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Andrew Evans's avatar

I just want to say: This is good. I don't think I've ever agreed more with you. This makes it clear that you're doing good things for your students, you know exactly what your students need, and I definitely have a few things to learn from you. And honestly, you may not want to hear it, from me or anyone, but you're more balanced (or maybe even whole language) than you know.

Thanks for sharing your expertise.

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Ashley's avatar

I had an “aha I’m over teaching phonics moment” about a month ago. Teaching my five-year-old boys how to read. We started about 9 months ago. They got bored with the book “How to Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons” pretty quickly. Added flash cards, the whiteboard, building blocks with letters, magnets and made my own funny sentences. Then they got bored again. So, I wrote my own decodables using only the sight words and phonemes they know so that they can read 100% of the book. It can be a slog to get through them but they feel accomplished at the end. And I know that the difficulty means real learning is happening. Used an AI imagine generator to make pictures, which I hide under sticky notes until they get the sentence correct. Also started moving faster and not reviewing every sound every day. “Make It Stick” has been super helpful.

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