![]() That was great, but I wanted all of it, so as soon as I got home, I immediately bought the Secret Stories Kit so that I could start using it in my classroom. ![]() I just kept listening as she shared information about early brain development, and how the earlier-developing, emotional part of the brain could be easily accessed and “tricked” into remembering phonics skills through social-emotional (feeling-based) stories, especially “secret” stories! This was really intriguing to me, as was the idea of being able to make sense of letter sounds and phonics for my students.Įveryone in Katie’s session was given a free download pack with the anchor posters and activities used in the session. The more Katie talked, the more everything made sense to me. ![]() I walked in and Katie Garner was on the stage, talking about how au & aw were “in love,” and how they got so embarrassed when they had to stand together in words, they always put their heads down and said, “Awwwwww….” (as in: saw, paw, cause, August, etc…) Katie further explained that this was a “grown-up reading secret,” and then she said something that really struck me, which was “If kids don’t know the phonics secrets, how can they read the words?” I told my friend that we needed to go and see what all the excitement was about. I was walking around trying to decide what speaker to go see, when I noticed a room jam-packed with people. If They Don’t Know the Phonics Secrets, How Can They Read the Words? However that year, the Michigan Reading Conference changed my life forever. If you’ve never been to a reading conference before, then you should know that you’re usually just hoping for a few nights away to clear your mind, and maybe one or two good ideas that you can bring back to use in your classroom. I have seen and lived through both sides of the teaching debate and the resulting “Reading Wars” over what works best when it comes to teaching reading.įast forward to the 2012 State Reading Conference…. I began teaching in the late 1980s when whole language was all the rage, though I had grown up in Catholic schools where phonics was the focus. ![]() This year is my 21 st year teaching, though I took ten years off in the middle of my career to raise my three children. We were only a few weeks into this school year when I experienced one of those special “teacher-moments” when you know that you’re doing something that is perfectly right and you can’t help but to smile! I’ll come back to this in just a bit, but first, a little background…. It was the first week of October, and even though school hadn’t started until the end of August, I was already feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.Īs a hybrid classroom for distance learning, I have 22 students in person and 7 online, and teaching both groups well is anything but easy. A guest post by first grade teacher, Karrie Kehrig. ![]()
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