Playberry Laser T1-2 Newsletter 2
In this edition:
Assessment: There’s tests and then there’s tests! …
The difference between assessing reading and spelling…
New Assessments on the platform…
Author: BillH
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.
Playberry Laser T1-2 Newsletter 1
In this edition:
Additive Blending in Phase 1 …
Teaching Heart Words Well …
2025 Training Dates …
Phase 0 Has Lift-Off! …
Lesson Videos ….
We Have a How-to Section
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!
Why teach spelling rules?
There’s been some conversation recently about structured literacy programs that don’t teach the most important spelling rules (generalisations) to students. This leads to the broader debate about whether spelling rules are an unnecessary distraction, and whether just teaching ‘more common’ and ‘less common’ spelling patterns is the way to go.
In this post, I discuss why we at Playberry Laser T1-2 and Playberry T3 believe spelling rules are an important part of literacy instruction, and why failing to teach them dooms too many students to ‘safe choices’ when it comes to writing.
Linda Clune Tier 2 Intervention demonstration lesson
Watch Linda Clune teaching a Playberry-Laser Tier 2 intervention Lessons
Handwriting – Why Bother with Cursive?
Anna Gillingham (the ‘G’ in ‘OG’) advocated teaching cursive from the beginning and many specialist schools for students with Dyslexia do the same. In many European countries, cursive is taught from the beginning of schooling. In Australia, just mentioning cursive to a room of teachers will draw out all sorts of strong opinions and sometimes heated debate. Regardless of a school’s position on the teaching of cursive, we advocate for a school-wide approach to teaching handwriting.
Consistency is the greatest gift schools can give students when it comes to handwriting.
Playberry Laser Teacher Tips
There’s a lot to for teachers to habituate when learning to run effective structured literacy lessons. At Playberry Laser T1-2 we’re constantly thinking about the small, easily missed pieces of practice that make huge differences to teacher effectiveness. We’re creating a growing collection of teacher tip slides to help make explicit what great teachers do implicitly.
Lifting the Bar on Behaviour in Structured Literacy – A video on establishing routines for Phase One Teachers
The Science of Learning has placed some inescapable truths in front of us all about the costs of inattention and disruption to student outcomes. We have to pay attention, otherwise the costs of not doing so will continue to be paid by our students. It’s time we talk about the elephant in the room – student behaviour and how we should be managing it.
Rosenshine’s Principle 10 : Engage students in weekly and monthly review: Students need to be involved in extensive practice in order to develop well-connected and automatic knowledge.
Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction are at the heart of how we teach in Playberry Laser. These principles have gained momentum, prompting us all to consider whether our teaching is compatible with human cognitive architecture. In this blog series I will unpack each of Rosenshine’s ten principles.
