Literacy – Jane Farrall Consulting

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

Writing Tools: Download or Customise!

Dec 11, 20252 Comments

Every year, I find I spend time creating custom resources for different writers I am privileged to work with. I truly believe that every writer has an appropriate writing tool – and sometimes we just need to spend time figuring out what that tool might be. It’s really important that the writing tool minimises the

Flip Keyboard: A new option for Emergent Writers

Nov 20, 202510 Comments

I am very excited to announce the launch of Flip Keyboard – a new writing option for emergent writers. Flip keyboard provides access to the alphabet in groups of letters (similar to a non-electronic flip chart), with a range of settings you can use to customise for each writer’s needs. You can access Flip Keyboard

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

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,

Developmental Writing Instruction Version 2: Online Training now available

Jan 28, 2024

I’m very excited to let you know that the online training Developmental Writing Instruction v2: Writing Assessment, Development, Teaching & Learning is now available. Version 2.0 of the course uses the Writing with All Tools Continuum as a framework to support writing assessment – and also a framework for intervention helping us to teach

Developmental Writing Instruction Version 2: Writing Assessment, Development, Teaching & Learning

Nov 18, 2023

As usual, a large part of my time this year has been spent focusing on writing – assessment and instruction. As part of this, I have been spending time updating my online writing course – and I’m delighted to let you know that on December 20th I’ll be launching Developmental Writing Instruction v2: Writing Assessment,