Helpful articles

Pure Sounds: avoiding schwabecues

Pure sounds are crucial to forming accurate mental representations of speech sounds (phonemes). Most of us have taught from programs that are a little sloppy on phoneme pronunciation and have formed not-so-great pronunciations. This video covers some of the trickier phonemes and their pronunciations in Playberry Laser T1-2. Some schools use this video in staff meetings to get sounds pure and have a good laugh at each other! Some teachers show this to students, and some even send it home to parents.

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The downside of a quick start in structured literacy

Playberry Laser has freed teachers from having to create materials so they can get on with the job of teaching. This has a downside. When teachers are provided with materials, they miss the learning that comes with designing the instructional materials and because of this, miss important learning about ‘why’ of the ‘how’ we ask them to teach. This places a huge importance on leaders to know how the materials are to be used and to set up cycles of observation and feedback with teachers.

Leaders, where is where your schools need you to get brave!

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