Literacy – Jane Farrall Consulting

Writing Mini-Lessons for Conventional Writers: Groups G & H

Aug 16, 2026

Once a writer can write one or more simple sentences, then they need to learn to write more with coherence and cohesion, including writing expanded (longer) sentences. These are the skills we are working to teach students in Groups G & H on the Writing with All Tools Continuum. When teaching students to write more,

Writing Mini-Lessons for Conventional Writers: Groups D, E and F

Jul 26, 20262 Comments

I have blogged a lot about emergent writers and helping students to develop their writing skills. My two favourite posts about emergent writing are Emergent Writing: Focus on Function and Emergent Writing: Moving onto Form. Additionally, I have developed (with lots of help) the Writing with All Tools Continuum, a 35-point ordinal scale consisting of qualitative writing levels from

Word Families for Phonemic Awareness

Jul 20, 20261 Comment

I have blogged in the past about using word families to help emergent readers and writers to develop their phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is one of the important strands in literacy that emergent literacy learners need to start developing (Scarborough, 2001). To support people to do this, I have developed a bunch of resources to print and use

The next Literacy Intensive

Nov 28, 20254 Comments

This is a really brief posting to let people know what is happening with the literacy intensive course. If you’ve already emailed about the course, then we should have responded. If we have missed responding to you then I apologise. Unfortunately, I have some personal issues which need to take priority next year – and

Phonics Implementation with People Who Need AAC: What Does the Evidence Base Say?

Apr 22, 20251 Comment

Today I had the pleasure of presenting a webinar with the awesome Nick Drover. We talked through some of what the evidence base says (and doesn’t say) about implementing phonics with people who need AAC. As promised, we recorded this session. The handout that goes with the video is below – and then the video

#AGOSCI2025 Day 3: Developing Print Concepts

Mar 15, 20252 Comments

Today was the third and final day of #AGOSCI2025. It was an outstanding conference with a very high standard of presentations – and, consequently, lots and lots of awesome information. Today’s highlight for me was Erin Sheldon and David Niemeijer‘s presentation on Aided Language Modelling. Entitled “Are we approaching AAC modelling all wrong? Lessons from

2025 Literacy Intensive

Nov 18, 20245 Comments

We’re excited to announce the details of the 2025 Literacy Intensive Course. The course will be held in July next year, at Glenroy Specialist School, in Melbourne. The course is a 5 day deep dive into comprehensive literacy instruction for all students, with a focus on students with significant disabilities. The course includes units on:

The Importance of Keyboarding

Sep 15, 20241 Comment

A few weeks ago I was talking with a teacher – and she told me that she had a student whose parents didn’t want them to use a keyboard, which puzzled me. Keyboarding is a very important skill for all of us to develop. It is how we do a large part of our writing

Goodbye Tar Heel Reader….. and hello Monarch Reader

Sep 4, 202412 Comments

Today was a day with a sad ending – for me and many others. It also has a new beginning – but I will get to that later on…. The sad ending that happened today is that Tar Heel Reader, an incredible resource for many of us who work with beginning readers of all ages,

Using the Simple View of Reading for Guiding Comprehensive Literacy Instruction with Literacy Learners with Significant Disabilities

Sep 1, 2024

This is a long blog post – if you would rather read it offline or have a copy of it, you can download it as a PDF below. Literacy and Individuals with Significant Disabilities Evidence is clear that children with intellectual and developmental disability can gain meaningful literacy skills with explicit instruction (Allor et al.,