One Day Intensive Structure Literacy Workshop - Whitestone Kahui Ako

Introduction to Structured Literacy

Liz will explain the Science of Reading, the body of knowledge from multiple academic fields including neuroscience which consistently describes how proficient reading develops, why some children have difficulty and how we can improve student outcomes through the prevention of and intervention for reading difficulties. She will unpack Structured Literacy, its crucial principles and elements that guide this teaching approach including Phonological Awareness, letter to sound knowledge, syllable types, vocabulary, morphology and sentence structure.

An integral aspect of Structured Literacy is the scope and sequence, essentially the content and the order of the teaching, encouraging mastery and leaving nothing to chance. Liz will share how a scope and sequence provides teachers with a clear pathway of what to teach starting at the sound/letter level, progressing to word, then sentence and finally reading books. She will explain when, why and how to use decodable texts for both beginning readers and those older students who continue to struggle with reading.

The teaching of spelling the English code, the most complex alphabetic code, should build seamlessly from the scope and sequence of a decodable series of books. Liz will use her resource, The Code from Y1-8, to illustrate this, how we continue to explicitly teach this complex code from sound, spelling and meaning ensuring our learners have a clear grasp of the language for both reading and writing.