The Decoding Dragon
Are you sick of all those so-called ‘balanced literacy’ animals trying to teach children to guess? You know the ones: Skippy Frog, Eagle Eye, Flippy Dolphin, Tryin’ Lion, Lips the Fish and Helpful Kangaroo?
Well I went into my Frankenstein lab and smooshed them all together to create the Guessing Monster.
Never fear! Decoding Dragon will chase that thing away!
For teachers who understand and want to implement the science of reading and not the philosophy of guessing!
#DontLeaveReadingToChance
Our Decoding Dragon has been downloaded thousands of times and is being used in classrooms all around the world. We couldn’t be happier. We did put a lot of time and energy into creating this graphic, and we will always keep it free for you, but in return, we ask that you respect our copyright and keep our logo there when you reproduce it. That will help other people find it and find us. That’s fair, right?
Independent Spelling Activities: Toxic to Helpful
I wrote this piece for the Learning Difficulties Australia (LDA) Bulletin as a guide to helping teachers avoid and select spelling activities for students. Some activities will help, some activities will actually cause damage.
<w> or <wh>?
There are countless posts and questions about teaching words beginning with <w> or <wh> on social media. Many of the answers are just plain wrong and actually a bit snobby/racist.
Don’t be that teacher.
How your students say words is how they say words. You’re no better than they are because you have a different dialect.
Pronunciation comes up a LOT when trying to teach students how to distinguish these words. Time to leave that behind. This simple infographic will guide you.
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