Hello friends and a happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I want you all to know how grateful I am for the community we’ve built here at Busy Bee Kindergarten and for your support in keeping this endeavor alive. Every time you comment or email me with questions, suggestions, or thanks, it reminds me that you aren’t just passively receiving this information; you’re engaged and changing and growing. And so am I. Because of you. So thank you.

You’ve probably heard of the Sold a Story podcast that is getting so much attention. I finally got a chance to listen to it over my break. Wow. It covers the history of teaching reading and how we got so off track in this country. Fascinating and infuriating.

Many teachers are feeling guilt and dismay after listening, wondering how many students they did wrong by. It is important to remember that 60-70% of students learn to read easily, despite how they are taught. It is important, too, to realize that many teachers supplemented the programs and leveled books they were provided for their classroom. Most critical though is that we are all now hopefully moving forward to a new era of reading instruction.

As I listened to how hundreds of school districts and thousands and thousands of teachers “blindly” followed the three cueing system of instruction—actually, as iterated in the podcast, the approach doesn’t suggest or require instruction—I reflected back on my 33-year career and began to list the ways I (not always necessarily intentionally) avoided many of the pitfalls of balanced literacy.

If my memory serves me correctly, I have always explicitly taught phonics, though probably not very systematically. I remember having a picture alphabet chart in my earliest classrooms and doing a chant every day that included the letter names, sounds, and pictures. I taught special education, first grade, and second grade for many years, as well as 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades, before trying kindergarten. I must have known that phonics was critical to learning to read, even in the grades beyond kindergarten. I don’t think I’ve never not taught phonics, even in the ‘90s when whole language was the reigning educational paradigm. I recall having a kindergarten teammate who did not have a picture alphabet in her classroom and wondering how that was even possible.

My first year of teaching kindergarten followed many years of teaching third grade, where each morning started with journal writing. I had no idea how to teach kindergarten (and the internet and its endless information was barely a thing then) so I had those kindergartners writing every day, assuming that what I did in third grade was also what should happen in kindergarten. Well, apparently not; not in 2001. We had a district kindergarten teacher meeting in my classroom one day, and all of the teachers looked at the writing on display in the hallway and said, “What’s this? We don’t teach kindergartners to write! It’s not developmentally appropriate!”

Not developmentally appropriate? Then why were my students able to write? I continued with what I was doing, knowing that my students were also learning to read through the process of writing. Perhaps this is when my rebel, rogue, and renegade teacher self was born. Not generally considered positive character traits, but I think they’ve served me well over the decades.

The thing about teaching writing to kindergartners—you can’t do it without teaching them how to listen to the sounds that make up words. In 2001, I had no idea what phonemic awareness was and I certainly wasn’t familiar with the term. But I was teaching my students to segment words into sounds and to write the letters associated with each sound. This is clearly evident in my 2008 book, Teaching Writing in Kindergarten, in which I wrote out the steps for drawing and labeling lessons at the beginning of the school year, including listening to and counting the sounds on your fingers several times while trying to spell a word. I was doing phonemic awareness training with my students every day without even realizing it.

Around 2014, we had a phonics consultant come to our school several times throughout the school year and teach us how to do daily phonemic awareness and phonics exercises with our students. I learned much from her and this is when my phonemic awareness and phonics instruction became more regular, explicit, and systematic. She was also teaching the upper grades about morphology.

Of course, like most teachers over the past several decades, I’ve had loads of leveled texts in my classroom. I used them for a couple decades as my primary way to teach reading in both first grade and kindergarten. But here’s what I didn’t do. I never did the picture walk. Remember the picture walk? Teachers were taught to walk the students through the book prior to reading and introduce all vocabulary (i.e., words) that would be encountered. I never understood that, especially with levels A-D. Why would I tell the students all the words beforehand? What then would be the challenge for them? What then would I learn about their decoding skills?

Yes, I did say decoding. While the three cueing system supposedly has students look at the beginning letter and really not much beyond that before just guessing the words based on context and syntax clues, I always had students look at the whole word. My students weren’t going to just learn phonics; they were going to apply them. After listening to the podcast, I am relieved to know that at least I was expecting them to use phonics, even if I wasn’t using the greatest of books.

But my leveled text collection wasn’t too bad either. I know this because last spring I went through all of my books, intending to throw out all the ones that weren’t at least 80% decodable. Guess what? 80% of the books I used for instruction were at least 80% decodable. I had already, years ago, put the “bad” books in the depths of my cabinets. I didn’t feel right throwing them away way back then, but I sure did now. I didn’t want anyone—teacher or students—putting their hands on those books. Also in my collection of leveled, predictable texts were a bunch of what I call “readable” books—books comprised primarily of common high frequency words balanced out with decodable words. These books were the most powerful for teaching reading and upon which I model my fluency ladders and continuous texts today.

Another thing I never felt compelled to do was running records. I did occasionally tick off the words as students read so I could determine a percentage of accuracy, but I always skipped the analysis of mistakes. I just didn’t get its value. I wasn’t going to change my instruction to emphasize relying primarily on meaning and syntax rather than the visual clues the letters provided. I wasn’t being stubborn or a know-it-all. No one thought much about kindergarten back in those years, we weren’t really expected to teach reading and writing, and no one was paying attention to what I was doing.

What was I doing? Using intuition. Our written language is based on the alphabet and it just made sense that reading and writing therefore required knowledge of and practice with the letters and sounds.

Because I started teaching kindergartners to read and write way back when, when it was totally uncool, I was always ahead of the game. And because of this, every principal I’ve had has trusted me to get the job done. I’ve always been fortunate to teach my students in the way that I think is best. This has been true my entire career.

For the most part, I’ve taught without reading programs and even without a curriculum. I just taught and taught and let students learn with no ceiling of opportunity. It didn’t take long to discover that of which kindergartners are truly capable. And I was always on the right track—kindergartners should definitely be learning how to read and write. It’s over the top developmentally appropriate. Sure, we got a few reading programs over the years but I wasn’t required to use them. None of them came close to the high expectations I have for this age group and every one of my principals knew it. They always quietly told me to just carry on with what I was doing.

My teaching was definitely influenced by balanced literacy—I mean, come on, my career has spanned from the late ‘80s to the present so there was no avoiding it—but never once in the past 30+ years has someone told me exactly how to teach and what materials to use, including the authors of books and programs. I’ve always been free to choose, based on what worked, and because of that I’ve discovered what really are the most effective ways to teach our kindergarten students.

To this day, I say no when it is needed. Three years ago we were handed Lucy Calkins’ reading, writing, and phonics with the expectation that it would be used as the primary method of teaching. I spent five days the summer prior to its implementation unpackaging and pouring over the lessons. Then, I put everything back in the boxes and I said no.

I hope you hear me when I say that the instruction I model is *one* way of doing things. I hope you understand why I send you links to my Google files, encouraging you to make a copy of everything and then modify things as needed to make them your own. To make them work for you and your students. And I will continue to tell you that you don’t have to do it my way, that there are so many effective ways to teach. I share my methods and materials and years of experience and knowledge mainly to get your juices flowing, to get you thinking about what will work best for you and your students in your setting. Take what works for you, leave the rest. Change it. Enhance it.

And remember, you an always say no.

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