good afternoon everyone thank you for joining us today and Welcome to our early reading Foundation skills learning
session my name is Riley Davis I am a Pearson Canada sales representative I
support school districts in both BC as well as Alberta and I will be uh facilitating your
session today I did want to just once again say thank you for taking some time out of your afternoon to join us the
goal for our session today is to provide you with a solid foundation for effectively implementing explicit
phonics instruction in your classrooms a couple housekeeping items before we get started we do have a pretty packed
agenda but um the session is going to be recorded So if anyone does need to hop off at any point throughout the day
today no problems there we will be following up with that recording for everyone who registered uh once the
recording is available we do have a chat box down below so feel free to type your
name in say hello if you do have any questions throughout the session as well we have a few different Pearson people
on the line with us so we'll all be monitoring the chat there to help you out as best we can
um and with that said I will introduce the the Pearson folks that we have on the line this afternoon
um the first person I will introduce I'll actually invite her to come off mute so for everybody in British
Columbia I'm sure you are all very familiar with our BC account executive Joanie Hein Horst so if Jody if you'd
like to say hello that'd be great hi everybody and welcome this is really exciting uh having this meeting at a BC
appropriate time and so many have joined us and we're really excited so thank you thank you Riley oh you're welcome in
addition to myself and Jody we also have Kelly mcjanet on the line with us this
afternoon uh Kelly is an account executive she supports customers in Manitoba the Northwest Territories as
well as Nunavut in addition to Kelly we also have Siobhan Murphy with us this
afternoon Siobhan is our planning and implementation manager and we also have Mark crestman on the line with us this
afternoon Mark is our marketing manager handling all things literacy and we also have Susan Steele on the line with us
today Susan is our national K-12 sales manager so Susan feel free to wave and
say hello to everybody now before we jump into the session we
would like to start with a land acknowledgment um so Pearson Canada acknowledges the
history of the land on which we all gather it is a combination of treaty and traditional unseated territory and metis
Homeland we acknowledge the many Inuit metis and First Nations whose footsteps
have marked the land where each of you currently resides or are visiting we also recognize the land as an act of
reconciliation and gratitude indigenous peoples connections to the land teaches us about their inherent responsibility
to protect and respect Mother Earth with this acknowledgment we honor their relatives who have been buried here as
well as those who live and work here today Pearson Canada strives for respectful
Partnerships with all of the peoples of this country as we search for Collective healing and true reconciliation in honor
of this beautiful land all right so here is today's agenda like
I mentioned we do have a pretty action-packed session for you today so I'll just give you a very brief rundown
of all of the different speakers that we have lined up for you this afternoon our first speaker is Karen phillowicz Karen
will be addressing early reading Foundation skills uh including topics such as the research base for phonics
instruction as well as what to look for in a scope and sequence and also how to use decodable text in your classroom and
then after Karen we have Trisha Prasad and Pamela Thompson with us they are coming to us from kingwood's Thompson
sd73 for all those folks in BC and they are have been gracious enough to actually volunteer to show us how they
have implemented some phonics resources in their districts so that should be a very informative great session and then
after Trisha and Pamela we have Mark crestman who will be coming on to talk about Pearson's phonics solutions for
your classroom and then we will follow that up with a brief q a session towards
the end and we will close out our section our session today with our door prizes so we do actually have a few
different prizes available we'll be raffling off our grand prize to one lucky person live at the end of our
session and that prize is a bug club phonics complete add-on pack uh that's a
that's 131 decodable books valued at over 1200 so one lucky person will get
to walk away with that we do have some smaller prizes that we'll be announcing as well we won't be announced announcing
those live we will be following up via email we'll be offering some free copies of the the phonics companion teacher
Resource as well and with that I'm going to stop sharing my screen and while I do that I'm going
to introduce our first speaker Karen phillowick so Karen has over 25
years of educational experience as both an elementary teacher and a school administrator and a language arts
consultant she has her master of education specializing in literacy she's
also a very accomplished author some of her written works include how do I get them to write which was published in
2017 as well as free writing with purpose which was published in 2019.
Karen is also doing a lot of really great work with Pearson she was one of the authors involved with the
canadianized versions of the bug club phonics decodable reader so she was involved in
that and she's currently working with our literacy team working on bug club morphology so Karen I am going to stop
talking and I will let you take it away thank you so much for the introduction
I just wanted to thank you um for everything that you just said because
you basically took my first slide which is fantastic I love it um the only thing that I would add is as
you can tell I am absolutely a word lover um I believe that words change worlds
and that is actually uh it was the type it was what I did for my capping project for my masters it's become my website
it's become my company I really do believe in what we're doing here and and I was honored to be asked to speak to
you today so with that we are going to start with some research so you know no
one loves diving into that research um and spending our spare time digging through all those uh reports that we
might need to read but I just wanted to highlight a few things here for you today just so that we can really get a
sense of why we're heading the way that we are now I know we're talking about phonics for the most part today but when
we're talking about those early literacy skills we really need to make sure that we talk about that phonological
awareness if you have not yet encountered David Kilpatrick he's the one that you might want to
um check out in terms of his the resources he has available and as he says here it's very clear the research
is is consistent and clear that phonological awareness is going to set our students up to become good readers
and if you just an example of this if you teach older students and they're struggling to read one of
the things that you might notice is that they have difficulty rhyming as an example that shows that that they're
weak in the phonological awareness now when we're thinking about what phonological awareness is remember this
is where those skills are still oral right so we're thinking about manipulating identifying the phonemes
our kindergarten teachers are really really strong in the phonological awareness piece and we would see these
things happening in our classrooms all the time now that's not to say though that phonological awareness stops in
kindergarten it is essential as we move forward and as we talk about now
bringing print and talking about the phonics instruction now another
study here has indicated that all children regardless of their socionomic
backgrounds they benefit from That explicit and early teaching of phonics
so the correspondence between letters and speech sounds so again just reiterating the difference between the
phonological awareness and the phonics where the phonological awareness is strictly the oral piece now we're
starting to attach print when we speak about phonics and so we're going to come back to these words you're going to
notice some of these words again when we're talking later about what are effective instruction should look like
now moving from there I just wanted to share with you a quote from George Giorgio and Christy Dunn in the phonics
companion and they have said that explicitly teaching students graphing phoneme correspondences and providing
opportunities to blend and spell words and then directly applying this new learning to text is the key to word
reading success and as you may be already aware when we're going to be
talking about the phonics companion resource in a moment it is grounded in research right and that's what we really
really want to think about is those evidence-based practices so the title that I put on the slide here explicit
and contextualized that's one of the important things that we need to remember our teaching needs to be
explicit but we also have to give our students the opportunity to practice in
context another quote from David Kilpatrick just highlights the importance of
orthographic mapping now this is a term for some teachers that is still
relatively new when you're encountering um more recent research-based practices
though orthographic mapping is going to be critical and so if you think back to
those old flash cards that we used to use to support students we have acknowledged the research acknowledges
that those don't work for most students and so what does work well when we think about that orthographic mapping in
conjunction with that phonics instruction working along beside it this
is where we're going to find success when you're thinking about if it is an
unfamiliar turn to you when you're thinking about orthographic mapping think about it in this way
it's a process where we connect not only the sounds and the spelling associated
with a word but we ground it in meaning and context as well and we don't have
time to do a deep dive into orthographic mapping today but it's something that you're probably becoming more familiar
with and it will be referenced in in some of the resources that we talked
about so given that just quick little overview of some of those key points when we're
thinking about phonics instruction we recognize how an essential it absolutely
is but a couple of points when we're thinking about what it should look like when I was in school I remember phonics
instruction and it looked very different than phonics instruction of today I had
those plaid workbooks that um when I was a student and we were circling the graphemes and it was very
uh isolated and it wasn't necessarily something that we were practicing in context that's what I remember about
phonics instruction so when we're thinking about how we're going to implement the instruction as a teacher
based on the research we saw the word explicit A number of different times there so keeping that in mind we also
know that it needs to be systematic following a spoken sequence it definitely should not be just incidental
whatever happens to um find its way into our classroom on this day and so we're
going to look at a scope and sequence today we know though that phonics instruction also must occur daily the research has
Pro proven the importance of it occurring on a daily basis for our young emerging readers and writers the other
thing to keep in mind is that even though we have an explicit phonics instruction let's say at the beginning
of the day because that's often when most teachers do it but we also should be reinforcing that phonics instruction
throughout the day so there might be an opportunity in another subject area where we're going to really uh you know
make sure we're highlighting the graphemes that maybe we taught that day or the the previous day right we're
really taking those opportunities phonics instruction must be cumulative
right we really have to think about how those graphemes are working together that's what language is is all of those
graphings coming together so even though our explicit lessons are going to zero
in on one graphene we really have to make sure that we're showing our students how those how they work
together to create words and finally the last thing that I wanted to point out here is just the research
is again proving to us that that instruction must be contextualized for students and so as we go through some
examples today I think you're going to notice all of these things within the pieces which we speak about
just an important point before we go on phonics is one part of our comprehensive
literacy program it's an extremely important part but we also have to keep
in mind that it's not the only part so when we're thinking about our kindergarten our grade one our grade two
classrooms just like our other classrooms we think about all of those pillars of literacy that are essential
right and and we do not teach them in isolation from one another so just
keeping that in mind as we go now we're going to spend some time looking at these two resources today in
in a fair amount of details so you get a sense of you know how they support what the research is telling us one of the
things to keep in mind and some people were surprised when I said this at a session that I did recently but the
research that we're talking about when you hear that term science of reading for example the science of reading data
is continually being added to but it has been around for about two decades now
that there it started to come together at that point what we've noticed though is that the research hasn't always found
its way into the classroom so the the information has been there but it's it
there has been a little bit of a gap in getting it into our practice and so what
I like about these two resources that we're going to talk about is what I think you're going to see is how we're
sort of bridging that gap between the research and our practice now Within in
the phonics companion we do have a scope and sequence as we referenced earlier
now when we're teaching phonics I mean many people are using a scope and sequence already and the important thing
is is that we are following something very intentionally now I wanted to share
with you a couple of things about this scope and sequence in particular and I should say I probably neglected to say
this at the beginning but I was actually one of the reviewers of the phonics companion throughout and I also was
involved in some of the the pieces of it which I will share with you um as we go
so I'm very very familiar with this this resource now when it was developed it
was developed with 120 explicit lessons explicit graphene letter combinations
that you're going to become more familiar with but I just want to point out if you see that little gray bar in
between the four lessons every time we recommend that there's a review
portion before moving on to what they're calling the next unit
again thinking about how phonics instruction needs to be cumulative we
there's a really important Pace that we're trying to um achieve we don't want to go too
slowly because if we go too slowly students aren't able to build and there's less graphemes for them to work
with but if we go too quickly for some of our students it might be too much so we're really trying to strike that
balance when you're thinking about the phonics instruction in your classroom now the scope and sequence was developed
based on research and I'll give you a moment just to read this quote that also
is in the phonics companion
now I actually was part of this research at one point it was prior to the
pandemic I was still a language arts consultant at the time with Edmonton Catholic schools and so I was involved
in the research that was being done in that school district now unfortunately the pandemic really through uh a wrench
into that plan because we ended up not being able to finish that research just because of where we were at and and
um and you know when the pandemic hit but it was really really fascinating to
see what was being done in the classrooms and so when we think about the importance of that evidence-based
um you know the practices that we see in our classroom evidence-based research based keep in mind that there really is
a lot of research behind this Giorgio and Dan also um considered when
they were creating their scope and sequence the frequency of the letter sound corresponds correspondences in the
books that children are reading and also some teacher feedback in regards to you
know what maybe combinations do they want to teach in in conjunction with each other so the all of these things
contributed to the scope and sequence now it is recommended in by George
Giorgio and Christy Dunn that in kindergarten we're teaching approximately 10 to 15 letter sound
correspondences now if you put this in the context again of our phonological awareness kindergarten so much is
um working on those phonemes and identifying the phonemes manipulating
the phonemes and then at some point we're also going to obviously bring print into the into the picture and so
really they're talking about 10 to 15 that we're really going to focus on explicitly
from there when we're thinking about grade one remember there are 120 lessons
in the overall book and so when we're thinking about those 120 lessons they're
recommending approximately 60 would be taught in grade one now that is not
obviously a precise number because we know that our classrooms are are different depending on where we happen
to be and the makeup of our students can be different from one year to the next but generally speaking that's what we're
going to sort of strive for but you notice it's important to include those
from kindergarten as well now depending on you know whether or not kindergarten is mandated where you happen to be what
we really want to make sure is those students coming to us in grade one are getting those initial UH 60 lessons
right or those initial lessons let's just say we don't want to assume that the students are coming to us with that
necessarily when we're thinking about grade two it then follows that perhaps we're doing
the other 60. now one of the things to consider if you are a grade two teacher
is you could um utilize the screener that's within the book and I'll show you reference to
that in a moment and the screener might help you identify where to begin perhaps
you do want to start a little bit earlier than you know than the 61st lesson if you notice that students are
struggling with certain graphemes then maybe you do want to start a little bit earlier but it is a judgment based on
your situation when we're thinking about grade threes this is where we're going
to definitely use that screener to determine where our students need more support so the screen is going to help
us to identify the specifics as not only let's say like
as a as a group but we can really think about it in terms of those individual students which students still needs
support wouldn't it be wonderful if they all came to us at a certain point now with all of this phonetic knowledge you
know in their back pockets and they're all ready to go but we know that's just not a reality they don't learn it all at the same pace and so the screeners can
be very useful for helping us Target our instruction and to help us support the students who need the support now with
the phonics companion there is an online component to it and one of the things I
just did a screenshot here for you to see but this is it's actually pointing there to the screener itself to to the
the spot where you would access the screener and it is just a tool there that's for your use and you may have
encountered other screeners this one's just kind of built right into the resource here for you so a useful tool
now when we're thinking about the lessons themselves obviously the lesson design was very
intentional but I just want to show you a couple of the things that are included and as I'm doing so think back to the
research so one of the things to acknowledge is that each lesson is going to be in three distinct Parts you will
have introducing applying and consolidating the lessons are designed to take approximately 30 minutes and
what they have said is 10 minutes each ish so you again some things might take
longer some things might take a little shorter on a given day but that's sort of how you can break it break it up for
yourself you will also notice that there is a lot of repetition from lesson to lesson and that's very intentional when
we think about our emerging readers and writers you know that that is going to actually support them right that
repetition it's not a it's not a bad thing at all it is actually there for their scaffolding
we're also going to notice some multi modal opportunities so students are
definitely needing to to to see and to hear you know what we're talking about with those phonemes and graphemes but
really you're also going to notice um the opportunity to manipulate materials that is important for our
students when we're thinking about these beginning skills the last thing just to point out about
the lesson design is the connected text and you will see all of these things are
really embedded or or um grounded in the research that we were
looking at earlier and I just gave you a tiny little snippet of that research now just to walk through sort of what a
lesson looks like one of the great things about the phonics companion that that I love
um as compared to let's say some some of the other phonics programs that I've seen is that they really capitalized on
the SLP connections and I you know was a classroom teacher for a long time and I
taught primary for a long time in fact grade one was one of my favorite crates to teach but what I realized is that I I
didn't have the speech and language background that would have made me an even better teacher and so many of us in
our primary classrooms don't have that background that experience and so embedded within the phonics companion
there are a couple of features that if I was in a grade one classroom right now where I say grade one just because that's what I'm thinking about but if I
was in a primary classroom right now I would love these two features so there is a QR code linked to a video on every
single lesson that can be shared with students to support pronunciation in
addition to that there's a piece called the SLP corner and if you look at this screenshot right here you can see both
the screen sorry both the QR code and that SLP um corner is right there when we're
introducing whatever uh graphing it happens to be and when we're thinking about this speech and language
connection some of you might know the term articulatory gestures and that's how our mouth is forming the The Sounds
well like I said I was never an expert in that area and I just feel like this is such an added benefit I know that
I've had many teachers share with me that they have students who are struggling to read and it is sometimes
adding this component adding you know under having the students understand how
the sounds are formulated in this way and listening to them in this way that really really supports our students so
something that I just I can't speak highly enough about it the other part of part one introducing
the letters sound correspondence is entitled blending to read and this too
when we think about it is such an essential part of the lesson and here's where we're going to see some of the
repetition but again just that reminder it's not a bad thing at all so each
lesson is going to have the students manipulating letter cards to create what they're calling the target words so you
can see one here from what this happens to be lesson 19 and so the students are
going to be manipulating those cards and we're really going to get them into the routine of doing that and it is such a
powerful opportunity if we skip this step we're really missing something for our students
when we're thinking about part two of the lesson applying the letter sound correspondence
this is when students are going to have some fun with a variety of different
activities so we know that just learning it you know being taught it explicitly
isn't quite enough right we also need to have them apply it in different ways now
they have come up with so many um fun little activities so I'm just listing them here a few and not all I will point
out um and so what you're going to notice about these activities is that there is
some repetition which I actually like because we're not teaching the students a new activity all the time so they see
another roll and read yay they get excited because it's another role in read or sometimes they might see
something that they've never seen before so it's really nice to have that mix and I'm going to show you uh start the car
in a moment it's actually a one-timer because it's specific to the AR graphing
so it's a one time but you can see the variety that we have here now one of the
things that I want to point out is that there we have resources in our classrooms that we are probably using
already and that we can continue to be using so I I couldn't live in a primary
classroom without a white individual whiteboards for my students I just don't know how I would teach so many of the
things that I teach them especially when we're thinking about phonics instruction without those those um whiteboards for
for each student to have the also the L Conan boxes are something that you might already have some teachers have
laminated a one like you see on the screen where it has the two three four and so you can use it for multiple
situations right you know still feel free to use those and see how they um can be incorporated into what is being
suggested within the lesson themselves so I just want to mention not to forget those pieces right but I wanted to show
you a couple of the specific activities that are included here so I mentioned
roll and read now it is amazing how the addition of a a die can really engage
our students right and so some what the students are doing in this one is they
are you know you can have them working with a partner for example and they roll the die and whatever they roll they that
is the line that they read across and as they're reading across let's say I
rolled a four I'm going to be reading these across and then once I do so I
could potentially color in that first little happy face there you continue to play now the the the idea is that you
would go through each line twice presumably which might mean some more rolling sometimes you know what
it doesn't really matter the kids are so engaged that that they're going to read now one of the things that I wanted to
mention is when you're thinking about these from a teacher's perspective I know the practicality peace matters
right so when I would be using these for the first time I'm going to think ahead
so to how can I use this um from year to year right I mean first
of all let's save some trees there's no you need to print this out for every student so do we laminate it do we put
it in a plastic sleeve so it can be and you know do the students instead of coloring in this circle do they put a
little button on top there's lots of ways to do it but just thinking that through so that we can use things from
year to year one of the reasons an activity like this is so powerful and if
you're a primary teacher you know this short vowel sounds can be really tricky for students and so if you were to think
about the scope and sequence I didn't talk specifically about the order of things but obviously we're
starting we're going to start with some um single consonants and also some short
vowel sounds now if we were to look at a scope and sequence and then it started only with consonants for quite some time
we'd be in trouble because our students wouldn't actually be able to read any words technically speaking right so the
the insertion of those few short vowel sounds is really important but I know that as a primary teacher the vowel
sounds are sometimes what gives my students some difficulty right so the fact that let's say they're reading that
first line notice how they really have to attend to each of those letters now
we've taught those letters explicitly if they're on the card the graphemes have already been covered but students really
do have to pay close attention in order to get that word correctly or read that
word correctly another example that I wanted to show you is called tap map and write and so
when you look at the example that you see here again I'm going to think about it in terms of okay how can I provide my
students with this um how is it something that I could reuse you know I'm just going to think
about it in different ways but a couple of things that I want you to to recognize here let's say that in this
example and actually I'm let's not just say I'm going to tell you this is actually what it is in lesson 32 and I
can tell just by the line Master number there it was the graphene c k so if our
students are going to tap map and write watch what they're going to do when
they're tapping each sound notice that really this is actually the the phonological awareness piece first right
so I'm going to use the target word back
students are tapping for the three sounds when they've tapped the those
three sounds and have them do it more than once by the way right then do you
notice the next part here says which letter or letters make each sound well if our explicit lesson was effective our
students are going to write the letter B A and together the CK here
eventually then they're also writing the word now you could do this potentially
on your little whiteboards like students don't necessarily have to have this page in front of them but sometimes that
visual can be nice as well so just be flexible in what you're thinking about what works for you but this is really
really in a there's it seems simple but there's a lot actually that's going on here so we're starting with the
phonological awareness piece they're they're identifying those sounds um they're segmenting right and then
we're also then making sure that they are associating the new graphene with the k sound and then they're writing the
entire word now on the lessons not only is there a Target word but there is also a
challenge or not only are there Target words but there are also challenge words now in this case quack was a challenge
word so we would have the students do the same thing tap
right and write the letters now just know that in this case the qu has
already been taught as a graphene as well okay let's move on to another oh I
wanted to mention okay this is me throwing this in I always think about opportunities for oral language so when
I'm doing something like this I might have students after they have had done
the tap map and write maybe they turned to the person beside them and you use the word in a sentence right we're just
trying to really bring that meaning and context piece to whatever it is we're doing so just a little addition that I
wanted to mention there a couple of other activities that are in the applying session section that I just
wanted to to show you these are a couple of the line Master sometimes there are game boards like this again the reason I
wanted to point these out students love these you can see how it's going to be so engaging for them right doesn't take
a lot of time it might take some prep the first time through but after that it's set up and you've got it right and
so finding that that way to organize it for yourself is essential but just so that you can see some of the variety
that's that's within the applying section all right now the third part is when
we're consolidating our students learning now this is where we have students reading words in context so
most of the phonics companion lessons suggest an appropriate bug club phonics decodable book
um that was actually my job my job was attaching a bug club book to the
particular lesson and we'll talk about that in a moment there are a few lessons
that do not have a bug club connection so instead we've written a decodable
passage that is shown within the lesson itself so it's still going to there's still going to be text for the students
to read in context regardless of which it is now when you're thinking about this text what you want to do is find
engaging ways to highlight the graphing as you're reading so perhaps you're reading it through once and remember these are very very short they're not
long but you know you might read it a couple of times I've had I've seen teachers do it where as you come upon on
the focus graphene students do a quick stand up sit down as you go just
something to help them start identifying right and there's lots of different things that you could do finger on the
nose whatever it is when we're thinking about those decodable books a couple of things that
I want to just highlight here for you um really when we're thinking about what they are they simply mean that the words
within them are decodable based on the alphabetic and phonetic codes the students have already learned now these
they need to quotable um book series is also created within a scope and sequence
so the intention is is that you know the students are learning them gradually and
we're it's cumulative right so there's not going to be a graphene in a book
that they haven't learned yet okay now when we're thinking about the scope and
sequence for bug club and the scope and sequence for the phonics companion just know that they're not identical and that
is understandable because we had um they're created they were created
separately from each other so the reason that we sometimes wrote those decodable passages is if there wasn't something
that I felt was a strong enough match I didn't want to include it or and that the reason the these two particular
scope and sequences tend to be different is when it comes to the long vowel sounds now I'm not going to stress if
there are a couple of graphemes that they haven't learned yet really we know that our students when they're you know
reading these decodables what's going to happen is that they're actually going to build that confidence so a few graphemes
that are different than what you've taught are not going to be um a huge deal especially as we go
throughout but the nice thing about these is that we know they're decodable words right so that's an important part
now this is that application of the student's phonic knowledge this is when it comes into play So if you think back
to those leveled books in particular from a to d
too often students were relying on the pictures because they didn't yet know
the graphings and so they would look to the picture and then they would be able to say the word but that wasn't actually
reading right so the thing about the decodables is that they're actually reading when were
um using the decodables we're actually strengthening their orthographic memory and we're improving their fluency all of
this leads to an increase in confidence now a couple of things that I wanted a
couple of exciting things that I wanted to share with you about the bug club phonics they were mentioned at the
beginning and there's 131 of them in the Canadian Edition and this product was
initially created in the UK and so what we did is we went through every bug club
decodable book there were some that could be used absolutely as is with no
problems whatever place we happen to be using them there were others that didn't
really fit our Canadian context for a number of reasons so one reason would be let's say spellings so for example any
time that we had mum we changed it to m-o-m another example that I give all
the time is the word din they use they used in the UK Edition the
word din a lot um it first of all it's a much more common word there than it is here it
also has three very simple graphemes and so they use the word a lot we took it out and we often were modifying the text
in in many different ways some of the books were also modified in terms of pictures or just context right so there
was a whole number of them I don't remember the exact number Mike Mark might remember specifically but I think
it was 40 or 50 of them that we actually modified and then in addition to that
what we actually did is had um eight new books um completely Canadian content so when
we're thinking about um you know there were books about Liverpool for example and so we took
anything like that out and then they had I actually wrote the ones that are in the middle here and then there was one
here um the indigenous art one was also added so those are the newest ones and
for example and I knocked it on the floor so I can't even hold it up for you but in different homes
um you know for example we have a picture of the floating homes and text related to the floating homes and of
course you can see Jelly Bean row there on the other Costa so we have a lot we try to do as much Canadian content as
was applicable in in these books so I I found that very exciting now when we are thinking about decodables and how to use
them we really want to think about how we're going to embed them into our explicit teaching first of all right so
that interactive read aloud the shared reading highlight that Focus graphene and that's where you're connecting it to
your lesson and then what I like to do is actually assign the students the same
book if a student needs that support have them use the same book or another
decodable text which is at the same um stage right so that many of the same
graphings would be used and that could be for independent practice now you may or may not be familiar with um the with
spark reading but the decodables are all embedded within spark reading which is the digital library and it's fantastic
for projecting them so that when you're doing your explicit lesson for example right you can
um project them onto your interactive whiteboard so just wanted to mention I'm big on the gradual release of
responsibility when I'm thinking about my lessons within the classroom and this is a great way to work through that
gradual release eventually leading to that independent practice by our students
now just to finish off here we're almost finished my portion thinking about our
decodable books the only books my students should be reading and the answer is certainly not so even at those
stages we still want our students to be surrounded by quality literature and
really like diverse texts in their classroom so decodable books serve a very explicit purpose it's that practice
of their phonetic knowledge we're going to do that on a daily basis but that
doesn't mean that's all they're reading at that time right the decodable books are also intended for a very very
distinct period of time they're really not going to exist much outside of our kindergarten to grade two classes
typically right and unless the students need it so they're really
um you know targeting specific things there for our students but we want them to be reading other things so if I'm
doing an independent reading um you know maybe I have independent reading scheduled daily into my classroom that's
not necessarily when I'm using the decodable books right I can have our students read other things at that time
and will they be able to read all of those words on the page no but are they engaged in great literature you bet and
is that a bad thing not at all and in fact they're going to start identifying the graphings and be excited about the
graphiums that they do recognize and that will support them right so even if they have access to some of those those
words and they're just excited by the books they're reading that's a positive so with that I just wanted to share my
gratitude with you this absolutely is my literacy is my is my passion and I
appreciate what you do every day by giving your students the gift of literacy and you're here on your own
time and after at probably a long tiring date and so I just want to thank you for
all you too
perfect thank you very much Karen that was that was an absolutely wonderful walk through um I will now invite Jody
to come off mute if she's if she's free hi uh yes I am and I see that I don't
have my camera on so well we'll go without the camera um up next I want to introduce uh Trisha
Prasad and Pamela Thompson they are both from sd73 in BC
um Kamloops Thompson Trish is the literacy coordinator and Pamela is the literacy resource teacher and they have
a project idea they want to share with you so I'm turning it over to Pamela and Trisha
hey thanks so much Jody
okay can you see the the slide deck excellent okay so um thank you so much for
inviting us uh today we are very excited about this new phonics resource to
provide Uh current Canadian and research informed resource option our district just recently uh purchased the phonics
companion and Associated bug club phonics titles for every Elementary School
so we're going to walk you through how we are in the process of organizing these resources so they can be shared
early in September with classroom teachers so these have not been shared
or implemented yet
we think it's important that phonics lessons are linked to meaningful and engaging connected texts just as Karen
shared earlier so our goal is to pair the phonics companion resources including the digital documents on the
website with 78 bug club phonics books so that a teacher could literally have
everything at their fingertips Lesson by lesson time is precious as you know
knowing that we want to replicate this for 36 elementary schools and make the resources easily accessible for teachers
we decided to house the overview lesson Blackline Masters books and assessment
documents in four four inch binders per set
we organize the lesson materials by grade the grade one set of two binders includes the first 60 lessons and the
grade two set includes the next 60 lessons we know that teachers in either grade May dip into the other resource
collection depending on the needs of their students year to year
we printed and placed lesson materials within clear sheet protectors one
phonics companion lesson guide to part of me is drilled and it fits within the second binder for each grade
we believe this binder organization model would suit newer teachers as well as experienced ones looking for a clear
manageable step-by-step phonics resource you can see our various materials listed
here the Pearson resources including two
copies of the phonics companion and one set of bug club phonics phases add-on
packs two three and five totaled about 1 200 before shipping and GST
so other materials would have cost about a hundred dollars per set
so there are also uh printing costs and labor but you can get a sense of uh
really we think how affordable it is for such a comprehensive resource
especially one that includes engaging decodable text
so this is that our content contents list at the beginning of each set and
Pamela now is going to highlight a few details from this
thank you very much and thanks for having us here Pearson so we printed all accompanying digital
documents from the phonics companion website and copied them onto Ivory paper so these will be print Masters to be
photocopied by the teacher summary documents such as the overview scope and sequence differentiation
strategies and assessment tools are located at the front of each of the four binders the black line Masters for each
lesson are placed into the corresponding lesson sleeve along with the decodable book
we included the informal assessment record every 12 lessons as a reminder to teachers to complete this important step
one teacher in our district also recommended that we insert materials for the unit review lessons after every four
lessons as Karen was referencing earlier so we are doing this as well with this organizational approach
teachers can easily access what they need Lesson by lesson
we sorted and then inserted these very colorful and sturdy bug Club decodable books into the correct lesson sleeves
teachers who have previewed these resources for us absolutely love these picture books I myself remember when I
first started previewing them before we even decided to purchase that I would just start giggling during some of the
stories they really are engaging they're also inclusive we do like the addition
of the Canadian books written by Karen for example that Calgary time to shine
title sometimes as Karen said a decodable book
is used in more than one lesson in these instances we inserted colorful cardstock as a placeholder indicating where the
book is located additionally some lessons do not have a bug club decodable book linked to it for these lessons we
typed up the sample decodable text and attached it to the cardstock
finally we wanted to help our busy teachers keep these resources organized we created labels for each plastic
sleeve decodable book and cardstock insert we are happy to share these labels in our table of contents list
with interested schools or districts and Pearson does have that digital file to
share with you we're really excited to get this comprehensive phonics resource into
schools this following September we will be including some training for teachers as well experient teachers who reviewed
the lessons and books for us were very positive about the layout of the lessons varied applying strategies that Karen
showed us today that build that orthographic mapping and the very highly engaging bug Club books so that's how we
are putting this resource together thank you