Post #Lucky 13 Shifting the Balance
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Wrapping it all up: Resources, further reading, and reflection. Jan Burkins and Kari Yates’ book Shifting the Balance has a profound impact on the work I am doing as a literacy coach. It’s a challenging time in every school I know, and it’s difficult to provide professional learning opportunities the way I had in the past. This club was born out of a request from teachers that we read the book together and have a chance to discuss it. Try as we might, we could not come up with a way, in person or virtual, that we could create time in our schedules to come together. Lack of substitutes for rele ..read more
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Post #12 Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Chapter 6, Part 2: Reconsidering Texts for Beginning Readers, The Simple and Scientifically Sound Shift In this chapter, we learn some important changes we need to make in our classroom libraries, as well as in our instruction to needs of every individual student in our classrooms.  Many of our students have been successful with reading workshop as it has been. But many have not. Burkins and Yates provide a strong case for including more decodable texts in our instruction, and how to use different kinds of texts with kids. As you build up your decodable text collection, they suggest a lis ..read more
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Post #11 Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Chapter 6, Part 1: Reconsidering Texts for Beginning Readers, A Common Practice to Reconsider In this chapter, Burkins and Yates summarize the problem with a steady diet of predictable texts verus decodable texts in beginning stages of reading. They say, “But what can we do about the disconnect between the skills in our phonics lessons and the words students encounter in their early reading texts? And how do we align our phonics instruction to our beginning reading texts when level A texts may have words like umbrella, caterpillar, and even cereal” (p. 137). Their advice is not to throw out ev ..read more
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Post #10 Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Chapter 5, Part 2: Reinventing the Way We USe MSV (3 Cueing Systems), The Simple and Scientifically Sound Shift In the second half of Chapter 5, a number of instructional routines are suggested for making the shift to V→MS. “Prioritize print as a strategy of first resort for word solving, using meaning and structure to cross-check” (p. 122). Many of the routines in Table 5.2 on pp. 123-124 are already familiar to most of us, especially practicing patience (wait time) and touching the text as a silent coaching move. I’ve demonstrated both of these in labsites and in classroom visits for the pas ..read more
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Post #9 Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Book Club Conversation #9 Chapter 5, Part 1: Reinventing the Way We Use MSV (3 Cueing Systems), A Common Practice to Reconsider This was probably the most eye-opening chapter for me, personally. I have been steeped in MSV since the beginning of my career and it was a huge surprise to me to learn that I should prompt students to “sound it out” first and then cross-check using syntax and meaning. I had always been trained in the opposite way - to prompt for meaning first, and then cross check with visual and syntax. In this part of Chapter 5, Burkins and Yates explain an important shift we ..read more
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Post #8 Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Chapter 4, Part 2: Revisiting High-Frequency Word Instruction, The Simple and Scientifically Sound Shift In this chapter, Burkins and Yates suggest a new routine for teaching high frequency words. If you’ve been using word walls and chants to teach HFW, some of their suggestions will be familiar, some will be VERY different! Burkins and Yates say: “Create opportunities for children to “pull apart” the phonemes in high-priority words and match each one to the grapheme(s) that represent them” (p. 100). Remember, the literacy curriculum in our district has four necessary components:  Readi ..read more
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Post #7: Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Chapter 4, Part 1: Revisiting High-Frequency Word Instruction, A Common Practice to Reconsider In this chapter, Burkins and Yates summarizes the research on how children learn high frequency words.  Sight words: One of the key things they explain  is that not all sight words are high frequency words. Additionally, for skilled readers, nearly every word eventually becomes a sight word - a word that the brain recognizes automatically. HFW: Secondly, high frequency words are simply the most frequently occurring words in texts that students read and write. Many of them will become sight ..read more
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Post #6: Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Chapter 3, Part 2: Reimagining the Way We Teach Phonics, The Simple and Scientifically Sound Shift In this part of the chapter, Burkins and Yates provide several high leverage instructional routines, when combined with a scope and sequence rooted in the sound research, provide scientifically-based, structured phonics instruction.  In our district our literacy curriculum has four non-negotiable components: Reading Workshop Writing Workshop Interactive Read-Aloud Word Study (includes phonics) While there are important ways that phonics instruction is embedded in Reading and Writin ..read more
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Post #5: Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Chapter 3, Part 1: Reimagining the Way We Teach Phonics, A Common Practice to Reconsider In Chapter 3, Burkins and Yates summarize the body of research on how to effectively teach phonics.  “What really matters is a strong and research-informed scope (what you will teach) and sequence (what order you will teach it), alongside solid instructional routines (how you will teach), whether homegrown or purchased” ([NRP] 2000; Moats & Tolman 2019, in Burkins and Yates 2021).  SCIENTIFICALLY BASED SCOPE & SEQUENCE + HIGH LEVERAGE INSTRUCTIONAL ROUTINES = SCIENTIFICALLY-BASED, STRUCTU ..read more
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Post #4: Shifting the Balance Book Club
Literacy Together
by Elizabeth Moore
1y ago
Book Club Conversation #4,  Chapter 2, Part 2: Recommitting to Phonemic Awareness Instruction, The Simple and Scientifically Sound Shift In this chapter Burkins & Yates present a series of high leverage instructional practices for teaching phonemic awareness, and a progression of difficult beginning with “stepping stones” to blending words with many sounds. They provide a succinct summary of a progression of phonemic awareness difficulty (which helps determine what order to teach your lessons!) This is a sample of part of the checklist can be downloaded for free at https://thesixshif ..read more
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