Do you want to get excited about teaching words, vocabulary, spelling, and writing instruction? Do you want to see your students embrace these subjects as enriching and empowering abilities — not just another academic task? Sean Morrissey points the way with The Word Mapping Project, a series of clear, consistent 35-minute lessons that integrate these language and literacy abilities using cognitive learning principles that make instruction stick. 

Sean, a school psychologist who became a classroom teacher, discusses the excitement that comes from seeing diverse groups of students embrace reading, spelling, vocabulary, and writing tasks they once avoided. Sean makes integrating this innovative and enriching approach simple enough all teachers to embrace, including classroom and content area teachers, EL and intervention specialists, SLPs and tutors.    

Website: www.wordmappingproject.com

X handle: https://x.com/smorrisey   @smorrisey

Substack: https://seanmorrisey.substack.com/

Do your students struggle to stay focused, avoid distractions, begin and complete assignments, or remember directions? Would you like to help them resist impulses, switch between tasks, and manage their thoughts and behaviors?

Speech-Language Pathologist Beth Coppic Gunshor discusses how these executive function (EF) skills play out when working with students, turning abstract concepts into practical activities that build academic and life-defining skills. Learn how Beth uses self-talk, whiteboard clocks, and flashlights to help her students remember past events so they can visualize the future to decide what action to take right now.

Resources mentioned during For the Love of Literacy’s podcast on literacy and executive function with Beth Coppoc Gunshor

Cognitive Connections: Sarah Ward and Kristin Jacobson

Video about working clock, starting at 30 minutes

Tera Sumpter: Seeds of Learning

Gretchen Wegner: Anti-Boring Learning Lab

Michael Mcleod: GrowNow ADHD

Video of Dimensional Change Card Sort Test

Center on the Developing Child: Building the Brain’s “Air Traffic Control” System: How Early Experiences Shape the Development of Executive Function

“If only we, as dyslexics, had learned how the English writing system works—from words to sentences—when we were in elementary school! Maybe we wouldn’t have struggled with language and literacy.” 

For decades, non-dyslexic individuals have been telling dyslexics how they learn, often focusing strictly on early literacy skills. This offers a very limited view of dyslexia. Listen to two adult dyslexics, literacy instructor Marie Foley and For the Love of Literacy host Bruce Howlett, discuss their decades-long struggle with reading comprehension, complex word spelling, and written expression. Your understanding of dyslexia will be transformed.

In this episode, Bruce hands over hosting duties to linguist Sara Lee. Sara works with Marie and Bruce on grammar and syntax, taking them beneath the surface of words and sentences while exploring new learning methods. Today, Marie and Bruce are utterly fascinated by language and its many connections to literacy. Best of all, written and spoken English finally make sense!

If your students read accurately but with limited fluency, comprehension or interest then Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert’s talk will be of great benefit. Freddy summarizes her decades of research, showing how vocabulary depth and richness are key components of reading comprehension and written expression. 

 Dr. Hiebert has created two essential materials: Teaching Words and How They Work, and TextProject.Org. Teaching Words centers literacy instruction on vocabulary development and how children learn, understand and read complex words. She notes that most students read with high accuracy, but with limited fluency and vocabulary depth. 

 To address this widespread problem, Freddy’s TextProject.org provides free resources for teaching vocabulary development and semantics, or word meaning. The site includes ready-to-use word webs, Exceptional Expressions and Super Synonyms as well as reading material for emerging readers, content areas and Teen Reads. 

 The subtitle of Teaching Words is Small Changes for Big Vocabulary Results. Dr. Hiebert talks about the importance of small changes, not wholesale shifts, for improving instruction. 

TextProject.org

Many students who struggle with literacy also struggle with math. 

• Understanding the number system requires engaging linguistic, cognitive, executive functions and conceptual understanding -- just like literacy. 
• Meaning is as important to math learning as it does in literacy. 
• Math that is taught as a series of isolated procedures, facts and “islands of knowledge” disconnected from meaning will make little sense - just as it does with reading. 
• Math makes sense when students learn the structure of math, including its syntax and vocabulary, and approach it as a coherent system. This also diminishes math anxiety.    

 Bruce Howlett’s Seven Layers of Literacy Approach:  ReadingShift.com 

Megan Hicks: [email protected] 

The Sentence Studio www.scienceofthesentence.com

Jen Petrich: 

• Literacy Dr website:  https://www.theliteracydr.com
• ·         D.O.T.S. course info and registration:   https://www.theliteracydr.com/pd/dots
• ·         Wednesdays with Literacy Dr (free drop-in) info and registration: https://www.theliteracydr.com/drop-in
• ·         Literacy Dr videos https://www.theliteracydr.com/videos
• ·         List of Resources for Further Learning

Why do so many students continue to struggle with spelling and writing even after years of phonics instruction? In this episode, Sarah Mitchell explores the missing layer between decoding instruction and deeper literacy transfer: integrated word study.

Drawing on research, classroom experience and practical teaching examples, Sarah explains how word-building using a six-layer “word study map” that develops sounds, meaning, spellings, connections, morphemes and sentences in the same lesson. The more connections a child has with a word the easier it is to recognize, comprehend and use it while writing.

The conversation explores the implementation gap many teachers experience — understanding the theory but still feeling unsure how to apply it during real lessons — and introduces practical ways to make literacy instruction more connected, efficient and meaningful for older students.

Sarah Mitchell 

Author - Teaching Structured Literacy Series

Contact Info: [email protected]

 Structured Literacy for Older Students:
 https://www.facebook.com/groups/360409786946482

 Founder - Morphology Hub
Website: www.morphologyhub.com

Social media: YouTube @sarahmitchell3941

Teaching about morphemes (the meaningful components of words), sentence structure (syntax) and grammar (the framework for organizing words and sentences) isn’t hard, once you learn about two new resources: Mary Beth Steven’s Dramatic Scripts and Meghan Hicks and Louise Hewitt’s The Sentence Studio. In fact, you can learn about these vital components of language as you teach your students by using their scripts, sentence and text practices. Their common goal is to create insightful readers and articulate writers. 

These educators recognize that word study, syntax and grammar go to the heart of reading comprehension and written expression. They also focus on responsive teaching that brings these topics alive through rich highly engaging activities.

Mary Beth Steven book, Enhancing the Teaching of Morphology and Grammar with Dramatic Scripts for the Classroom, uses plays to build reading comprehension while creating a collaborative classroom. Meghan and Louise’s new instructional guide, The Sentence Studio, teaches grammar and syntax with fables and a groundbreaking BubbleMap analysis strategy. Educators and students discover the artistry of sentence structure while unlocking the meaning that lies within every sentence

You can find more information about Mary Beth’s book on her classroom blog

mbsteven.edublogs.org

You can purchase The Sentence Studio and access free downloads and other supporting resources at Meghan and Louise’s website

www.scienceofthesentence.com

Title: Meet the Students / Humans of the Boring (into words) Scholars Collective

Listen Sara Leland’s students, five humans who have dyslexia, ADHA and/or autism. With Sara’s guidance and support they grew to love literacy. They joined together and built a website www.boringscholarscollective.site. The boring scholars used their writing, creative and artistic skills to express their love of reading and writing through the website. Learn how they became word detectives, deeply investigating the spelling, meaning and history of words. 

Sara shares how she develops a fascination for words in children who may have struggled with basic skills. She explains that the ultimate purpose of education is human development, helping children to grow into capable, curious, creative and empathic citizens. You’ll also learn how a philosopher views language, filled with metaphors and narratives, fueled by critical thinking.   

Sara’s own website is: 

www.wordscholars.net

Sara can be contacted through the site or by email at:

 [email protected]

If you have ever wondered why your students struggle with word reading, or read accurately but with limited comprehension, then you may want to flip your approach to reading instruction. Start at the sentence level by using Xiuhong Tong and Hélène Deacon’s groundbreaking Linguistics Pathways Model, which provides two parallel paths leading to reading comprehension.

The first pathway leads to word recognition by morphological decoding. Deacon and Tong show how word reading and meaning arise from an awareness of how morphemes—the meaningful components that compose all words—are linked to graphemes. Unlike phonics decoding, students develop word reading, spelling and vocabulary knowledge in unison, which supports reading comprehension. 

The second pathway is a syntax to sentence pathway. Syntax, the blueprint for creating and understanding sentences, is the layer of language that most directly supports reading comprehension and fluency. Together, words are not only read with meaning but as part of meaningful sentences – which largely determines text comprehension.

Xiuhong Tong and S. Helene Deacon 2025. The Linguistic Pathways Model: Capturing the Multiple Dimensions of Reading Development. Reading Research Quarterly

Meghan Hicks returns to talk about how teaching structure at the word, sentence, and text levels can help students make sense of the writing process. We often discuss literacy as a system and the importance of students understanding how it works. Meghan explains the broader system and how her students discover that the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. 

You’ll learn that syntax—how sentences are constructed from words, phrases and clauses—isn’t an abstract language concept. Rather, it is a straightforward way to improve reading comprehension and sentence construction. Meghan explains a simple sentence diagramming method that provides visual representations of sentence structure.

Meghan also dives into the cognitive aspects of writing, starting with thinking. Students who can structure their thoughts are better able to structure their sentences. You learn about the four categories of thinking and how they influence students’ writing.  

You can contact Meg at [email protected] 

or visit the Think~Write~Read Community 

Bruce Howlett's Seven Layers of Literacy Project - ReadingShift.com