working with words – Jane Farrall Consulting

Word Wall Oxford 500

Jan 24, 2022

10 years ago I started Jane Farrall Consulting – and also started this blog. Over this time, I have blogged quite a bit about word walls – about setting them up and using them. They are such a valuable tool for our conventional literacy learners. In Australia, the Oxford Word List is the most

Making Word Wall words in Boardmaker

Jan 2, 2019

Yesterday I published a post with a bunch of new word wall words as Boardmaker files. Keren made a comment that she had been trying to make her own – and that reminded me that a few people (especially Emma from Bullimbal School) had been asking me to make a “how-to” video. So – here

Word up – 2019 is here and we’re going to the wall!

Jan 1, 20193 Comments

Happy New Year everyone! I hope that 2019 has lots of great times in store for you all 🙂 I’m going to take a break from my string of blog posts about writing and add to my previous blog posts about the word wall that I published in February 2017. The first blog post was

Targeting Onset Rime with Emergent Literacy Learners

Feb 10, 20178 Comments

Phonemic awareness is an important skill – it is what we use to hear sounds in speech. Without phonemic awareness, we cannot break words down and decode them to read unfamiliar words. We also find it extremely hard to re-code words to spell them. Therefore, phonemic awareness is a very important skill in learning to

Word Walls: Using the Word Wall

Feb 1, 201712 Comments

Last month I wrote about getting your word wall ready for use. Now they are ready – we need to use them. There is no point having a word wall that you don’t use! Word Walls are an important resource for conventional readers and writers. Our job, as educators, is to teach them how helpful

Word Walls: Getting the resources ready

Jan 13, 201717 Comments

In the next couple of weeks in Australia and New Zealand, our schools will finish their summer holidays, and students and teachers will return to the classrooms. This means that lots of teachers are currently getting their resources together for the new school year ahead – including me. For students who are conventional readers and

Working with Letters, Sounds and Words in our Classrooms

May 28, 20154 Comments

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

Word families and Onset Rime: early literacy instruction with learners with CCN

Mar 27, 20148 Comments

As we learn to read, word recognition plays an important part in our literacy journey. Automatic word recognition is essential for fluent reading. We need to be able to recognise words quickly to be able to read quickly. However, word recognition isn’t just taught via whole words. One of the ways we learn to automatically

Letter of the Week: Resources for Older Students

Aug 26, 20128 Comments

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