Welcome to Making Words Make Sense!

So glad you're reading this. Here's why I wrote it.

Last year I published a (nonprofit) instructional guide to reading, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense. This book was a synthesis of several decades of teaching every grade level K-12, starting with advanced placement English to seniors and culminating in beginning reading instruction to kindergartners—Plato to play-doh. It reflects my experiences in the classroom coupled with the reading research I've discovered along the way.

I drew upon my English teaching credential, my master's in writing instruction, and, most important of all, my reading specialist credential to make sense of reading instruction. Since its publication, literacy consultant Faith Borkowsky, co-host of The Literacy View podcast, and author of Failing Students or Failing Schools? as well as several other books (along with writing the foreword to mine), has kindly posted my blogs on the High Five Literacy website. These pieces relate to the following chapters:

• Chapters one and two, Making Sense of Words We Hear and Making Sense of Words We Say: How Speech to Print Speaks to Me

• Chapter three, Making Sense of Words We See: Bursting with Knowledge: Are We Overteaching Phonics?

• Chapter five, Making Sense of Words We Remember: The Vanishing Act in The Balancing Act: Reading Instruction That Ignores Orthographic Mapping and Cognitive Load Theory Is a Setback for Students and Goldilocks and the Three Cues, Or–Will the Seven Blind Mice Ever Agree on the Parts of the Elephant?

Since most of these blogs are quite long, I will be dividing them into sections and posting them in the weeks to come. However, before sharing these, I will draw upon chapters four and six, Making Sense of Words We Understand and Making Sense of Words We Analyze, to post a piece about the current debate related to knowledge-building vs. strategy instruction.

I look forward to sharing these blogs with you and, especially, to a vigorous discussion in the comments section, since a few in this field have been known to occasionally be wrong on the internet.

Comic by Randall Munroe, xkcd.com, used under CC BY-NC 2.5

Speaking of being wrong—and to end on a more serious note—I should share with you that I’ve been heavily influenced by the words of psychologist Steve Dykstra in his webinar, An Adaptive, Scientific Approach to Science, where he states:

We are not required to be right; we are required to have ‘right’ reasons that we can explain to other professionals . . . Know where the science ends and your best judgment begins.

My goal is to explain what I consider the right reasons for doing what I do, drawing upon my understanding of reading science and my best judgment from decades of teaching.

I look forward to discovering what reasons you have for the choices you make.

Always striving to make sense–please let me know when I fail.

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