Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Kate Winn: Hello to all you travelers out there on the road to evidence-based literacy instruction. I'm Kate Winn, classroom teacher and host of IDA Ontario's podcast Reading Road Trip. Welcome to our fifth episode of season four.
Before we get started, we would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast from the traditional land of the Mississauga Anishinaabe. We are grateful to live here and thank the generations of First Nations people for their care for and teachings about the Earth. We also recognize the contributions of Métis, Inuit and other Indigenous peoples in shaping our community and country.
Along with this acknowledgement and in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'd like to amplify the work of Indigenous artists and today we are sharing the picture book Dad, Is It Time to Gather Mint? Celebrating the Seasons by Tyna Legault Taylor, illustrated by Michelle Dao.
Learn about the rhythms of the seasons with Joshua in this soothing read aloud story for ages 5 to 7. Joshua loves being on the land. He loves to learn about plants and animals from his family as they fish, hunt and gather food together. And more than anything, Joshua loves mint. When the weather is warm, Joshua and his dad gather mint from the shores of Lake Nipigon First Nation in northeastern Ontario. But when will that be? It's not the time if the leaves are changing colour. It's not the time when the snow falls from the sky. It's not the time when the flowers are budding. When is it time to gather mint from the land?
In the back of the book, find a glossary and pronunciation guide for the swampy Cree and Ojibwe words featured throughout the story.
Add this title to your home or classroom library today.
Now on with the show.
I am really excited to introduce our guest here this week on Reading Road Trip, Lee-Ann Lear.
[00:01:57] Kate Winn: Lee-Ann has spent over 20 years teaching in Ontario elementary schools. She has always been fascinated by the process of teaching reading. Throughout her career, she has sought experiences to help her grow her understanding of the current best practices in reading instruction. This journey has included Reading Recovery. Interesting place to start. We won't have time to get too much into that, but that's interesting. Empower Reading, Orton Gillingham Structured Literacy and most recently, an exploration of structured word inquiry. In 2022, Lee-Ann became certified by AOGPE at the Associate level. She has now resigned from teaching to focus on growing her company, SyllaSense, where she writes and publishes decodable books and shares her knowledge of structured literacy. Welcome to the show, Lee-Ann.
[00:02:41] Lee-Ann Lear: Thanks Kate. I'm excited to be here.
[00:02:44] Kate Winn: I'm really interested to get into this conversation. I do want to start with a little disclosure piece. I mean, you've got it right there in your bio that your company is SyllaSense. You sell decodable texts. So of course you have, you know, that financial piece of selling decodable books that, that people should be aware of. I also want to mention that on a few occasions I've had a chance to do some reviewing for you. When you have your text and illustrations and things ready and you get reviewers to, to look them over. I've had a chance to do a bit of that and I've been compensated with some books after the fact. Just to be clear, I don't think either of us is going to, you know, exaggerate or lie about anything about how amazing these SyllaSense books are today. But people do need to have that disclosure. I don't think I would work and review books just to get books that I don't think are good and wouldn't use in my class. But still important for people to, to have that background before we start.
Okay, I'm just going to throw at the first question here. We're all about the research, the evidence here on the show. What do we know and not know from research and science about the use of decodable texts?
[00:03:50] Lee-Ann Lear: So that's such a great question to start with and also a very complicated one. So let's dig into that a little bit. So the research is actually a little bit unclear.
There haven't been a ton of research articles that have been done. There have been some, but part of the issue seems to be the fact that we don't have a clear definition of decodable books. So what one publishing company or organization calls a decodable book can be very different from what another one does. So some people define decodable books as really simple little phonics books that only include the most common and straightforward grapheme phoneme correspondence.
But others consider decodable books, books that it's okay to include any concept no matter how difficult, as long as the instruction has happened first. And I tend to go with that definition of decodable books, but a lot of people use it in a very different way. So because of that, when they go to like actually determine and create a study to do some research on it, it's hard when people don't have that set definition.
So it's also hard because if you go with the second definition, which I tend to, which is that decodable books are linked to instruction, the instruction has to happen first. If you see it in that way, then it's not easy to create a study that separates the instruction from the decodables because makes a decodable book decodable is the fact that the concepts within it have been taught.
So how then can you go and study that concept of the decodable separate from the actual concept of the instruction?
So all that said, because it is a little bit unclear, I tend to focus on the organizations that are sort of set out to review research and help us out. And of course there's some key ones being in Ontario, obviously we have the Right to Read Inquiry which did a full review of research to make its recommendations.
I also look at the Reading League which is a nonprofit in the states whose mandate is to sort of bring information about evidence based reading. And then we have UFLI which most people are familiar with in education now, University of Florida Literacy Institute and they have their Foundations program. All of these sorts of organizations have done a lot of work on reviewing and making recommendations and they're slightly different for each one.
The Right to Read as we know in Ontario has recommended the use of decodable books for kindergarten, grade one and maybe into grade two.
So as a long paired along with obviously the explicit direct instruction, systematic instruction which we know is critically important.
So I mean being an Ontario teacher or I was when, when that report was released, it was obviously a very significant piece of information that I use to sort of support the use of decodables.
A lot of other places like the Reading League basically in their review they say it's a bit unclear, but they recommend using them strategically and judiciously. So you know, I think anyone in those of us that are working in early literacy understand that as well is that they are a tool for a purpose but not necessarily something you want to be using for too long.
[00:07:12] Kate Winn: Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean I can't imagine that research is ever going to show us that we shouldn't use decodables with our early, I mean it's all about practice. Right? But when we've got this label on text now like these ones are decodable and we haven't researched that, but I think we have a lot of research to show that kids need to practice reading with material that they can read, right. But what I kind of understand from research is we still don't know like is there a the perfect, you know, percentage of decodability or is there a perfect proportion of decodable text mixed with another kind of text, right? Like that may all evolve as research evolves, but I can't imagine ever being told that kids shouldn't start out with these books.
[00:07:56] Lee-Ann Lear: Well, and when you think about it, just like you said, we know that that guided practice is so important with whatever it is we're teaching. And it was one of my frustrations when I was using leveled books in the classroom as I started this journey and learned more about structured literacy at the time there wasn’t decodables available. And so I would be systematically teaching phonics concepts to my students, and we would be practicing sort of at the word level in our small group. And then I, you'd give them a level book. And they weren't really able to use those skills that they had just learned in the context of the book because it was like it wasn't giving them the opportunity to practice what it is I had just taught because they're crafted in a totally different way.
So it does make sense. What the research does say is that pattern books are not helpful. So books where the words repeat or the phrases repeat because they encourage guessing, they encourage memorization, and that is what we don't want. So it's pretty clear that that is not what is being recommended. And we know that systematic, explicit instruction is being recommended. And decodables align beautifully with that. So that's why it's a very complicated question to start with.
[00:09:05] Kate Winn: Yes, I know.
What would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions about the use of decodables? You share yours and then if there's anything else that you didn't say, that I'll share mine.
[00:09:17] Lee-Ann Lear: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I always start with this one because I think the biggest one I hear is that they're boring. Kids don't like them, they're not engaging like levelled books were. And, and I hear a lot of that. And I must admit, when I first started working with decodables, I fell into that a little bit. But the thing is, success is exciting. Decoding is exciting for kids. So when they start to break the code, it doesn't actually matter what it is they're looking at at the beginning. There's an excitement that comes from that success.
So I just think that that is one of the biggest myths out there is that, you know, if we're using decodable books, we're not going to be promoting a joy of reading and an excitement in reading, because I categorically disagree with that one.
I think another big one is that decodable books are the only kinds of books that should be used in the classroom. And, you know, decodable books are a tool for a purpose, just like we just talked about.
They are an opportunity for guided and independent practice on the concepts that we've just taught them.
But there's a lot that they don't do because, you know, decodables, the point of them is to help students break the English code.
We don't go into a lot of well, we sometimes we can't because of scope and sequence constraints. We can't go into more complicated words.
Delving into background knowledge, things that are, whole parts of language that are non English, that children are exposed to and use every day. When we get into things like cultural celebrations, we get into student names if they're from different languages.
Common words in the English language that we use every day but are not at actually English words that have been morphed into our language. So a lot of these concepts we just don't get into in decodable books. And they're critically important for students to have access to and to be exposed to.
The other one I'm hearing all the time is that they should be used the whole way through. Decodable books should be used the whole way through the primary grades. I get asked all the time, when are you going to write decodable books for grade threes? And I think it's the concept that decodable books are a tool for a purpose.
Very good to be used in early literacy instruction at the very beginning of breaking the code. But once we get a little bit further on in our language, students need to learn to be flexible. You're only going to get so far, like you can't map out every concept. We have stress. We have schwa. Our language is a stress time language. It includes concepts from, you know, the history of our language, etymology, morphology.
And there's just only so far we will get with only decodable books. It also kind of messes up that concept of statistical learning. So that statistical learning is the idea that we start to understand and learn how often a concept is represented in print. And like for instance, ea, like it has three different sound correspondences that, that are common. So like ea can make the ē sound, it can make the e sound, it can make the ā sound. But which one is more common? If you write a decodable book with the least common and the whole book is full of all of these, all of these words that have the very least common sound representation, then it can sort of mess up the, our sense of how our language works.
[00:12:43] Kate Winn: Those are some great ones. And yes, I hear that for sure. The boring, the boring piece. And you know, I just want to say if you, your kids are bored, maybe you're doing something wrong. Because I agree with you that when they start cracking that code, they absolutely love it. I just want to give an example with SyllaSense, because I do use these books a ton. So you have the different colours of series, and we'll probably talk about that a bit later. But by the end of kindergarten, my kids can read the yellow and my kids can read the green. So here's just a little excerpt from where they get at the end of the year: Get next to the pond, said Ashlyn. Quinn got next to the pond with a nut. The mum duck swam up to Quinn but did not get the nut.
Like, there's something happening there. There's actually, like, there's a plot and there's, you know, there's something going on. And no, these aren't the richest books for language comprehension, for sure. But it's not that you can never ask any comprehension questions. Like, in the very first book, like, why do you think the dad's sad? Like, just make an inference here, like, what's going on? Whatever. Like, you can do something with them. But we're going to use other trade books, other rich picture books, other things in our, in our diet of books as well.
One, one, I would say almost a pet peeve I have is the question when, when do we move them from decodable to leveled?
And my point is that the, like, all of those books that we have in our schools that have the levels, there's no rule to say kids ever have to read those. It's not like you go from the decodables, then go grab the level H books and then…right? Like, my kids go from decodables into trade books. But if you've got those leveled books, they're books, and that's great. So they can just be part of books that they can actually read once they've got the code. But that, that would be a pet peeve I have.
[00:14:26] Lee-Ann Lear: Well, for sure. And I mean, you think about it, if you define decodable books as I do, which is books that align with your instruction, then any book is decodable. Like, if the students understand the concepts within or most of them, and can be flexible to help them with whatever remaining concepts there are, then that is a decodable book for them. It doesn't matter what kind, like, what it's labeled. It's all about the instruction that is paired with it.
[00:14:50] Kate Winn: Yeah, exactly.
[00:14:51] Kate Winn: Another one I hear is when people are trying to choose decodable series, like, to purchase, because I talk to a lot of schools, a lot of boards, you know, trying to make purchasing decisions, and they, they feel like that the decodable series has to align step by step, like lockstep with their phonics, scope and sequence.
And I use UFLI. I love UFLI. UFL has passages that align lockstep with their scope and sequence. So that's great. So you do have that. But that's not all you want kids reading, they need to practice with other materials. Right. So I find, you know, UFLI has a great chart where decodable publishers can kind of get their books on this list to show where they align with the scope and sequence. And I know with SyllaSense, for example, when I get to a certain UFLI lesson, not the first UFI lesson, but when I get to a certain one, then it's like, okay, now I can start rolling. Bring in the. The SyllaSense books. I teach kindergarten, so when I come back in September, my year twos will already be like well into SyllaSense. And then my year ones, I'll wait until I've taught enough that we can start using the SyllaSense books. But it's not necessarily going to be, I taught this sound today. This is the exact one that we're going to practice in this exact book. And it goes in that order. It doesn't have to be that way. They just need practice material. You do want to make sure that they've been taught the, the phoneme grapheme correspondences that are in there, but it doesn't mean that it's going to follow, you know, every single sound is going to be introduced in order the same way as in your scope and sequence.
[00:16:18] Lee-Ann Lear: Well, exactly. And I mean, I say the same thing to people all the time. Unless there is ever a publisher out there that creates a program and then has multiple decodable books that align exactly from different authors, different perspectives, different style, you're always going to have to - and that's not a good idea anyway because we don't want students to be exposed to that exact perfect text where they know every single concept. Because we, actually, English doesn't work that way. We reach a point where we have to be flexible with sounds.
So I don't know whether, how familiar you are with it, but it's why I really love Duke and Cartwright's active view of reading. They have their.
It's modeled on the simple view of reading. They have their two sections, just like the simple view of reading, where they have their word decoding section and then the language comprehension section. But in the middle they acknowledge there's a bridging area that covers both. And within that they have graphophonological semantic cognitive flexibility, which is such a mouthful, but it's acknowledging the fact that our language is very complex and we have to bring in both the letters and sounds as well as our understanding of what's happening in the text in order to decode properly. And you think of a word like project and project spelled exactly the same. Different emphasis changes from a noun to an adjective, verb, sorry. Just that change in the stress and the schwa makes it a completely different word. And it's like, how do you teach that to students?
You really have to teach it them instead that they have to use what the context, their, their background knowledge, what's happening in the text along with the letters and sounds, and the morphological concepts. Which is why it's so important to not actually have decodables that are a hundred percent decodable because they have to learn that flexibility in order to be, to really fully understand our language well.
[00:18:57] Kate Winn: And that's a nice segue into the last thing I wanted to say, I did hear, it's not exactly a misconception, but I heard somebody the other day say something about, you know, there's no using set for variability with decodable.
And I mean, of course totally depends on the decodable. But I'm thinking about even with my little kids with the nasal A, they'll sound out a word and they'll say like and c-a-n can. And I'll say, are we British? Do we say can? Right? And then they. I don't know if that's exactly the same as flexing a vowel when it's just the regular vowel or the nasal.
[00:19:27] Lee-Ann Lear: For sure it is.
[00:19:29] Kate Winn: Or you know, like and you know, and some of them automatically they recognize and now and say it, but some of them will go and, and. And like, they fix it. Right. Because that's not how we say that word. So there is more opportunity for, for these things than you might think.
[00:19:44] Lee-Ann Lear: Well, and it is. Sorry, just before you go into that, it is kind of. I find it kind of funny because I've had people, because I'm still recommending prompting. Does that make sense? And, and, and I've. I've had people say, like, are we allowed to prompt that anymore? Because we think of that as something as being from three cuing. But ultimately, absolutely, they have to. Even as simple as and or as simple as the S making the s phoneme or the z phoneme. Right. Like, it's like, does that sound right? They have to be thinking about that at the same time because our language is so varied. So, yes, 100%. I think that they have to bring that meaning in to fully get there, for sure.
[00:20:21] Kate Winn: The next thing I want to ask you about is just, you know, I'm a writer, but I don't write decodable books. I'm curious to know what was the process of actually writing the SyllaSense decodables. I know there would be so, so much to think about, and I know, like, in your information that you share, I can tell there's a lot to think about. But I'm wondering, you know, how you got the idea, did the work, and, and we can maybe talk about some more specifics later, too.
[00:20:43] Lee-Ann Lear: Yeah, absolutely. So that is a big one. So I'll start with how we got started, but I'd also like to talk a little bit about what we're doing now because it's very different from how we got started.
So, I mean, I started just like a lot of people did who were exploring sort of structured literacy earlier than. Than everyone. It's out of necessity. So our daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia in 2012, and that sort of changed the whole trajectory of my sort of educational career.
I got introduced to Orton Gillingham, and as part of those courses, first of all, I started learning about how our language works, which blew my mind, how much I actually didn't know about our language and how our language has worked and how our language works and is structured.
But I got also introduced to decodable books. And it's kind of ironic because I just finished saying that one of the myths about decodable books is that they're boring. But my first introduction, I thought, these are boring. I don't like these at all. They're just not interesting. I like my Baby Bear books. I like my magic key books. I like, I like the stories and the characters. And these decodable books are just flat and boring.
And my hypothesis was that can't we write books that are structured in nature but also are engaging and exciting and have characters and plot lines and what have you? So I kind of got that seed of an idea and it caught my imagination. So I started trying to write and put books together for my own kindergarten students because at the time I was teaching kindergarten and I was really lucky because my DECE partner liked to draw. So she sort of sat down and did the drawings and I put the words together. And then we also, we were big photographers. We take a lot of photos of our kids and so we used our family photos and sometimes we made our kids pose and sometimes we just look through like old family footage to, to actually create books out of them.
But we ended up with these little photocopyable books. They were the Green series. So they were, and at the time I was big into syllable types, so they were all closed syllable books.
Didn't really have a scope and sequence because I didn't really understand what that was at the time. I just sort of had all the short vowels and they were just a series of little books with short vowel sounds. And my students actually started to do really well. So I had students that I had been working with for a year and a half because they were, they'd started with me in JK and now they were in SK and they were just not thriving with leveled books. And I started giving them these little books that we had written and they started to do really well. And, and it was kind of mind boggling for me. I'm like, how do we not know that this style of book is actually there and that it can be helpful for students?
So I've got a super fantastic, supportive husband who said, well, why don't we try to publish these? Like, why don't we get these to the market? If this is, if you find these are working with your students and they're helping, let's, let's do it. But you know, this was, at this point, now we're into 2013. We reached out to some publishers, but there really wasn't anyone who was interested in partnering with us. And when you think about it, there wasn't a market. So it's not. I don't blame them. It's not surprising.
So we ended up self publishing and that could be another whole podcast episode on its own, how to, how to self publish. It was years of figuring out formatting and getting a print company and figuring out how to put it all together in a format that the printers would take. And then of course, when the books arrived, there was, we had no concept of marketing or how to even get the word out that these were even here. So it was a really long process.
But, you know, as all of that was happening in the background, the world was starting to change. So, you know, Emily Hanford started doing her work. The Right to Read inquiry was launched. Suddenly, like Facebook groups about the science of reading started popping up and, and you know, my husband calls it the slowest roller coaster ride ever because we would go for months without a sale and then someone would email us and say, hey, we've heard you have a series.
And it was, it was absolutely thrilling.
But you know, in time as I learn more and I went back actually and did my Orton Gillingham again, this time with a practicum. And I mean if you ever are wonder, and I think those of us in education don't, but this brings it home. The learning is one thing, but I think it's only when you actually teach it that you really understand it. So you can do like a whole bunch of theory, you can read books, you can, you know, listen to podcasts, but it's actually when you try to teach it that you really develop a deeper understanding. And that practicum that I took was like, it changed. It changed everything.
So I realized that we had to do some changes to the series. So we need to actually create a really detailed scope and sequence. And I know we're going to talk a bit more about the scope and sequence afterwards.
I'm not going to lie. There may have been like a total intervention with some of my friends who are also OG trained who like sat down with me and basically said, we need to move away from syllable types. You need a full scope and sequence. And it would hard because you write things in a certain way and you and they become like your kids. Like I love these little books, right? But I realized through their conversations, through conversations with people in the field that it was. And through my own experience with the practicum, it had to change. So we went through a series of updating everything. So we created the scope and sequence we reimaged because while we totally believe in the importance of having, you know, multicultural representation in the books, they were all based on our family photos and it was just a proof of concept at the beginning. So we needed to do reimaging in the midst of all of that. I also resigned from teaching because this was something that we realized was going to become all encompassing, which it was.
And it was a super, super exciting time. But we ended up launching in 2022 with our updated scope and sequence, our reimaged books with additional titles that we wrote and, and I resigned at the same time. And it was just a very exciting and change filled time, but super exciting.
So that's kind of like the history of it. So I'd like to also talk about how we do it now because obviously it's very different how we create things now. Like now we have a company, we have a graphic design person on staff, we can take our own photos. The scope and sequence is set. So the writing now is a little bit easier because we have that scope and sequence to base it on. So it's now a matter of, okay, we're going to do a book that is focusing on maybe the grapheme oa making the o sound. So then we do all these massive word lists of all the words that we could potentially have in a book. And then we try to look at them and try to find connections to say, okay, what could we maybe write about that could include enough of these words? That would be good practice for the students.
The non fiction ones are the most challenging because we're trying to accurately reflect something in the real world and build knowledge. But within the scope and sequence, there's only so many words that we can use.
So and we want to make sure that there's at least something new, even for us. Like every nonfiction book we've done, we've had at least one fact in it that we're like, I didn't know that beforehand because as the adults in the room, we want to feel that same, that same sense of excitement when we're, when we're reading a book.
So that's kind of like the writing process, like simplified. But it's not enough just to write them like that. We also have to make sure that they're good enough to go out in the world. And to do that we have a rigorous review process. And I know that you have very kindly spent time reviewing the books. We have such a range of editors. We have like my Orton Gillingham friends who are amazing and they do what I call the fine tooth comb edit. Like they go through every single book and make sure there's no concept in it that we haven't included in our scope and sequence, that there's enough practice of whatever the concept is. We have people who review the books for like bias for inclusivity for, that there's a range of people and places. Like, we live just north of Toronto, but we're in a suburban area. And our first few books were all just pictures we'd taken local to us. So it's like, do we have books that have pictures for students who are living right in the core of the city that they would recognize as being part of their environment?
So those are the sorts of things that we have our reviewers look at. And we also, wherever possible, bring in experts. So our book Clever Dolphins, we actually sent to a dolphin researcher who is doing her doctorate in dolphins and how they communicate. And one of the pictures in the book is actually from her. And we had her review and make sure that everything we had in it was accurate. And that was super exciting for us to do. So it's quite a process, but it's very rewarding.
[00:29:49] Kate Winn: Yes, I bet. That's so interesting. We talked about the scope and sequence. So just to dig into that a little bit, I think people obviously think about the phoneme grapheme piece when they're thinking about, you know, what order the books go in and that sort of thing. But you've got some other categories on your scope and sequence as well. So I'd like to ask you about them just to make sure listeners know what the category means, but also how you decided on the progression. So let's just start with that phoneme grapheme correspondence piece.
[00:30:13] Lee-Ann Lear: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And that's something that's fairly traditional in scope and sequences.
It's important to lay out those grapheme phonemes, especially because in the very beginning of instruction, that's where we tend to start.
But English has a super deep orthography, so graphemes and phonemes on their own will only get you so far. And if you're not, if anyone listening is not sure about that, we could just look at a word like jumped. And if we try to sound that out and we're just using the sounds that we hear, we're going to have students write jumpt.
So, you know, we really need to go beyond grapheme phoneme correspondence. The orthographic conventions I actually put for myself and to be a teaching tool for everybody starting. Because when I started this work, I did not know the majority of the orthographic conventions that go along with the concepts we were teaching from a grapheme phoneme correspondence place. So when I took Orton Gillingham the first time and I learned that we use CK after a short vowel, my mind was like, exploded.
I did not know that I could spell those words. But if a student came up to me and wrote the word puck and they wrote puk, I would just say, this is how we spell it. Because I didn't know there was a convention. So the orthographic conventions was for myself as much as anything to map out those conventions that I didn't know and maybe other educators didn't know. And also as a reminder that if we are teaching a grapheme phoneme correspondence and there is a spelling convention that goes along with it, we should be teaching both.
So that's why I did that one.
The morphology one is just, I mean, morphology is the structure of our language. We have a morphophonemic language. So our spelling conventions are combination of both grapheme phoneme correspondence and morphology.
So having those that morphology column was super important to me. I also bring morphemes in a little bit earlier than some series do. And that is what has allowed us to keep natural language structures or more natural language structures in the books, which I super, I believe in. And I believe we should be teaching this to students orally even before they become begin to read and write. So that's why I mapped out the morphology column. Punctuation text features is sort of our least fleshed out one.
But I looked at it when I got started and I was actually thinking back to, you know, those parts of reading recovery that did stick with me. And there were some components of it that, you know, are important to remember. Like, for instance, when we were doing the CAP assessment, the concepts about print and we were looking at do students understand what a period is and what it's there for? And do they understand punctuation such as a comma or quotation marks or an exclamation mark or a question mark? And so I decided to map those out in the text so that when educators were working with the series, they would have a sense of, okay, if I haven't talked explicitly about this yet, I need to make sure my students understand and are aware of it.
And then the last one is the high frequency words. This comes from my experience in teaching. The majority of the time in my 21 years of teaching, I was working with students who were struggling readers because I just was fascinated by that. And part of it is because of our daughter's journey, but part of it was because I just found it so fascinating, that process of learning to read. A lot of decodable books and programs out there that are structured literacy programs add the high frequency words in, but don't map them on the scope and sequence.
I chose to map them on the scope and sequence because for any teachers who are working with students who are struggling, they may need that additional time and energy spent on mapping those words, understanding why they're spelled and pronounced the way they are so that they're not just getting exposed to a lot of words that they haven't practiced with. So that's why I map them out, and in our teacher tip sheets we actually go through and it's explain how to, how to teach each one of those. Like what is the history of the word? Like for instance, the, it's a schwa, the E is a schwa, which is completely predictable. But it's not the first letter sound correspondence that we start with.
So in our teacher tip sheets we go through this is how you can explain and teach this word to your students so that they are not caught unawares when words are popping up like that. So that's why I mapped those ones out. And I know not all series do, but, but it's just from my experience with students that needed that real direct, explicit instruction for all aspects.
[00:34:42] Kate Winn: Well, we will be sure to link to the teacher tip sheets in the show notes for this episode because they are extremely helpful. Just a couple things I wanted to touch on I like for the morphology. For example, some listeners might be thinking, well, these are decodable books. How much morphology do you get into without understanding that? For example, in kindergarten, adding that suffix s to make a noun plural, that's morphology, you added another meaningful part to that word. And I like how you've got, you know, the ones that are the s that's pronounced s and then the s that's pronounced z depending on the word.
But like that's morphology. We start teaching morphology in kindergarten, which is important. I really do love your scope and sequence for high frequency words. One thing I find with the Ontario Kindergarten program, having kids come in in year one, I usually start the year with at least a handful of three year olds. So we start like we start our phonics program, we start those letter sound correspondences. But for a lot of those kids, they, they haven't seen a letter before. They don't know what a letter is. And so we're teaching them this is a letter and then here's the sound that goes with it. And then I don't want like one week later to be saying, oh now, sometimes in these words the letter isn't going to say the sound, you think. And so this is an exception. I don't want to jump into the exceptions so fast, right. And so I love how slowly you introduce, I kind of follow your, in terms of teaching my heart words, I follow your scope and sequence of teaching heart words also because. And we'll talk about how I use decodables later a bit, but I use them a lot for the home practice. And so I feel like I want to make sure that they have been taught the words and you know, have some ability to recognize them before the parents are sitting with them thinking, oh, they can't sound this out. What am I supposed to do? I teach them about, teach the parents about heart words of course too. But I do like, I appreciate that about SyllaSense, just the pace at which you introduce those.
[00:36:28] Lee-Ann Lear: And I know you also were asking too about like how to decide how we decided on that progression.
And that's a, that's a tricky one to answer as well. I was so I was, you know, I was listening to your, the conversations you've had with various people. And I really like the conversation you had with Anna Geiger about that, that bullseye science about like hitting, you know, what we know for sure that science states, but then there's that whole gray area around the outside. And I don't know if we will ever get scientific proof that like an a sound is, is a better place to start than an o sound, right, like, and, and ultimately when you're setting a scope and sequence, you know, various programs, we all tend to start with short vowel sounds and then we start, tend to move from there into like a long, long vowel sounds. But some do sort of those short open syllable words like he, me go no, so first. Others go right into vowel-consonant-e first.
And it's like, I don't know if we will ever have it very clear which order, if there is a right order. I think we just know that we need to do it sort of. We need to go simple to complex. But understand that what each student sees as simple or complex is going to vary from student to student.
And we've been lucky in that we've been able to adjust a little bit. So we had. Because in my experience, we started when I was working with students and I was, I was teaching in the classroom. I often started with like some of the simple, straightforward vowel teams first like ee and ay.
But UFLI starts with a-consonant-e first. And we had put our scope and sequence out before UFLI had put theirs out and before the Ontario curriculum too.
And, and when it came out, we had a lot of conversations with educators and just said like what do you start with? Like, do you start with vowel-consonant-e? Do you start with ay?
And again, it's sort of, so many people had each one of them. So we created that step in our scope and sequence where it's like parallel. So you can start with blue or you can start with teal.
And that allows educators to be able to say, I like to start with this or I start with that.
So we've tried to create that flex in our scope and sequence while still mapping out it explicitly and giving people the opportunity to sort of follow what works best for them.
Which is a little bit complicated when you first look at it, but we've gotten a lot of feedback that that is good simply because I don't know whether we ever will get science that says that specifically. You should absolutely start with this and then move to this.
[00:39:05] Kate Winn: I want to ask you next about your images for your books. So some of your titles are photo books and some are illustrated. You gave us a little bit of a sneak preview earlier when you were talking about how you started the series. But how did the images all come about and how do you do that now?
[00:39:23] Lee-Ann Lear: So, yeah, at the beginning it was. My DECE partner did the illustrations and actually she did them just pencil drawings to start. But then when we came to actual publish, she painted them.
We have had a couple of different illustrators who have done the illustrated ones for us. At the beginning, the photos were all our family, but then we moved into stock images, so, and choosing the images is actually the, I find the most fun part. Like, it's just, it's so fun and it, sometimes it's also frustrating because I have it in my head, okay, this is what I want for this page. Like, I have a picture of what I think I want to have and then trying to find it, it's not always easy.
As we've gotten a little bit bigger now we've started doing photo shoots. So when you look at, if you look at our yellow square, a good portion of those books actually were full out photo shoots where we had like a location that we went to. We had an actor that we. Or a model that we hired to do the shoot. We had dog trainers. We had, we had, it was, it was quite the adventure actually to do that. But it allowed us to actually really hone in and be specific about what we wanted to include and having the pictures align with what we wanted the text to say. That said, it's not always easy because you look at a book like Pig Pit, which is in our which is illustrated and in our first yellow series. There's no way we can do an actual photo shoot with that. Right? Because we have to, if we're doing the photo shoot, we have to stick with animals that are, like, trainable, which was kind of fun for in the bag because it was our niece's cat that we used for that photo shoot. And we did a trial ahead of time to see is this cat actually going to get in the bag. Because if you have a cat, you know, they're not necessarily the most trainable animals in the world. And we did the trial shoot, and the cat jumped in the bag, and we were like, awesome. This is great. And then we got all set, and we had our model and we had all the props, and we had everything. And then the cat refused to jump into the bag, so we had to all leave the room for a while and give the cat a chance to actually do it. So it's, you know, the whole process of doing those photo shoots has been fun, but it's also, there's been times when it's been stressful, but it's a new learning for all of us. So I have a question for you. Do your students have a preference between the illustrated or the photo?
Just curious.
[00:41:43] Kate Winn: That's a good question. I mean, I like the photo better. I mean, the illustrated are amazing. But if you made me pick, I would say, I like the photos.
Yeah, you know what? It's kindergarten, so I don't know. I think they like picture books, too. Right? So they don't articulate much about that to me. They seem to love them all, but as an adult, I like the photo ones.
[00:42:07] Lee-Ann Lear: Well, we got a lot of feedback that the photos were better, that people preferred the photos. So moving forward, we sort of made the decision. We were just going to do photos, and then I had a friend come to visit the office with her granddaughter, and we have a whole display of books. And she walked up and she picked up every single painted illustrated book and carried it around the whole office together. And we were all sort of looking at each other as a team and laughing, going, you know, maybe it's a mistake to move all into photo ones because maybe they're the kids. They like a variety. But for whatever we've decided moving forward, we're really focusing more on the photos. It does allow us, there is an engagement level, I think, with real photos that students seem to really be enjoying. So we're sticking with it for now.
[00:42:53] Kate Winn: What are some ways that you recommend teachers use decodable books in their classroom program?
[00:42:59] Lee-Ann Lear: Sure. I mean, as I've mentioned before, I really believe that they should be paired with instruction.
So they should be the consolidation of the learning, so the teaching. While I have had experience with and talked with people who are just beginning their sort of journey of the structured literacy, I think decodable books are easier for students even without the instruction. But they are certainly more powerful paired with the instruction. So consolidation of learning, 100% for sure, Etc. But they could be used for fluency practice, they can be used for partner reading, they can be used for home reading, they can be used for small group instruction. I've had various people ask me like, do we still do guided reading? And I'm like, well, guided reading is a term that we use for small group instruction with leveled books. But small group instruction with everyone having a decodable book is 100% like a great strategy to use with students.
So for sure that they can, they can do that.
But the keys are that they're more powerful if they're read first with a teacher. They're more powerful if they're used to support instruction.
I don't actually recommend using them for students that have broken the code already. And as a kindergarten teacher, I'm sure you've experienced this too. I've had students come into my room who are fully reading, like Franklin books or early chapter books, and I'm like, I don't feel that they need to be reading decodable books. Do they still need systematic, explicit instruction? Yes, because we need to make sure that they actually understand the components of the words. And we have to make sure that they know how to spell those words as well.
But do they need to start at Cat Nap? I don't think so. I've sort of been saying no. I know that there are some people who are starting everyone on that. So that's sort of my sort of recommendations. What are, what do you have any additional ones that you're using in your classroom?
[00:44:44] Kate Winn: I think you hit on some of my key ones. I mean, obviously paired with instruction. But I use them a lot for partner reading. I use them for my take home reading program.
I have a few kids assigned to each day of the week. They take the book home, practice it for a week, bring it back, and then read it to me on that day. And I just have it spread out because I can only listen to so many kids read on a given day. Right. So a few are Mondays and a few are Tuesdays. I agree with you about not every child. So I've only had a couple of kids since I've made this shift to structured literacy who have come in not needing to be somewhere in the decodable kind of range.
But you're right that those children have still participated in some of the phonics instruction we do, because even letter formation might not be there necessarily with those kids.
And you know how you talked about even attending to punctuation, all of that. Like they might be able to word by word, crack the code really well, but the prosty isn't there, you know, so fluency can still sometimes be done too. But I, you know, I had one student this year where right from the beginning of the year it was like, nope, you're, you're in trade books. Let's go to the library and get you some, some chapter books and you're ready to go. One other thing I want to suggest too is using them as assessment. Now, I don't do it in kindergarten per se, because in Ontario the kindergarten report card doesn't have letter grades or that sort of thing. But in grade one, let's say I've, I've had people who are confused about, we, I mean, our board uses Acadians, but the whole early reading screening and, you know, is that your grade for the report card? And how does that kind of work? And no, that's not really the best use of screening data. It isn't supposed to be you came in below benchmark, so that means you are a C on the report card. And now it's hard to, with language being, being one mark. It's not just reading, it's your, your writing and, and all of that combined. But, you know, just in terms of the, the leveling system we have in Ontario, students who are at level three are meeting expectations.
So if you have taught these concepts and the child can read them in a decodable text, they're meeting expectations like it's a piece of the puzzle. Again, you're not going to have them read a decodable text. And that's, that's the mark that you give them on their report card. But it's a piece of the puzzle too, right? Are they exceeding expectations? Is it more of a level 4? Are they not meeting the expectations of the scope and sequence that you've taught your phonics program, then that would be more of your level two. So there are ways to kind of incorporate that because I know a lot of people feel like, well, if I don't have my PM benchmark or I don't have, you know, whatever, how am I supposed to know what, what grade they get for reading? So again, not again, you're not going to take a decodable. And that's their one mark. But it's a piece of the puzzle, assessment wise, are they meeting the expectations of what you've taught? Because we spent a lot of time on this, you know, foundational skills piece of the day.
So obviously you're going to get some assessment information from that.
[00:47:28] Lee-Ann Lear: Well, for sure. And if you use a decodable that's based on the scope and sequence you've taught, then you can assure that you're actually assessing what you've taught. And that, that is.
It seems obvious, but it, but it really helps to make sure that that assessment is aligning exactly because it's almost like otherwise it's like we're going to do a multiplication lesson and now I'm going to give you a division test to see how you did.
You know, it's really important to make sure, it seems so obvious, but it is challenging, especially if there are multiple scope and sequences that you're using and if you're using some kind of a diagnostic that doesn't align with exactly what you taught.
[00:48:06] Kate Winn: Well, our time is starting to wind down. But I also want to ask you, what would you say have been some of your highs and lows of running a business in this market? The whole science of reading and, and being Canadian and all of that stuff. Any highs and lows you want to share?
[00:48:19] Lee-Ann Lear: Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I'm going to start with, with the lows because it's nice to end on the highs. I do miss teaching. I really do. I miss that connection with the students.
I still do a fair amount of teaching in terms of the workshops that I do where I'm working with adults, but I do miss. I miss the kids.
It's also. It's been a bit of a tough year. Even though the science of reading movement is still, is still moving through. There's a lot of things from a business perspective that have been, that have been hard. We've got.
Sales fluctuate, they come and they go depending on the money that the system has to spend.
Tariffs, I think, have played a role this year in things. We have a staff now that are, that rely on us to continue to sell and to continue to do, to do well. And this is something that we have never. Both my husband and I sort of run the company and we've never had that experience before of being a boss. Right. So there's a lot of pressure for me, particularly to keep creating quality resources that people still want to buy. We're so lucky though. I mean, the bonuses, we just have an amazing team that we work with here. Like every single one of our staff are just so awesome there. They, we laugh here, we have fun here. And that part is amazing.
I think some of the highs are the stories. Like we'll get an email or a message or we'll see something online where, you know, there's a picture sent to us of a child who's sleeping with their books because they consider them their friends, just like their stuffies. And there's just nothing better than that. Like that is just because ultimately our goal is to get little books in little hands. And when we hear that those stories, it's so exciting.
It's also super exciting working with teachers who are excited. So, because I started this journey a little earlier than some did, out of necessity, I spent a lot of time when I was in the school system trying to convince people that, that there is another way to teach reading and that our struggling students could be better served if we tweaked how we were instructing. And it was an uphill battle. And now I stand in front of a group of teachers in a workshop who are all super pumped and excited to be there and can't wait to learn. And that is just fantastic.
So those aspects of running the company have just been.
We just feel so lucky, so lucky to be doing this every day. Yeah.
[00:50:40] Kate Winn: That’s great, and I mean, you've mentioned staff and you were talking earlier about like your photo shoots and things like that. So I just want to throw in the fact that I feel like the SyllaSense books are also very reasonably priced considering the investment that goes into creating them too, right, because like you said, you guys are bosses now and you have stuff and, and all of that and you're still managing to, to keep a product at an accessible price, which I think is great too.
[00:51:03] Lee-Ann Lear: Well, we get it. We get around that by printing, like when we go to print, we print like 250,000 books at a time. So by printing a whole lot of books, you can keep the price down, but that, that allows us to keep the price down, but that's also part of the nerve-wracking bit because you do this print run and you just have to have faith that people are going to buy them. Right. So so far so good.
[00:51:24] Kate Winn: For sure, and I love that there's that, you.
[00:51:26] Kate Winn: Know, a little bit of Canadian content in there. But I also feel like these books are great for little American children learning to read. You know, like I feel like they can definitely be cross border books. Their quality is, is really good.
[00:51:37] Lee-Ann Lear: Well and we make sure we don't put any words in there that are spelled differently across the border so that, that there's a lot of double checking that goes into that.
[00:51:47] Kate Winn: That's great.
Before I let you have sort of the last word, I want to give.
[00:51:51] Kate Winn: A little shout out to my library. I sit on the board of the Kawartha Lakes Public Library and they have SyllaSense books now as part of the library. So they'll get one of the series and kind of box it up as a little kit that can be signed out. And I love it because you know, in libraries there's still a lot of that here are your step one books. Pinkalicious and the Magical Unicorn is the first book. Like who's gonna read Pinkalicious the Magical Unicorn if they're just starting to decode. Right. But some publisher has decided that's the step one or the level one or the whatever it is.
So I'm so excited that my library has gotten on board with this now, and I know so many other public libraries as well that the options there for parents too because whether your school has them, maybe you know, the school can't just necessarily send a whole bunch of copies home to families. And some schools just aren't even using things like this yet.
[00:52:43] Kate Winn: But just knowing some public libraries may have decodable text, SyllaSense or other that you can access as families is exciting too.
[00:52:51] Lee-Ann Lear: It's great to see.
[00:52:54] Kate Winn: Anything that I have not asked you that you want to share anything we've missed, anything new going on with SyllaSense that you want to mention before we say goodbye.
[00:53:01] Lee-Ann Lear: I think just to talk about a little bit about the fact that we're now doing in person and online workshops. So that's sort of something that has started this year that I love, love working with teachers that are excited and want to learn more. Our sort of core focus is on building background knowledge in the areas of like grapheme phoneme correspondence, orthographic conventions and morphology.
So we're running those and that has been.
So we just had the most amazing people come and show up here which is fantastic. And we've just added an online option where we've got a studio with a couple of cameras so we can demonstrate and, and have good quality video going out there. So I think that's just, if people aren't aware of that it's. It's good to know from an exciting point of view. With starting, we're just working on the green deck-odables right now. So the deck cards, which we've been getting a lot of feedback that people are enjoying using those decks for, for their instruction. And the green deck-odables are on the way. They're hopefully going to be available, we'll send them to print sort of September timeframe so we should have them midway through the fall.
And there we're having a ton, you talk about photos, trying to pick the photos for each one. Like there's, our team is amazing and they give me like five or six photos for each like phrase that it could be. And I mean I'm sitting in my office laughing out loud, like they're just, we're having a lot of fun with those. So those are coming too. So stay tuned for more information on those.
[00:54:29] Kate Winn: That sounds so fun.
[00:54:30] Lee-Ann Lear: I love.
[00:54:30] Kate Winn: So I have the yellow deck-odables and I use them a lot with my small group when I'm like the kids who need that extra support and we do things like, you know, they'll play games, I might have three kids and they'll each draw one and they have to read it and then, you know, it's almost like partner reading where, you know, a child can help the child if they don't get the sound and that sort of thing. But it's.
I feel like it's less intimidating for them sometimes to just have a card in front of them as opposed to a book with all the pages and that sort of thing. So I use those a lot for that. You mentioned your workshops. So some are virtual, but in person you are in the Newmarket area, is that correct?
[00:55:04] Lee-Ann Lear: We are, yeah. We are. We are. So we've got a nice. We've got a workshop. We were very, very lucky when we found this office.
It actually is bigger than we need, but it was available. It wasn't easy finding office space in the York region and this place is bigger than we needed. But what it allowed us to do is to put in a teacher workshop, which means we've got the space to invite people in, which has been like just super rewarding to work with teachers that are out there and learning and are trying and are, it's just been, I mean, hearing the stories about children reading the books is thrilling.
But listening to the shifts and talking with teachers that are so exciting, I mean that's, that's, that rivals it in terms of that excitement that we feel around here when things are going well. So it's it's great to see. Yeah.
[00:55:52] Kate Winn: Oh that's wonderful. Lee-Ann Lear, thank you so much for being here for this episode of Reading Road Trip. This was a fun chat.
[00:55:59] Lee-Ann Lear: Thanks Kate.
[00:56:02] Kate Winn: Show notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found at podcast.idaontario.com and you have been listening to season four episode five with Lee-Ann Lear.
Now it's time for that typical end of the podcast call to action. If you enjoy this episode of Reading Road Trip, we'd love it if you could rate and or review it in your podcast app as this is extremely helpful for a podcast and of course we welcome any social media love you feel inspired to spread as well. Feel free to tag IDA Ontario and me. My handle is thismomloves on Twitter and Facebook, katethismomloves on Instagram and Kate Winn on Blue Sky.
Make sure you're following following the Reading Road Trip podcast so you don't miss a single episode in this jam packed season. New episodes will be released on Monday mornings all summer long.
We couldn't bring Reading Road Trip to you without behind the scenes support from Brittany Haynes and Melinda Jones at IDA Ontario.
I'm Kate Winn and along with my co producer Dr. Una Malcolm, we hope this episode of Reading Road Trip has made your path to evidence based literacy instruction just a little bit clearer and a lot more fun.
