TWG Jacquelyn Davis
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[00:00:00] Jacqueline: At a certain point, he said, Mom, I know what you're doing. And I said, Really, what? And he said, You're trying to help me learn to read, but it's okay. It's fun, so we can keep going.
[00:00:10] Speaker: Hey, everybody, Cheri Dotterer here. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, depending on where you listen to the podcast. Hey, I just wanted to talk to you about a story that was resonating with me as our guests today, and I were talking before we hit record. I was thinking about this story, That happened to me.
[00:00:33] Speaker: Now you all know that I'm a, an occupational therapist, yet I did some substitute teaching while I was writing handwriting brain body disconnect. And if you don't know what that is a book about dysgraphia that was published back in 2019. It's on Amazon. You can go to my website, CheriDotterer. com and you can download it.
[00:00:54] Speaker: The story is that I was substitute teaching in a. 5th grade classroom , [00:01:00] you come into the classroom and you're looking through the lesson plan and you're trying to get assimilated for the day. And there was a note that said, I'm not quite sure what the child's name was. See Joey for morning routine.
[00:01:14] Speaker: Okay, the morning routine happened to be amazing sensory motor motions that these kids needed to get their cognitive base ready for learning. I thought, Oh, this is great. I realized after doing more research , the teacher wasn't strategically doing those activities at the right moment throughout the day to benefit the child at the right academic level. moment. One of the things that I've been doing is really studying when to do what, when to do the bilateral integration activities. When, like, when does crossing midline gonna benefit the kid the best?
[00:01:59] Speaker: [00:02:00] Without further ado, I'd like to introduce Jacqueline Davies. She's from Clevernoodle. Clevernoodle, I believe, if I'm understanding comes out of Washington, D. C. The Structured Literacy Program that is making strides around the country. I believe it's because the background of, , Ms.
[00:02:22] Speaker: Davies. Welcome to the podcast and tell us a little bit more about yourself.
[00:02:26] Jacqueline: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. Really grateful. Always appreciate the opportunity to talk in partnership with educators and parents that care deeply about how we support our children to become effective readers. I'll give you the really quick just overview.
[00:02:43] Jacqueline: Back history and back story, and then I'll fast forward to the current moment. I've been in education for 30 years. I was a high school teacher. I was a co founder of a high school that served low income children in a really low income neighborhood in Washington, D. C. We created that [00:03:00] school to do what we thought was possible for all children.
[00:03:03] Jacqueline: if given the right opportunities to be educated effectively. The school one block away from us had 3 percent grade level reading for their high school. We took the same population of kids a block away, non selective school, and had them reading at about 86 percent proficiency within a few years. That was the first time I saw, exactly, it's not the kids.
[00:03:30] Jacqueline: It's not that the kids can't. It's that we as adults. haven't yet.
[00:03:34] Jacqueline: That was the first time I saw, exactly, it's not the kids.
[00:03:39] Jacqueline: It's not that the kids can't. It's that we as adults. haven't yet.
[00:03:44] Jacqueline: If we as the adults do the organizing that we need and the educating that we need, specifically based on evidence based practices, we can accelerate kids learning and children can learn. ,
[00:03:57] Cheri: You and Jonily, my co author, would so get along. [00:04:00] I can't wait to introduce you both together. Fast forward to today. Tell us more.
[00:04:05] Jacqueline: Fast forward to today, I did not expect to be on the journey that I'm on now. After 30 years in education and many different roles from training of principals to training of teachers to working on the philanthropy side, COVID happened.
[00:04:20] Jacqueline: As all families in America and teachers know all too well. All of our kids came home. What I very quickly noticed and saw that it was much worse than I had understood. With my child's very ineffective reading, frankly, he was a first grader at the end of first grade, and he couldn't read. He didn't know his alphabet.
[00:04:41] Jacqueline: He couldn't put all the letters in sequence. He didn't know all their names, and he definitely didn't know their sounds. And by sitting with him day after day and trying to support him in a couple of weeks, I recognized how dire the situation was, and he didn't want to be online reading. He hated it. And he hated reading and he [00:05:00] thought he was really stupid.
[00:05:01] Jacqueline: Now, I was not an early literacy expert. I was a high school teacher. Early literacy was really new for me. But fortunately, because I was in education and I had a lot of colleagues and friends, I started calling and asking lots and lots of questions, and I started reading. And I started reading books by neuroscientists about how the brain learns to read.
[00:05:23] Jacqueline: And I had that aha. And, embarrassingly, the aha that many of us need and don't even know that Ah! Reading is not just a natural thing that happens. I thought it just happened. You mean we actually have to teach children to read, and it's not common, and it's not like speaking. Speaking, of course, we adopt from our household, right?
[00:05:45] Jacqueline: If you're in a Spanish speaking household, you adopt that, and you develop that, and you learn that language. If you're English, same thing. But reading is not a natural adopted skill. It actually has to be.
[00:05:59] Jacqueline: Neither [00:06:00] is writing.
[00:06:02] Jacqueline: And neither is handwriting and spelling. As I came to appreciate that and then watching my son online, I realized that his school was teaching.
[00:06:14] Jacqueline: the curriculum that had been discredited and that was shown not to be effective. So that was my first, Oh no, we have a challenge here.
[00:06:25] Cheri: How did you manage that? , did your son have a 504 or an IEP or was he in the regular mainstream and how did you tackle that?
[00:06:37] Jacqueline: He was in regular mainstream and.
[00:06:40] Jacqueline: As I shared, he was in first grade. What's fascinating is in kindergarten, I started to be worried. I started to see these red flags and think, oh, he's not progressing at the same rate. is other kids that are his friends that I see. So I went to the kindergarten teacher and I said, Hey, I have this concern.[00:07:00]
[00:07:00] Speaker: And her response was, don't worry. He's a boy. He's really smart. And he will read when he is ready. So I thought, okay, you're the kindergarten teacher. You've seen hundreds of children. Better than me. I'll trust you on this. Now we're in first grade. Early first grade. Same thing. I go to the teacher and I say, Hey, he still doesn't know his alphabet.
[00:07:25] Speaker: He can't remember the letter names. He can't remember the sounds. Couldn't we talk? Same thing. He's a boy. He's a late bloomer. He's smart. It'll work out. He'll learn to read. Don't worry.
[00:07:39] Cheri: I
[00:07:39] Cheri: have
[00:07:39] Cheri: a question before you go on to the rest of the story. Was he an early six year old or a late six year old when he entered kindergarten?
[00:07:48] Speaker: Great question. He was early. He's a summer birthday, which I think also made them feel like they could more easily make the claim that he was a late bloomer.
[00:07:57] Speaker: Cause it wasn't really about late blooming. It [00:08:00] was about being early.
[00:08:01] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[00:08:02] Speaker: I made
[00:08:02] Cheri: my son wait cause he's also an August baby. I made him wait the extra year.
[00:08:07] Speaker: Not a bad idea, and in hindsight, I wish we had. That's one parenting misstep that I still sometimes think about trying to correct at these transition points.
[00:08:18] Speaker 2: Don't make me put any guilt trip on you. That was not my reason for my question.
[00:08:22] Jacqueline: I just think it's a really great thing to consider. I will say my one concern with having kids repeat is if the school is not doing the right thing, it's subjecting the child to another year of receiving not right thing education.
[00:08:38] Jacqueline: But sometimes kids just do need more time because they're really young. I think you have to think about your own child and try to understand what's going on and particularly understand what the school is doing and what curriculum they are teaching. Because we were in COVID, because I couldn't get a lot of support, because I came to discover that his school was teaching very [00:09:00] discredited curriculum and teaching him the 3Qing and teaching him to guess, wasn't teaching him his sound letter correspondent, wasn't teaching him how to sound out words, I thought, okay this is not going to work.
[00:09:12] Jacqueline: I need to get more skilled very quickly and start helping my child. At the same time, because he couldn't read, he was really feeling a lot of shame and a lot of embarrassment because his friends could read, and he began to feel like he was really stupid, and he became increasingly resistant to anything that seem like reading.
[00:09:38] Jacqueline: I got desperate. We are a family that plays a lot of games. We have family game night. And I thought, how do I start taking these games that we play and substituting out the cards or the activities using some of the same gameplay? But making it about reading. I started doing that. And then at night, [00:10:00] after he went to sleep, I would read books on phonics.
[00:10:03] Jacqueline: I would read books on phonemic awareness. I would learn the scope and sequence. I would study and then I would think about where he was at that moment. And then I would make board games. I'm going to grab, this is one of my early, all the cardboard boxes that come from the COVID deliveries. When we were still washing the vegetables I would take it night and I would make games.
[00:10:27] Jacqueline: And then I would try to align them to the best of my ability to the research on how children learn to read. And it started helping a lot. At a certain point. One, he was ready, he was willing to play all the time, so he was getting a ton of practice in, and he was making really substantial progress.
[00:10:47] Jacqueline: And then at a certain point, he said, Mom, I know what you're doing. And I said, Really, what? And he said, You're trying to help me learn to read, but it's okay. It's fun, so we can keep going. Oh my gosh,
[00:10:59] Speaker 2: [00:11:00] that's adorable.
[00:11:01] Jacqueline: I talked to his teacher and his teacher was really blown away at the progress that she saw him making when she would jump back in and do a check in on his progress.
[00:11:12] Speaker: She couldn't believe the progress. And she said, he's making more progress in these couple of months at home. Then he's made all year with us. I really think you should give me more of these games to try with other kids. And I did, and she did, and she said, you really have to publish this. That is how Clever Noodle was born.
[00:11:35] Speaker: I also searched the market, buying everything I could find that was a reading game. And consistently what I saw over and over again was that was one, the games were not aligned to the science of reading and what we know about how children learn to read. Two, the art stunk most of the time. And three, they weren't fun.
[00:11:58] Speaker: I remember this one game, it was called [00:12:00] Phonics Game. My son was like, this is not a game. This is phonics cards. This is not a game, mom, and I'm not playing it. I kept thinking about how do I make this a real game? How do I make this really fun? How do I make it great art? How do I make it not look like a game?
[00:12:17] Speaker: Not look like a reading game. So that again, he thinks, Oh yeah, mom, I know what you're doing. You're teaching me to read. But I don't care. It's so fun that I want to do it. And it feels to me like a regular game. It looks like a regular game. You're sneaking in the reading science. I'll show you our 1st game.
[00:12:33] Speaker: This is called Kangaroo Cravings, and I can tell you more about it in a little bit, but that's our 1st game. We have another game coming out. We also have an expansion pack for the game, but we have a lot of new things coming and they're all aligned to the science of reading.
[00:12:51] Cheri: I love it. I love it.
[00:12:54] Cheri: , is there any writing involved?
[00:12:57] Speaker: In every game, we [00:13:00] are trying to teach a fundamental skill. That's a what I call a gateway skill. It's something that the kids have to learn and be able to do to move to the next level of their reading, writing and spelling. We also try to embed multi sensory in every game because we know that's important for children to map the words to their long term memory and to increase the neural pathway connectivity.
[00:13:25] Speaker: That's also essential for children with learning differences, dyslexia, ADHD, Even high functioning autism spectrum, the more you can have kids doing the physical and consolidating, the more they can focus and engage. We want to make sure our games are effective for all children and inclusive of children that have learning differences.
[00:13:48] Speaker: In terms of the writing, this game, Kangaroo Cravings, has some writing in it, not a robust, Component of writing, but some writing and spelling. We are working on [00:14:00] additional games that get in the handwriting and also the spelling because we know that there's the interconnection between the reading and the sounding out, the writing and the spelling, and that the more we can do this interconnectivity, the more we're going to help children accelerate.
[00:14:18] Speaker 2: Writing is going to be more prevalent in future games, which will be wonderful, but it is the right place to start. You need to get the eyes and the sensory part working before you can have a motor part working. It's just naturally the way things go. That's why speaking is so much easier than writing because it uses Neurological mechanisms to execute the task.
[00:14:46] Speaker 2: People are not aware of the connections, but yet. are also then not aware of how much they're still disconnected because it's not intuitive. It's exactly what you said [00:15:00] earlier. You need to be taught. The wording in Common Core said font.
[00:15:06] Speaker 2: Style and text style and didn't come right down and say, and make sure they do 20 minutes of handwriting every session. It put a damper on kids education. I'm sorry, your kiddo is probably going through a curriculum where handwriting is not at the forefront of the teacher's mind either. Especially when they were in kindergarten and first grade, where they were trying to put everything together.
[00:15:33] Speaker 2: It wasn't. Part of that curriculum in most schools, I see right now that the third, fourth graders, is that where about where he is? Third, fourth grade? He is in
[00:15:43] Speaker: fifth grade. And I can't wait to tell you the rest of the story in a minute because it gets better. Thank goodness. And I, it's a powerful story.
[00:15:54] Speaker: What Our son's story shows us is what's possible for all kids, [00:16:00] but what needs to happen for them. Too many children in our country are not given what we know they need to be able to succeed. That's a travesty and it's a loss to all of us. Were sharing such important information about the connectivity and how Disconnected so many of our curriculums still are, and how important it is to have this integration.
[00:16:25] Speaker: I'm going to get back to my son's story in just a second, but because we're on this topic, I also as a parent early on thought, if I just read to my child from zero on, if I just read those board books and sit and snuggle, I'm going to do so much to help. And yes, that is essential.
[00:16:44] Speaker: And this is before the child is responsive. You can read a little board book to the child who's six months old and say, look at Sally. She has on a green dress. Do you see her green dress? The child's not going to respond yet. They're not verbal, [00:17:00] but you're starting to have a discussion. And then as soon as the child is verbal, you can start to ask them to think, which dress do you like best?
[00:17:09] Speaker: Why? They may only have a few words, but getting them to process and think and be in a dialogue is different than just reading. Reading is essential, and it teaches them all kinds of things. It teaches them what a book looks like, how the pages turn, that you read from left to it's teaching them all of these essential foundational skills, and by just doing a little bit of the dialogue back and forth, and then increasing that with age appropriateness.
[00:17:36] Speaker: You're bringing it to a whole nother level. I didn't know that. And then I learned that and I thought, Oh, I wish I had done that. Now I share that with a lot of parents because it's an easy fix. It's just a little piece of get in discussion. And then it can get more advanced. It can say Oh, Jamal just found a candy.
[00:17:59] Speaker: What do you think he's going to [00:18:00] do with it? Or, Canick. And Jamie are playing hide and seek. What do you think is going to happen next? And you're building prediction skills. You're building their ability to think about what might come next. And so you can, advance that over time.
[00:18:19] Speaker: But I wish someone had told me from zero on, don't just read, but talk to the child and discuss it. And so you're bringing this literature to life. Again, you're building those neural connections to process information.
[00:18:35] Speaker: My son, who's now a fifth grader and is not just a fluent, reader, but he is above grade level. I will tell you all when he was in first grade, I didn't think that would ever happen.
[00:18:46] Speaker: I was beyond concerned and I didn't know what to do to help him. The games became a critical part, but not the only part. I want to make sure that your viewers and your audience [00:19:00] understand it's not just one thing you do. It's a combination of things that are often needed To really move a child forward, particularly if they're behind, if they're far behind.
[00:19:10] Speaker: Our son started second grade, two full academic years behind in reading. We continued to play the games and I built more and more games of which many will come to the open market for other parents and teachers to enjoy. I used that as an access point. I used that to get him out from underneath the table when he didn't want to read.
[00:19:34] Speaker: I got him out of the laundry basket when he was hiding so he wouldn't have to read in order to get him to engage. That became the way that I got access, the way that I brought him back in. And definitely all that practice was essential, and we also needed to put him in a school where they taught reading aligned to the evidence, and where they taught [00:20:00] phonics, and where they understood phonemic awareness, and where they understood that decodables were important to align to what children were learning so that their reading matches what they're learning and it's aligned.
[00:20:12] Speaker: It was a very hard shift to find a school that was doing science of reading. We are very lucky in Washington, D. C. that all of our public schools are now moving to the science of reading. Some of the schools still had opt outs. Our local neighborhood school still had an opt out. They were still using the discredited curriculum.
[00:20:34] Speaker: Because it was a process of change, right? And it's a hard thing for a school system to change in entirety. And thank goodness more and more are starting to change. So we moved him to a school and we were extremely fortunate that we could get him into another school where they were teaching the reading.
[00:20:53] Speaker: And that made a tremendous difference. We were continuing to play lots and lots of games to back up [00:21:00] everything. He was learning in school. Very effective skills aligned to what we know works, and we had outside tutoring, and so it was the combination of those three things that catapulted him, and by the time he finished third grade, so two years later, He was at grade level and then through fourth grade and fifth grade, he continued to accelerate and continue to improve.
[00:21:30] Speaker: Your comment about handwriting and the curriculum, that was an essential part of their curriculum. Not only did they teach print, but they taught cursive, which is a lost art, exactly. And now I know how important it is to teach cursive and print and how much the cursive helps with the neural pathways .
[00:21:55] Speaker: And that's almost absent in all of our schools now. [00:22:00]
[00:22:00] Speaker 2: Yes, and research shows that kids that have writing delay reading delay do better with cursive because they don't have to pick up the pencil. They see the word as one unit rather than individual letters. Which is forced upon you with print.
[00:22:20] , I saw that firsthand. My girlfriend had a first grader who she homeschooled. She taught her cursive before she ever taught her print and her reading all of a sudden started taking off. Her writing took off and today she is excelling and she's a 10 or 11. At this point, she's really
[00:22:44] Speaker: had a track record now, so important and it's.
[00:22:49] Speaker: such a miss that we're not teaching it in more schools. We started doing cursive along that same period when he was struggling during [00:23:00] COVID, the last quarter of the year, I started reading the research that talked about how important cursive was. I just started teaching him cursive .
[00:23:09] Speaker: And so we did cursive all summer. We did cursive in the fall. And then thankfully, when we were able to get him into a different school, They understood best practice, and so they were teaching phonemic awareness. They were teaching phonics. They were teaching background knowledge. They were teaching vocabulary, which sometimes we also forget now.
[00:23:27] Speaker: They were teaching cursive, and it was amazing to see that 2 year gap close, but not only was it a 2 year gap that closed. He had to also maintain a grade level, right? So sometimes what happens is we close that two year gap, but then the child is at the beginning of the third grade and has now missed third grade.
[00:23:47] Speaker: They're still a year behind. We were able with all these pieces coming together and all of this combination of support to not only catch him up the two years, but keep him on track for third grade. By the time he finished, [00:24:00] he was actually ready for the fourth grade.
[00:24:02] , I think a lot. Of our students fall into that category
[00:24:07] Speaker 2: I talked to you a little bit about Tier 1 interventions. About the other podcasts that we have started. Some people on this podcast may not know that, but if you go to Tier 1 interventions, that's a brand new podcast if we did better collaborative classroom interactions with the adults. It would improve. For example, why do we segregate the kids that are needing this special support? Why aren't they part of the classroom and the therapist is coming in, sitting beside them while the teacher's teaching, making the adaptations alongside , the student, and letting them integrate together?
[00:24:55] Speaker 2: Isn't that more inclusion than pulling them out
[00:24:57] Speaker 2: [00:25:00] I've been doing a lot of my research is how do we create inclusive learning? in collaborative environments, trying to decrease pull out and Are we going to have success? I help teachers with that , but I'm also helping the therapists.
[00:25:19] Speaker 2: They're also thinking, how can I get into a classroom?
[00:25:23] . I talk a lot about tier one, tier two, and tier three, because we, in this country, have 70 percent of our children not reading a grade level by third grade.
[00:25:35] Speaker 2: Writing's about the same, but a little bit more.
[00:25:38] Speaker: I would suspect that's exactly what's happening because if you're not reading, you're likely not writing either. And it's probably worse because reading is treated as the first part of the sequence and then writing again, we know we should actually be integrating those as we should be integrating vocabulary and background knowledge.
[00:25:57] Speaker: I think that's another big mess right now, but [00:26:00] with tier one, 70 percent of our children are not reading at grade level. The neuroscientists say, That only 5 percent shouldn't be able to read a grade level if we do the right thing. So we should have. 95 percent reading at grade level.
[00:26:16] Speaker: In this country, we have 30%. So something is really amiss. Tier 1, and for those of you that are not sure about what Tier 1 means, don't worry. I used to not know this either. Tier 1 is what we consider the basic core instruction. It's what all kids are going to get. It's the regular day to day curriculum.
[00:26:36] Speaker: Whenever the reading block comes, it's what all the kids are getting. And tier 1 instruction in this country is broken. Over 60 percent of our American elementary schools are using curriculum for Tier 1 that is discredited and not aligned to the science we know of how children read. The very first thing we have to do is get Tier 1 curriculum to be aligned.[00:27:00]
[00:27:00] Speaker: If we did that, 70 percent of our children, and maybe more, would be served and should be able to read a grade level by just that core curriculum. Then you'll have some kids, about, 20 percent that are Tier 2. Sometimes you can address tier two by exactly what you're saying. Just push in and give a little extra support.
[00:27:24] Speaker: Do a little extra practice. That's where, frankly, games can be enormously helpful. They can be enormously helpful in tier one, but if you're trying to get a set of kids to practice again and again, making it fun, using games helps with the absorption. What I call the stickiness. It makes practice fun.
[00:27:42] Speaker: It makes practice bearable. And it makes kids less resistant. It's going to get absorbed more. It's going to extend that learning time. It's going to extend the classroom learning from tier 1. But tier 1, getting tier 1 right. Should serve 70 plus percent of our kids and then about 20 are going to need tier [00:28:00] 2.
[00:28:00] Speaker: Sometimes that's more practice. Sometimes that's small group. Sometimes that's a push in service that's, collaborating with the teacher and supporting the child in the moment and giving them some extra attention. And then about 10 percent of our kids are going to need Tier 3, and that's a kid like my kid who starts off two years behind, and it's going to be a massive lift to catch them up.
[00:28:21] Speaker: That's a dyslexic kid who just needs a considerably higher amount of engagement and practice. That might be a severely ADHD kid who's having a lot of distraction in the classroom and needs some more time. But Tier 3 should be 10%, max 15%, and that's when you may have to use all the tools in the toolbox.
[00:28:43] Speaker: Do some pull out, do some push in, but most of our kids don't ever get to Tier 3 if we do the right thing in Tier 1, and so I get challenged. I believe deeply in tutoring for our Tier 2 and our Tier 3 kids, but we're using [00:29:00] tutoring as the tool for Tier 1 mistake and for Tier 1 bad quality curriculum.
[00:29:08] Speaker: We can't tutor our way out of this crisis. We don't have enough people and we don't have enough money. The way out of this crisis is to get Tier 1 right. And so I'm thrilled that you're focusing on Tier 1 and all that we can do to serve 70 percent of our kids and try to move this to 70 percent reading at grade level instead of 30.
[00:29:31] Speaker: We have the 30 percent of harder to crack nut kids, but we'd have the time and resources to do that. So I'm delighted to hear that you're focusing on tier one and doing a special podcast because we need to move tier one. We need to improve what we're doing in tier one.
[00:29:47] . One of the things that I think is. Missing in education is this idea that we have to remember everything. And there's a neurologist, his name is [00:30:00] Scott Small. He wrote the book called Forgetting. And what he says is forgetting is necessary.
[00:30:08] Speaker 2: The reason forgetting is necessary is because when you go to re remember something, it actually builds better myelination connections in the cortex better sulci, better gyrus, so that you can use that previous knowledge, which you mentioned earlier.
[00:30:30] Speaker 2: With our kids, we expect them to remember everything that we've taught them the first time. Kids can't remember.
[00:30:39] Speaker 2: , you need repetition.
[00:30:41] Speaker 2: You need repetition and when we relate this back to tier one, kids that are really a tier one need two to 10 repetitions to remember it. Kids in tier two are going to need 20 to 50.
[00:30:59] Speaker 2: Kids in [00:31:00] tier three are going to need a minimum of a hundred. Think about it, trying to teach a child one letter to write it. And they do have the disability. It's going to take them over a hundred times of practicing it before they go, Oh, a T's just a straight line with a cross on it.
[00:31:21] Speaker: I read when I was in this early part of my journey of deep dive into the literacy science to support my own child.
[00:31:29] Speaker: I read a book by Marianne Wolf, who's a. Incredible neuroscientist who's written extensively about the brain and how the brain learns to read. She literally said exactly what you just said. She said for a dyslexic child or a child that is really far behind, it's 100 plus practices to the average child's ability.
[00:31:49] Speaker: 5 to 10. And that was a huge light bulb for me Oh, so my kid is going to have 100 times of this practice to the regular kid who's already on grade [00:32:00] levels 10. That was another reason why I thought of games, because how am I going to get 100 practices in? I'm not going to get them to do the same lesson 100 times.
[00:32:09] Speaker: How do I extend the learning? And how do I get that repetition in that practice? And that's, again, where games. Get that, right? The games, let's take sight words, for example, which I don't really like to call sight words. They're high frequency words, which are the most common words in early children's literature.
[00:32:27] Speaker: That's what Kangaroo Cravings is all about. That's the 300 early high frequency words, which, many people call the sight words. I'll explain in a minute why I don't like to call them sight words, but they're sight words. The Dulch words, which many parents and teachers will have heard of, the heart words, the Orton Gillingham words, the Orton Gillingham, the heart words, which are the tricky words.
[00:32:48] Speaker: We did a high frequency of all the 300 most common of those words. Of course, there's tremendous overlap, but you can see what the frequency is in [00:33:00] early children's literature. There is a misnomer or misconception that all of those words are irregular and cannot be sounded out. That's not accurate. 95 percent of them are regular and can and should be sounded out.
[00:33:15] Speaker: It's very important to teach the children how you decode. A word like hot, you can decode. Everything in there is phonemically regular. Hot. That's regular. A word like put, is irregular because that, if you're really saying put, you should have put, you should have two O's in it, but this U is irregular, but the whole word is not irregular because the child knows the puh and the tuh.
[00:33:46] Speaker: It's just the U that we put in red to signal to the child. It's a tricky one.
[00:33:52] Speaker: , my son was given the 220 Dolch words and told on one sheet of paper and told to memorize 20 a week. [00:34:00] We don't want children memorizing words, and that's not the kind of practice we want them to have, to do it again, and again, as a flashcard memorization.
[00:34:08] Speaker: One, there's no way children can memorize all the words in the world. And two, we are not teaching them the foundational skill which they need, which is to how to sound a word out. Fancy term decoding. So we are much better off If we are showing kids words that are considered these high frequency words and signaling to them, it's regular, it's phonemically regular, you can sound this out and you should.
[00:34:31] Speaker: So we're teaching that decoding skill, we're teaching the sounding out skill. And then we're flagging for kids something that's tricky, which is about 5 percent of those words. With repetitive practice is how a child does this fancy thing called orthographic mapping. And what that means is you practice that word so much by sounding it out that it starts to be recorded in your long term memory.
[00:34:53] Speaker: And then it's stored. And once it's stored, then you have instant recall. And so that's what fluency is [00:35:00] about. That's what accuracy and pace of reading is about. The more you know words that you can recall because you learned them properly, Then you start to pick up the speed at which you can read, and you're not having to stop and sound out every word.
[00:35:13] Speaker: But we can't teach kids to memorize all the words. That's impossible. And we don't want to because then we're denying them that essential skill of sounding words out. These are often called sight words, and I joke and say, yes, they do become sight words. After you've mapped them to your long term memory, after you've practiced them, then there's instant recall.
[00:35:34] Speaker: And so then when you see them, you do know them by sight, but that's the back end of the process rather than the front end where you memorize the word and then you would know it by sight. That's a terrible skill to be teaching kids. But many kids are still taught that way. That is how most of the Dulge 220 sight words are taught.
[00:35:53] Speaker: In Kangaroo Cravings, we differentiate. The phonemically regular from the phonemically irregular. This goes to the question [00:36:00] about writing. We have nine multisensory actions. The child would say each of these letters, sound the word out. If it's a tricky letter or tricky set of letters or a tricky word, they would then get grown up help or peer help.
[00:36:14] Speaker: Then they're going to do this multisensory action, spelling the letters. So in this case, they're going to literally write on the desk, and P E O P L E, and so they're using their finger to make each one of those letters. There's one that the kids love, which is nose writing, and they would do the same thing.
[00:36:40] Speaker: P, U, T. And so it's forcing them to do that actual development of the word connecting those neural pathways. The one they all love the most is the tail writing, where they have to take their tush and move their whole entire body. And that, of course, makes them laugh. And they particularly like if an adult does it.
[00:36:59] Speaker: [00:37:00] That is how we should be teaching sight words. And we know kids are not going to memorize. A Xerox piece of 220 words, that's absurd and we shouldn't be teaching that way. It's practice, it's repetition, it's sounding words out so that those letters and those sounds become very familiar. And that too becomes a repetitive trained skill.
[00:37:22] Speaker: Everything you said is what I learned in the research. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, Oh, how do we get from those 10 practices to the hundred? And what are the kinds of tools we can give parents and teachers to increase that practice and not make it worse.
[00:37:40] Speaker 2: We're running out of time, but I want to give you one more trick.
[00:37:44] Speaker 2: As you're looking at other games that you can think about this. One of the things that I've been doing in my research is looking at air writing. And you had talked about people. I'm finding with my [00:38:00] kids, especially my kids who are struggling the most is putting both fingers together. P E.
[00:38:08] Speaker: Oh, interesting. Oh,
[00:38:10] Speaker 2: P. Putting them side by side.
[00:38:14] Speaker 2: Interlaced bilateral integration is what I do when I'm doing that, but I can also, you can also do it finger to finger, side by side. What you're doing is you're activating both sides of the brain. So you're activating the logic, you're activating the creative, you're putting them together.
[00:38:31] Speaker 2: You're solidifying both sides at the same time, not just the dominant side. With some letters, like the word kangaroo, it's a picture. It's an animal, so it's a thing. We have to make that connection to the creativity part of what a kangaroo looks like and then the logic part of what it does, like the kangaroo hops and stuff like that.
[00:38:56] Speaker 2: By doing that kind of activity or interlaced and a [00:39:00] reason interlaced works this way rather than this way is because this will give you the chance for writing. For those of you who are listening to the podcast, just go over to the YouTube link and watch it there and you can see what I did differently with my hands, but I interlaced them with my palms away from me because that'll prepare the kids motor planning for writing.
[00:39:26] Speaker 2: I just wanted to give
[00:39:26] Speaker: you
[00:39:26] Speaker 2: that
[00:39:27] Speaker: little thought.
[00:39:28] Speaker: No, that's great. We actually add tips onto our website of additional things you can do. I'm going to come back to you and make sure I get that and we're going to add it as a tip so that we can have additional tips to help families, because that's also what we do.
[00:39:43] Speaker: Anybody can subscribe to our newsletters for free. You just go to our website, www. clevernoodle. com, and we send out a monthly newsletter full of content. It is not marketing. It is content. We care deeply about helping teachers and families [00:40:00] learn more about the science of reading and be able to support whatever children are in front of them, their students or their own children.
[00:40:06] Speaker: And we do a monthly webinar and all that content is free. So if you just subscribe. We'll give it to you and you can choose what you want to participate in, what you want to read. So thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Thank
[00:40:20] Speaker 2: you for being here, Ms. Davis. And remember, you were put here for such a time as this.
[00:40:27] Speaker 2: This has been Cheri Dotterer of The Writing Glitch. Subscribe and send us a review and let us know how we are doing. Again, thanks for being here today, Jacqueline. Thank you.
