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Understanding Your School's Reading Curriculum
202 Plays8 hours ago
Episode 87: In this episode, Beth answers one of the most common questions she gets from parents: What reading curriculum should I be looking for and how to I know what my school uses? She breaks down why reading is not a natural process, what phonological awareness really means, and what to look for in a strong reading curriuclum program (plus red flags that a curriculum may be doing more harm than good.)
- Why curriculum matters and the different types of curriculum schools can use
- What to do if your child's curriculum isn't working
- What phonological awareness is and why it predicts reading success
- How to evaluate your child's school reading curriculum
- What parents of struggling readers and kids with dyslexia need to know
- How fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary all fit together
Topics
science of reading · phonological awareness · structured literacy · reading curriculum · phonics instruction · dyslexia · early literacy · reading fluency · parent questions about reading
Links Mentioned
Play on Words Episode 52: 3 Cuing and Reading Struggles
About the Host
Beth Gaskill (Miss Beth) is a reading specialist, early childhood educator, and founder of Big City Readers. She helps parents support their children's literacy development through research-backed, science of reading strategies.
Follow Miss Beth on Instagram @BigCityReaders
Browse Big City Readers resources at BigCityReaders.com
Recommended
Transcript
Importance of Struggle in Learning
00:00:00
Speaker
I always tell people actually that there's a benefit to struggling because you actually get to teach your child how to problem solve. And when kids don't struggle, they don't have the skills on how to face problems, whether it's in reading or any subject. So a struggle is good. We want there to be a productive struggle.
Introduction to Reading Curriculum
00:00:21
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Plan Words podcast from Big City Readers. It's Ms. Beth and today we are talking about one of the most common questions parents ask me. What reading curriculum should I be looking for? How do I know what my school uses?
00:00:37
Speaker
And should I be worried? And you know what?
Impact of Curriculum on Reading Skills
00:00:40
Speaker
This question actually does matter more than a lot of people realize because the curriculum that a school chooses can dramatically shape how children learn how to read.
00:00:51
Speaker
And if you're here, you know that. You have not just stumbled upon this reading crisis that we are facing in the United States and globally. I recently was on Al Jazeera News talking about this because it is affecting kids' lives.
00:01:07
Speaker
all over the world, not just in the United States.
Role of Teachers and Parents in Reading
00:01:11
Speaker
So in this episode, we're going to talk about why curriculum matters, the different types of curriculum and that schools can use, what parents should look for, and what to do if your child's curriculum isn't working.
00:01:23
Speaker
So some really important things to note here. One, Reading is not a natural process. A lot of people think because our brain is typically wired—typically, you know, there's of course certain circumstances—but typically the brain is wired to learn how to crawl and walk and talk. We don't have to teach a baby how to do those things. We can help them practice, but they're naturally going to do that. So a lot of people think that reading is a natural process too. It's just another step.
00:01:55
Speaker
But it's not. Reading has to be explicitly taught. Curriculum shapes how teachers teach reading, but teachers and parents are ultimately the people or the reason that your child is reading. Now, of course, there's a small percentage of kids, less than 10%, that their brain does just automatically pick up reading.
Balancing Curriculum and Teaching Quality
00:02:18
Speaker
But that doesn't come without its struggles. I see so many kids that learn to read when they're two or three or four, and then they're in seventh grade and they cannot spell. Their handwriting, their spelling looks like they are four years old.
00:02:30
Speaker
I always tell people, actually, that there's a benefit to struggling because you actually get to teach your child how to problem solve. And when kids don't struggle, they don't have the skills on how to face problems, whether it's in reading or any subject. So a struggle is good. We want there to be a productive struggle.
00:02:50
Speaker
So curriculum is one thing, but curriculum is something that sits in a box. So the person, the training, the skills matter a lot as well. But that doesn't mean that we don't need a good curriculum as well. They just, they go hand in hand.
Components of Reading Curriculum
00:03:05
Speaker
So a reading curriculum determines how phonics is taught. whether phonemic awareness and phonological awareness is included, how students practice reading, how they're tested on reading, whether guessing strategies are encouraged. And I know I'm not going to talk about this in this episode because we have so many episodes on 3-queuing and guessing strategies. We will link those in the show notes if you want to go back and listen to those, but how they're banned in dozens of states in the United States and working to ban them all across the United States because they're so harmful.
Pitfalls of Guessing Strategies
00:03:38
Speaker
So again, these are some things that we look at when we're thinking about curriculum. So imagine, let's say you're trying to learn how to play an instrument, but your teacher never shows you the notes on the sheet music and just tells you to listen and guess.
00:03:55
Speaker
That is one way to start to learn how to play music. But we eventually want to know how to match the music. So let's say you become an excellent musician and someone hands you a piece of sheet music and you don't know how to read it.
00:04:11
Speaker
then you're in a pickle. So similarly, that's what happens with some reading programs. A lot of emphasis is on storytelling or guessing, and it gets kids by for a little while.
00:04:25
Speaker
Here's the trick. It's a little while. And so we don't notice that that curriculum was so harmful and such a problem because it might take one or two or three years to see the child struggling. And then it is so much harder to correct. So we want to make sure that we are picking the curriculum right from the very beginning.
Balanced Literacy vs Structured Literacy
00:04:45
Speaker
So here's where curriculum approaches start to differ. There's two big approaches in reading instruction. They're called balanced literacy and structured literacy. Now, when i was a new teacher, i thought that balanced literacy meant like it was a balance. It was a balance of phonics and sight words and cueing and other strategies. It is not. it's It's misleading. So balanced literacy is a type of curriculum that is aligned with cueing-based programs. So as a quick refresher, cueing-based programs are banned in
00:05:23
Speaker
16 states in the United States, because they're so harmful. Cueing-based programs often include strategies like look at the picture, guess a word that would make sense, skip the word and come back to it. If you get to the end of the sentence and you figure out, oh, it's probably that word.
00:05:38
Speaker
Those are cueing strategies. These are fine as test-taking strategies. These are not reading strategies. So it's fine if you're using those in other ways, like to figure out what vocabulary word is or to build inferences.
00:05:52
Speaker
Those are also strategies that we need to develop as
Criticism of Balanced Literacy Programs
00:05:57
Speaker
readers. But when we're talking about explicitly learning how to read in those specific years of kindergarten, first, and second grade, we really want to avoid cuing strategies.
00:06:09
Speaker
These approaches teach kids to guess words instead of decode them. Now, so many people always say, well, no one just sits there and decodes words. They don't go b-ig-big.
00:06:21
Speaker
Of course, but at one point you did. and so what we're doing in the brain is we're mapping those words, we're thinking about those words, we're learning how to decode them, and then we rapidly learn how to just read them as a whole word. We don't sit there and decode forever.
00:06:38
Speaker
So many well-known programs historically use this approach, this balanced literacy or cuing-based approach. But with this approach, children don't develop strong decoding or orthographic mapping skills. So if you've been here for a while, you know you've heard me talk about orthographic mapping. It's a process in the brain. We can strengthen with a lot of tools.
00:07:00
Speaker
We have them all. So many resources and so many strategies on bigcityreaders.com. Go look for those or send me a message if you need help finding some of those. But these balanced literacy programs are harmful.
Issues with Leveled Reading
00:07:14
Speaker
Lucy Calkins' Units of Study is one of them that was balanced literacy. And listen, I was a victim of this as well. I used the Lucy Calkins' Units of Study. And there were parts of it that I think aren't terrible, but overall, this is rooted in balanced literacy.
00:07:31
Speaker
It was built around a reading workshop model that which was mini lesson, independent reading, and conferring. And there was a strong emphasis on student choice, which is great in a lot of ways. I really believe in student choice in some areas, but in literacy, it's really clear. The research is really clear. We need specific, systematic instruction.
00:07:52
Speaker
So Lucy Calkins is something we don't want. It does rely on cueing and pictures to figure out words And a lot of people would consider this a hallmark balanced literacy curriculum.
00:08:05
Speaker
Another one, Fontes and Pinnell. You've heard me talk about this before. This was created by Irene Fontes and Gesu Pinnell, and it includes guided reading. So often guided reading levels. So often like those levels A to z is the assessments. And so you'll be like, oh, your child's at level C. Here are level C books for them.
00:08:24
Speaker
Ugh, do not get me started. I know, again, I've already talked about leveling and how dangerous and harmful and not great it is for kids, and it's not even useful in reading development. So I won't bore you with that in this episode, but leveled books, leveled reading, this is not what we want to do.
00:08:39
Speaker
And fontes and pennella is very
Flaws in Reading Workshop Models
00:08:41
Speaker
widely used. i I talked about it like it was very common on Instagram, and I got about 100 DMs saying, like, what does this even mean? So either you've heard of it in your school, and in that case, I am sorry, that is not what you want to see. at one point, I think the New York Times estimated that it's used in 40% of classrooms in the United States.
00:09:00
Speaker
So that is way too many for something that is not following the science of reading research that we want to see. So again, this is rooted in balanced literacy, emphasis on leveled text and queuing, and that's not what we want.
00:09:15
Speaker
um Other ones are oh, the reading workshop model. This is not a single product. It's more of a philosophy, but it's often paired with units of study or fontes and panel.
00:09:28
Speaker
And benchmark advance. I haven't seen this as much, which is good, but some districts use it in a balanced literacy way. Again, it focuses on leveled readers and strategy-based instruction and not systematic instruction.
Importance of Systematic Phonics Instruction
00:09:43
Speaker
But some districts have shifted to align it more with the science of reading. So again, there's a bit of nuance. So most balanced literacy programs include guided reading with leveled books.
00:09:54
Speaker
So these the things you don't want to see. Strategy instruction, like can you predict, infer, visualize? This is not something we want to avoid. this is just often something that's pushed before education.
00:10:07
Speaker
actual decoding skills are there for a child. So a lot of programs will be like, oh, they need to practice noticing nonfiction text features or predicting in a text. And I look at the child's writing and they're writing like BG for the word big and they're in first grade.
00:10:24
Speaker
We need to give them phonics, explicit phonics instruction before we're pushing these strategies. So guided reading with leveled books, strategy instruction, cueing systems, picture clues, look at the first letter, can you finish the sentence and go back and guess what the word might mean, and less systematic phonics instruction. And so what that means is there's some phonics instruction, but there's not a really clear map. The school should be able to tell you every week what phonics pattern they're learning in kindergarten, first, second, and even third grade. So it should be really easy if they have a curriculum that follows the science of reading research for them to give you that list.
Recognizing Harmful Literacy Approaches
00:11:04
Speaker
Like second week of second grade, they're learning hard C versus soft C. Here's that rule is C usually is hard or says unless it's followed by an I, E, or Y, and then it's soft.
00:11:19
Speaker
Of course, we don't just say that rule and move on. There's a whole curriculum. If we have the right curriculum, there's a whole lesson, the whole week we focus on that strategy. We do dictation. We read decodable text with that pattern. We talk about that pattern. We do word study.
00:11:33
Speaker
There's a lot that goes with it. But of course, in this podcast, I'm just summarizing and telling you what that might look like. You can see the rules as they come and see an overview easily. You will not be bothering your school district or your teacher by asking for that. If they have the proper phonics, explicit phonics instruction in place, it should be very easy to give you that list.
00:11:55
Speaker
So there is some nuance, and I know i mentioned this, but some teachers are able to supplement heavily with phonics. So maybe their district isn't allowing them to change curriculum, but some teachers sneak in other supplements. I've worked with a lot of teachers in coaching, and they use Big City Readers program in addition to their curriculum because their school hasn't changed it yet.
00:12:16
Speaker
And, okay, so if you hear things like guided reading levels or look at the picture, you're likely looking at a balanced literacy approach. And that's not what we want to see.
Structured Literacy and Science-Based Reading
00:12:29
Speaker
Okay, so what do we want to see? So we want to see structured literacy and science of reading approaches. A lot of people get confused on science of reading approaches because they think that the science of reading is a curriculum name, but it's a body of research and it's 100 years old and it focuses on teaching the brain how reading works. So key components include phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, decoding, which is like instead of looking at a book that has a pattern, like my cat can run, my cat can swim, my cat can jump. And so there's the pattern, the words aren't changing, just one word is changing. And if you know that first letter and can look at the picture, you can guess.
00:13:12
Speaker
That's not a decodable book. That might be labeled as an early reader or a leveled reader. That's not what we want. We want decodable books that follow the phonics pattern that your child has learned and they align with the systematic phonics instruction that they are learning that week.
00:13:30
Speaker
So the book might be called Gentle Cindy, that second week of second grade when they learn about soft C. um Spelling connected to reading, writing, fluency, vocabulary, and comp comprehension. That is what you want to see in structured literacy or science of reading approaches.
Characteristics of Strong Reading Curriculums
00:13:48
Speaker
So instead of guessing, children learn how to map sounds to letters and store words in their brain permanently.
00:13:55
Speaker
So here are some signs of strong reading curriculum. A strong reading curriculum usually includes practice reading a decodable text, not a book that comes home that they say read it four or five times to build fluency.
00:14:10
Speaker
Without decoding properly, we often jump to fluency before kids are able to decode. So we want practice reading decodable texts. want explicit phonics instruction. We want spelling connected to phonics. So we're not just focusing on a spelling test and spelling 10 words perfectly, but a spelling pattern. So maybe this week the spelling pattern is AR, and they give you 25 words that might be on the spelling test with that AR pattern, but they're only tested on 10. we're not memorizing. We're looking for mastery of that phonics pattern in their spelling.
00:14:48
Speaker
Daily phonemic awareness practice, this takes two minutes. Gradual progression from simple to complex words, like going from CVC words to blends of digraphs to adding rules like silent E to multisyllabic words.
00:15:01
Speaker
So systematic instruction is not random. It's really clear.
Promoting Systematic Phonics in Schools
00:15:05
Speaker
It's really explicit. It's really easy to follow. That's why I say you will not be annoying your school or your teacher if you ask for this blueprint because they have it and it's really easy. They are following it. So don't worry about that.
00:15:17
Speaker
Okay, so to wrap things up, we're going to talk about red flags you should watch out for and what you can do. So here are some common signs something may be off.
00:15:28
Speaker
Kids are told to look at pictures to guess words, or you notice that they're doing that on their own when they're reading aloud to you. You get large lists of words to memorize. You get a spelling list of words that they will be tested on exactly these words.
00:15:42
Speaker
You're not seeing phonics instruction. You're not seeing inventive spelling explained, like, this is normal at this stage. We'll learn this pattern later. Books that contain words that kids haven't been taught to decode, like the word because shouldn't be coming up in a decodable in kindergarten.
00:16:00
Speaker
And heavy focus on strategies instead of sound letter relationships. So a lot of people think, okay, my kid already knows the ABCs. Why are we focusing on sound letter relationships? But sound letter doesn't mean just one letter. It can mean digraphs like S-H doesn't say S-H. S-H says shh, learning those digraphs, learning the sound letter match of T-I-O-N for shun, caution, things like that. So we work on that through third grade. So it's not just learning the ABCs.
00:16:30
Speaker
We want to focus on sound letter relationships in all of those kindergarten through third grade years.
Parental Involvement in School Curriculums
00:16:35
Speaker
A good teacher can sometimes work around a weak curriculum, but curriculum still matters.
00:16:44
Speaker
We know curriculum sits in a box, teachers the ones who teach, but it makes their job a whole lot easier if they have access to really good resources. So what can you do? Start by just asking what curriculum the school uses. If you're not clear on that, you can send me a message or an email. I would love to help you figure that out.
00:17:01
Speaker
Ask how phonics is taught. You want to hear explicit, um systematic instruction. Watch how your child approaches unknown words. Do they guess or do they try to sound it out?
00:17:13
Speaker
And you can support their decoding skills at home. And if you're unsure where to start, I am so glad you're here because I have resources for you. Actually, our kindergarten and first and second grade classes are all on-demand tutoring. They're 15 to 20-minute lessons, and there's 20 lessons. So you will learn in explicit instruction for kindergarten, first and second grade classes. what rules they need to know and how to properly correct their spelling and what they should know. So there's parent videos and then there's also 20 lessons for your child. So it is literally exactly what I do in my tutoring sessions. You just can watch it on demand over and over again whenever you would like and you can learn alongside your child. So
00:17:56
Speaker
look I'll link those in the show notes, the kindergarten first and second grade one. And we also have an upcoming workshop for parents. So if you're like, I don't know if I want to commit to doing 20 lessons, just teach me what to do. I'm going to help my kid.
00:18:08
Speaker
i have a workshop for you. It's coming up, I think, in the first week of April. It's the blending workshop. It is awesome. It's one hour. you will get so, so many skills on how to help your kindergarten through second grader.
00:18:21
Speaker
right now, you will feel so empowered. I'm not kidding. So many parents, after taking the blending workshop, say they went to parent-teacher conferences. Okay, not so many. Four people have said this, but still it's enough that they went to parent-teacher conferences and their child's teacher asked if they were a reading specialist because of the type of questions they were asking and because of the growth the teacher was seeing in the child and the strategies they were learning just from that workshop. So if you don't know where to start start there. But if you're like, I'm all in,
00:18:49
Speaker
Check out ah the link in our show notes for one of these classes. But you can support your child at home. You don't have to be a reading specialist. I will give you all the tools that you need.
00:19:00
Speaker
I promise. So don't feel too stressed if you're like, wait, I just listened to this and this is exactly what's happening in my child's classroom. You can be a part of changing the curriculum at the school. It doesn't happen overnight. There is a lot of red tape in schools. It is kind of complicated and a lot of bridges to cross and hoops to jump through. So if you're like, I can't handle tackling the school right now.
00:19:24
Speaker
i just want to make sure my child learns how to read. You are fine because you are a big city reader's parent and you have all the resources you need. i promise I will be with you every step of the way. So the goal of reading instruction isn't just to help kids get through books in kindergarten. It's to build a brain that can decode any word it encounters. We want to engage curiosity, not panic or rush or accomplish or complete reading. We want kids to devour books. We want kids to love reading. We want kids to love learning.
00:19:59
Speaker
Curriculum isn't everything, but it does tell you a lot of information about how a school believes children learn how to read. And that gives you a lot of information about the school. Your school should want to
Collaboration Between Schools and Parents
00:20:10
Speaker
hear from you. They should want to answer you. And they should be interested in growing and changing. No school is perfect. No curriculum is perfect.
00:20:19
Speaker
But you want a school that hears you. that is open to more feedback and is willing to change and grow. You want a school that says you're right, this is new information to us, we're going to get training for our teachers, or we're working on changing this, or let's talk more about this, this sounds like you're really serious about this. That's what you want to hear from your school. You don't need them to do it perfectly. You just need them to do it with you.
00:20:48
Speaker
All right, my friends, that is all I have for you today. If you have any questions about your school's curriculum or your child's reading development, as always, my DMs are open to you at bigcityreaders on Instagram or check out some of the resources I have on YouTube. It's bigcityreaders on YouTube or send me an email, hello at bigcityreaders.com or go check out my blog.
00:21:10
Speaker
It's bigcityreaders.com and you can look in the blog, search any word like dyslexia or behavior charts or two-year-old books. There are so, so, so many resources that my team and I have worked on for literally over a decade. So anything I've ever mentioned is
Resources for Improving Reading Skills
00:21:30
Speaker
listed there for you. i want this to be easy. I want you to have access to everything that you need. So please reach out if you need any help and send me a message if you have a question that you want answered on the podcast.
00:21:42
Speaker
I hope to see you all soon In the meantime, happy reading.