Working with Letters, Sounds and Words in our Classrooms

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Working with letters, sounds and words are important components of literacy instruction in our classrooms. Emergent students need explicit and incidental instruction around the alphabet and sounds, to improve their alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness.  Conventional students need to learn how words work. Below is a checklist I use with teachers in working through the

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ISAAC 2014 Handouts

The ISAAC 2014 Conference in Lisbon was fabulous! Big congratulations to the Conference Co-Chairs, Luis Azevedo, Margarida Nunes da Ponte, Pedro Encarnação and Isabel Amaral. Also a big thanks and congratulations to ISAAC, the organisers and everyone involved, including the amazing volunteers who were such good hosts. For those of you who attended my sessions

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Too late to learn to read & write? No!

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Last week I had a wonderful experience.  I’ve been smiling ever since.  Then yesterday I read a blog post by David Koppenhaver and decided that I needed to write about my experience. One of my favourite quotes is from Dr David Yoder. “No student is too anything to be able to read and write.” I

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Literacy and AAC Presentations from AGOSCI 2013

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Yesterday I was very lucky to present three papers around the topic of literacy instruction for students with complex communication needs (CCN) at the 2013 AGOSCI Conference. The first presentation was with the awesome Dr Sally Clendon.  Sally and I both do similar consulting roles – although Sally is based in Auckland, New Zealand. We

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Letter of the Week: Resources for Older Students

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This year, I’m working with quite a few teachers who have older students in their class who need to improve their recognition of the letters of the alphabet.  They need to be able to instantly and quickly identify letters so that they can move further along their journey of becoming readers and writers. This means

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