Structured Literacy Journey 2021

 Link to my Structured Literacy Site

Bex's reflection on the Structured Literacy journey

I was at a stage in my teaching where I knew that that was possibly more that I could do for the struggling readers/writers, but I wasn't sure where to start. I began my journey with Structured Literacy when a couple of friends started talking about it. This interested me, and I made sure that I researched and read the Science of Reading. I then looked at lots of different research and resources that Sara and Nelly had shared with me, but my mind was spinning.

I then discussed with Tara about structured literacy and her thoughts around it, and where I wanted to go. At the beginning of my pathway, I needed to search around for some stops to help my learning. I was very interested in Liz Kane, but her Dunedin and the South Island workshops were full, so I went to Ideal and Carla McNeill. I noted that she had a workshop running and signed up.

That day was very overwhelming, but it made sense to make a change to my literacy program. We signed up for the iDeal platform, and I started to explore that. It was a very intense website and took lots of time away from school to work out. I decided that I needed to see Structured Literacy in action and had done more reading and research around Liz Kane; I also purchased the code and had a look at that, but I still needed to see it in action. I chose four children in year two that I thought would benefit from Structured Literacy. I talked to their parents in that group and told them what I was planning and that I was in the learning phase and would like their buy-in to move forward. I assessed them and knew what they needed but didn't know where to start...Hence why we visited Grants Braes.

Mikaela and I talked, and we decided that a trip to Grants Braes saw it in action. We organized it and spent the morning going over the school to observe the teachers at the different levels; we saw the Haggerty and PA in action. Then we saw the code in action. I took this back to school and implemented the Code and LLLL assessment to see what I needed to do with my intervention group. We focused on sounds with handwriting, to begin with, and then moved to words. Sounds - words then moved back and forward a few times until they had secured their first sounds. I only sent one book home a week and it was that we had practiced for the week. I was mucking my way through and I was seeing progress. Slow and steady, learning as I went and the kids were having success and I was seeing it coming into the classroom.

At this stage, I also recognized that the Totara group also would benefit from some spelling lessons. I tested their spelling and saw that they needed to move back to year one of the Code. From here I taught them the spelling rules that they were missing and also introduced them to the iDeal platform for learning spelling rules. I began to see results in their writing and spelling. This also helped their reading and the difference in their confidence was visible too.

Around this time I noticed that my intervention group of children was gaining confidence and ability. Their writing in the class had shot off and the boy who would sit and cry in the corner was now eager to write and would write any change that he got, this was a massive improvement for him and made me very confident with the program that we had created.

Towards the end of Term 3, the difference in the groups that I was taking for spelling and structured literacy was foraminal and this showed in their end-of-year results, it was enough for me to think about rolling it out across our junior team. So, with what little resources we had, we took the term 3 holidays to roll it out, group the children and start with a structured literacy program. My fellow teacher was enthusiastic about it and was beginning to get some of her own resources and the teacher in the NE room loved the structure and saw improvements with her kids immediately. It was a success and we had parents on board, which always make such a difference.

Early in Term 4 Mikaela and I held a Structured literacy workshop for parents, where we unpacked what we had learned from the last year and why we wanted to roll it out. We had such a great take up with the idea from all of the parents that came.

At the end of the year when I came to test the children, we used the PM+ Running Records for my intervention group and they had all made accelerated progress with seeing them 20 mins a day, 4 days a week. It was empowering, as this worked for everyone and also gave such a good base.

The BOT was happy with the results and we got approval to roll it out across the school in 2022.