How to plan a structured literacy lesson
The Literacy Architects
We break down complex literacy routines into step-by-step plans and deliver PD to support you along the way.
Can we tell you our biggest pet peeve? Professional development that leaves teachers feeling like this:
Something that sets our Literacy Masterminds PD series apart from other science of reading trainings is that we break down high-impact literacy routines into bite-sized steps to try each week, which leads you to full implementation of a routine. This prevents the headache of having to figure out how to implement research-based practices on your own without any support.
In our Structured Literacy for All PD, we break down the implementation of a fully structured literacy lesson that’s aligned with student data. Today, we're taking a look at how to design a structured literacy lesson that provides students with the explicit and systematic instruction they need to decode and read single words, phrases, and connected text with increased fluency.
Over on Instagram, our Friday Lesson Labs are workshopping key literacy skills submitted by our followers. Let’s take a look at lesson planning for a skill shared by Amanda Y. – digraph SH.
We’ll start off our structured literacy lesson by priming the skill with a phonemic awareness warm-up. This three-minute activity will prepare students to work with the SH digraph. Say it/Tap it/Blend it is a TLA favorite because it engages students in both segmenting (tap it) and blending (blend it) phonemes.
After priming the skill through phonemic awareness, we can turn our attention to sound-spelling correspondences. If this is the first time we’re teaching /sh/ spelled SH to our students, we will focus primarily on introducing this new concept. Introducing a sound-spelling correspondence includes explicitly connecting the phoneme to the grapheme, connecting the correspondence to a keyword picture, explaining where the grapheme occurs in words, and modeling with several example words.
If students have already been introduced to /sh/ spelled SH, we would instead complete auditory and visual drills to quickly reinforce SH and other spelling patterns our students will encounter in the rest of the lesson or otherwise need to practice.
Then our lesson will focus on decoding and encoding. For decoding, we can use a blending drill to guide students through the decoding process with several words that match the target pattern. For encoding, we can guide students in writing word chains by changing one phoneme at a time to create new words. In the word chain listed below, you’ll notice that SH is a consistent pattern in each word and that we actually have students create a nonsense word: fish → flish. This nonsense word is in service of moving our students to the next word on the list, flash, but it may also be a good way to ensure students are reading what they write to ensure accuracy and meaning. Our literacy lessons should keep students on their toes!
We’ll close the decoding and encoding section of our lesson by dictating a sentence to students that includes current and previously taught features. This specific sentence is pulled directly from the connected text we’ll have students read!
Before reading our connected text, we’ll spend some time focusing on irregular words that will appear within the text. Instead of teaching these words to students through memorization, we’ll use a sound-spelling approach that highlights both the regular and irregular patterns within these words.
Finally, we’ll pull together all the skills we’ve practiced throughout this lesson and apply them within the context of a connected text. Shep the Sheep is a decodable text from Success For All, and includes all of the SH words used throughout this lesson! Because students have already encountered many of the words within this text through our instruction, they will feel confident putting their literacy skills into practice.
There you have it! Simple lesson planning that provides the repetition students need to become proficient readers. You can access the lesson planning template we used for this lesson here as a free download!
Looking for more support in lesson planning? Join us on Instagram for our free Friday Lesson Labs or take the leap and meet with The Literacy Architects team on Wednesday, September 25 to take your literacy lesson planning and implementation to the next level!
What We’re Working On
We’re coming to Memphis!
We can hardly wait to attend the fourth annual Memphis Literacy Conference! This conference weekend is designed to empower Mid-South educators and literacy leaders with tools to promote meaningful literacy experiences for all students.
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?? September 20 and 21
?? Memphis, Tennessee
We can't wait to share these engaging conference sessions with participants:
? Background Knowledge and Vocabulary: They Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
? Finding and Addressing Gaps in Phonemic Awareness
Stay tuned for a conference recap next week!
?? Attention university professors!
? ?
We have an exclusive opportunity that's perfect if you want more ideas for your course syllabus to align it with the science of reading.
Join us this October and November for a six-week community of practice with other reading professors to learn more about teaching educator prep candidates about evidence-based literacy instruction.
Here’s what past participants had to say about this unique opportunity:
“I liked hearing from the other instructors what content they were adding to their courses and their justification for doing so. It is giving me a lot of great ideas for my own course.”
“There are so many valuable things that I will use. My class will be much more hands-on with students practicing the instructional techniques instead of me always doing the modeling.”
“This course helped me to wrap my head around strategies to help undergraduate students understand the big picture.”
Fall Community of Practice Details:
Mondays, 2 pm–3 pm EST
October 21–November 25
on Zoom
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