What are book sells and how do you teach them?
I recently finished reading the final book in Jessica Townsend’s AMAZING Nevermoor series. This series, touted as a cross between Harry Potter and Alice and Wonderland, had me looking forward …
Reading
Strategies for Emergent Readers: An interview with Jennifer Serravallo
Those of you who have followed me for a while now will know that I’ve been a huge Jennifer Serravallo fan for quite a long time. I carry her books …
1 Confession and 2 learnings about guided reading
I have a confession to make. When I first started teaching, I was a guided reading fraud. I had NO IDEA what I was doing. Being shown the location of …
Why Guided Reading shouldn’t be mandated in schools
Imagine there was a hospital that only trained its surgeons to put plaster casts on its patients. They’d heard about the benefits of plaster casts and how great they were …
6 reasons every teacher should read aloud every day
When my year 3 teacher, Mrs Margaret Browne, told us she had to pull on a pair of gloves before she could start reading our new class novel, I don’t …
Why is literacy important? (A lesson from 2020)
As far as books go, 2020 has turned into Margaret Wild’s ‘The Sloth Who Came to Stay.’ You know the picture story book about the busy family forced to adjust …
A Community transmission worth spreading
Olfactory memory. Have you ever smelled a smell and immediately been reminded of a place, person or thing from your past? That’s olfactory memory: the recollections of odours. For me, …
5 common mistakes teachers make in Independent Reading
Being a literacy consultant, I get the opportunity to visit lots of schools and observe in lots of classrooms. I see all types of wonderful teaching practice and I get …
Tips for preparing student work during school closures
Australian teachers and schools have the ‘benefit’ (if you can call it that) of entering this challenging time a few weeks after many other countries. We therefore have the opportunity …
Reading Workshop- the what, why and how
This week’s blog post answers a question asked by one of the Oz Lit Teachers in our community. It focuses on all things Reading Workshop. What is a Reading Workshop? …