful to have something that's reasonably difficult well with your new patterns um so what are general guidelines for bd for reading instruction all beginning decoding instruction is with decodable books language comprehension is primarily through read-alouds and other discussion once the student shows strong beginning decoding skills they're ready to read leveled readers or non-decodable texts and they start getting to where they develop language comprehension through their own reading because they can read texts that's complex enough they can read about bears and learn something about polar bears and what they eat and they eat bamboo they could learn something new where when they don't have very many when they aren't able to figure those out on their own with great accuracy they won't be able to do that okay most of you have seen scarborough's rope model and we do have permission to use this pam and um so what we've got is you can see that at first language comprehension is taught separately from decoding and what we're seeing is that when decoding is strong enough to read independently is far up the rope i mean you go ahead you want to just before you go to the next slide go ahead okay i just want to say so the green is is uh and uh hollis allowed us to color code this is the language comprehension so the everything that's in the green that's separate right there that's all going to be oral and that's where you can use decodable level i mean the leveled books because they're there to help you develop that oral language comprehension and then the red is your decoding and that's where you're going to use the decodables to practice the decoding skills and then following the guidelines those two things are going to get strong enough that you can start bringing them together and that's what we're trying to get at with that's when you can so this this non-decodable text in the middle there uh that's really pretty much where we were saying on that reading skills map down there where the red box was after uh silent e r controlled and you guys once they get to non-decodable text you still want to have them read aloud occasionally to make sure they're being accurate oh yeah um okay so you guys you've all seen the posters that say look at the picture look at the first letter these are the strategies here's what we say please burn those have get rid of those those are not those are strategies for vocabulary for developing oral language they are not strategies for learning how to decode they're distractors from learning how to decode um what do you do then if a student doesn't know a word well once he finishes the sentence go back and say you read x number of words correctly or you read correctly to hear then encourage him to sound that word out if that word is yacht you're going to give it to him you're not going to have him sounded out but if you can't sound it out teach him to ask for help and that's one of the things that we really encourage um early elementary schools to do teachers to do is when a student can't read a word instead of guessing ask them say help please michael just said they need to ask for help because that helps them recognize when they do or don't need a word need help and then i can as a teacher can go in and say sound it out if it's a word that they can sound out or if it's a word that i don't think they've learned yet i can say that word is or or help them with only a part of the word that they need help with now when a student adds a word or skips a word you can when he gets to the end of the sentence say you got all those words right if he added a word and you added one could you please read this again and you guys always have them read the whole sentence again that's how they develop accuracy as a habit they don't want to read it again but and so they'll try to be accurate so they don't have to do that um you guys oh we already talked about that it is so important to have accurate reading from the start do not let the kids guess if they read an a instead of a the you guys correct it every every change eventually will have meaning and reading is a habit the way we read the way we decode is a procedural habit so you guys work on rate work on accuracy first and then work on rate don't work on them both at the same time because we can only learn one new thing at a time um so no rate goes i'm going to real quickly show you that we have some we have on our website at readster's this is free we have some ins you can talk about it you're better at it um so we have whoops that's okay go back okay this is what it looks like it's our tracking accuracy with decodable text you'd do it for me um so there are directions and the directions will guide you in how we do this with small group okay you can and i'm not going to walk through that because we don't have time and then there's a tracking chart that's set up for you to be able to track and each student will get three tries to read a section of a decodable text and you can control how big the section is to to be appropriate but they get three tries to get it right um all right and what you're aiming for is to get it on the first try they don't get it on the third try then um the direction will tell you that you're working you're still working and we'll try it again tomorrow and you can see this student is sami sample the first the first day the first time he read pages 9 to 14 took him three times to get to 100 but then when he went to read the next section it only took him two times and the third section it only took him one time so and these are cold reads if sammy's reading nine pages nine to fourteen no one else reaches reads pages nine to fourteen all right that is in the pages 9 to 14 pages 8 to 10 pages 11 to 13 and pages 18. the instructions yeah and there's a tracking chart in the in the um packet okay so this is how you set up text you want to sure um so this is a decodable we wrote at some point and we didn't have pictures and we're fine with that but you can see we broke it into reasonable sections uh 32 to up to one had 40 words uh in it and each section would be assigned uh not ahead of time but first student to read get section one and they have three tries to read that 100 accurately they track on their chart then we go to the next reader and we keep on going like that and uh if we've run out of students then we just keep picking up until everybody's read until the whole passage is read and then that's when we can do a literal question or two or find the answer in the story is what we like to do and underline it so they can learn how to skim and um there's one other thing that i'm going to end with because it's the end of our let me just show you you can also do this in you know already made decodable just count the number on a page or break a page if it has a lot on it into two sections and just pre-number it ahead of time so everybody knows you know how many words they're trying to read correctly and then you can say you've got not out of 32 but you got 30 right let's go back fix these two words and try again and then what i want to say is that um dakota decodable texts are used at the end of a phonics lesson i had someone call me the other day and say they were going to teach phonics with decodable texts decodable texts are not for teaching they're for practicing after you have taught phonics if you um download the handout we have some recommendations for decodable texts ones from readsters these and that's it because our hour is up so thank you very we got through the essence um thank you very much for having us and i will all right [Music] amy do you want to address that question um yeah there was one quick question about what's better decodable passages versus books do you have a preference you know you show the little chunks the first thing i'm going to say is that we work almost exclusively with struggling readers and we take pictures away because when we get a struggling reader we know they're a struggling reader that's why they come to us and they've already got the habit of looking at the picture so for us we will even cover up pictures but if i were doing this from the beginning if they can have pictures and not look at them yeah i don't have a problem with it we just don't want them to to get distracted um but that does bring to mind if as long as you guys are going to the website possibly to get the packet also look for um article on eyes on the word where we're going to talk a little bit more about how to keep students looking at the words and not looking up or not looking at the pictures it's only about two pages it's not four there are four pages but it's double double-spaced it's not much but it's helpful and and we didn't get a lot of time to talk about that we mentioned it but it is so important because that is part of the accuracy is keeping your eyes down so you actually read what's there what a surprise anything else there were other questions um it's okay people are willing to hang out is it okay to send books home for children to read if they're working in decodable books decodable books home well any books is it okay you know that's an interesting one um as working with struggling readers i do not encourage children to read anything but decodable books that they've already shown me they know how to read with their parents but then i encourage their parents to read to them um and that's with the struggling readers if you have a typically developing reader who has demonstrated that they know are controlled well if they're if you can send one of them our experience is that teachers have a hard enough time knowing how to teach struggling readers uh parents we just can't expect them to do that and i would say at the you know particularly at the beginning reading when you're in the cdc stage parents aren't shouldn't be expected to to be having their students read to them at that level that's when they should still be reading to them and much better time spent let's read together and then i'm going to talk to you about what we read as long as the parents can read of course recognizing that not every parent will be able to do that but that same parent couldn't read the decodable or tell them if they read it right all right well this has been wonderful thank you so much ginny do you yeah i just want to say thank you i mean we had 300 on this call which was amazing and they're still hanging in there yet with you so this has been wonderful and if you have any questions i know you can go to your website readsters and there's a lot of information there in your email addresses as well yep and you guys please we are very happy to answer questions michael used to be the head of a con concrete construction company and i used to be an investment banker and if we were really if we didn't want to help children we would still be making money so we left those those careers both of us because we worked with adult readers and adult struggling readers from america who went to school here and we want to get rid of the need for adult literacy for english-speaking people who went to school here so that's our goal and we want to help you if we can so all right i think that's a wrap then thank you thank you it's great thank you shall we debrief or anything if you'd like to okay okay