Recent PIRLS results saw Ireland among the top-performing countries in the world in literacy. This is indeed a good news story, but looking a little deeper into the results gives us cause for concern.

This blog post is the view of an Irish Primary School Teacher in response to Emily Hanford’s podcast series, Sold a Story: How teaching kids to read went so wrong.

When teaching phonics, it is important to incorporate Phonemic Awareness into your lessons. Here are the steps I follow when introducing a new letter sound. 

It has taken me four months to create this guide and I am finally ready to share it with you all. I hope it will be useful to teachers and parents of beginning and struggling readers.

A sight word in any word that you can read instantly and without effort. An adult has tens of thousands of sight words stored in their brain.

In order for children to become skilled readers and writers, it is important that they are able to tune in to the speech sounds of the English language. This can be tricky for some, but a focus on listening skills before learning to read will help.

A core reader is a reading book that a whole class will read together. The text in these readers usually includes lots of high-frequency words and some topic-specific words, which may or may not be decodable for the children.

A decodable reader or book is one that only contains words that can be ‘sounded out’ and the letters use their most common sounds.