Help Your Students Become Masters at Decoding Multisyllabic Words With Marnie Ginsberg

Sara

You’re listening to episode number 220 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

Sara

Today, I am so excited to welcome back Marni Ginsburg to the podcast. Marni was on the podcast a couple years ago, and she shared an incredible episode that was jam packed, filled with suggestions on how we can support struggling readers. We’ll be sure to link to that in the show notes. But Marnie is the creator and founder behind Reading Simplified, which is a very systematic and effective program that teachers can use to really support students who struggle with reading. Now as upper elementary teachers, you know that students really struggle to decode multisyllabic words in upper elementary and that is exactly what we’re going to be talking about on the podcast today. Marnie has some really simple and effective strategies that you can start using this week to really help your students become masters at decoding these multisyllabic words. So let’s go ahead and jump into the conversation.

Sara

Hey, Marnie, I am so excited to have you back on the podcast today.

Marnie

Thank you, Sarah. It’s a treat to be with you.

Sara

Absolutely! So Marnie was a guest on our podcast, I think, back in 2022 and it was a phenomenal episode. You gave so many strategies for teachers to support their students who struggle with reading in upper elementary. I’m glad to have you back on today, and we’re going to really dig specifically into how do we help our upper elementary students learn how to decode multisyllabic words.

Sara

Which I know, we’re the start of the school year. I know there are teachers who are probably reading with their students, kind of figuring out where they’re at, and I know that this is a gap that exists in our classrooms. I experienced it when I was in the classroom. We hear all the time from teachers the biggest challenge is their students can’t decode the words in the text.

Sara

So before we get into the strategies that you have that we know are going to help students, why do we have this gap in upper elementary? Why do students get to us in third grade, fourth grade and fifth grade and have such a challenge decoding these big words?

Marnie

I’m so glad you’re bringing this up, because it is such a problem in so many environments, and it’s a bear teaching these words, especially if you don’t have that background in how to teach decoding. And I think that’s one of the reasons that we have this problem, is that a lot of teachers have been prepared to teach reading very superficially. In fact, the RAND report just came out and indicated that over half of teachers, I think maybe even three quarters, say they need more help on how to teach these foundational reading skills. So if you came from the university learning a Balanced Literacy Approach, which particularly targeted the three cueing approach to teaching word reading, then you’re going to have a lot of students who struggle with decoding, not only multi syllable words, but even single syllable words. They just end up having, as many as 60% of them, they tend to have weak sound-based decoding. So that’s the foundation on which you build your word identification, that automaticity, recognizing a word in the blink of an eye, and the foundation on which you build fluency, being able to read words automatically, but also with phrasing and at a good rate. So the whole reading system, all the way up to comprehension, is built on that foundation. And frankly, the three cueing approach led us astray for decades. So now, as many teachers are moving over to the science of reading and teaching systematic phonics, more and more, we may see some of those huge gaps in decoding wane. But I think it’s a challenging period, because most of us weren’t taught that in university, so we’re picking up what we can on the job, and that ain’t easy.

Marnie

So that is one thing that’s going on. If the foundation is cracked, it’s really hard to build the harder words, and indeed, that’s what’s going on with multi-syllable. It’s hard enough to decode a simple one syllable word like cat, but even harder, maybe exponentially harder when you multiply the syllables, as in, cat-e-gory. So there are more things to look at, per word, and then there’s more variation. So the vowels are going to morph and be tricky. The I, for instance, maybe the e sound, if it’s by itself in the middle of a multi-syllable word more than expected. Where you chunk the word or divide the syllable is going to be highly variable. Those are things that just make the reading of multi-syllable words more challenging.

Marnie

And then finally, I think another thing that explains why it’s hard is even in programs that teach phonics systematically, a lot of them are weaker at teaching how to teach multi-syllable word reading. So there can be a tendency to think, Oh, my kids can decode simple, single syllable words. They know they’re short vowels. Maybe I’ve taught them some long vowels, and then I’m done with that. Let’s move on to worrying about fluency. Well, that’s really mistaken. Reading a multi-syllable word is something apart. I mean, it builds on the things you’ve learned as a reader of one syllable words, but there’s other things that we need to do. I think maybe we’ll get to talk about that above and beyond just how to attack the single syllable word, and we have to be strategic about it. And there are some things that teachers can do across the course of the day to weave in that type of instruction that just along with your science and your social studies, not just your literacy block, so that kids can pick this up and you can know that you’re actually teaching it, even though, historically, we’ve probably done a weaker job at that.

Sara

Yeah, the point to where it’s like teachers in primary oftentimes stop at the single syllable words, right? And we’re like, oh, students, they know all the letter sounds. They know the blends, like they know the diphthongs the diagraph. They’re good. They know how to read. And I think it’s so often, especially starting in third, fourth and fifth grade, the students see more multisyllabic words. And it’s like, teachers often check in with the lower grade teachers and they’re like, Hey, I’ve got the student who’s struggling with reading, and the second grade teacher might be like, they did fine in my class. It’s like, Yeah, well, they mostly saw single syllable words, and so with that introduction of multi syllabic words, it is a whole new set of skills, and if the students don’t have that, they’re going to struggle for maybe for the first time.

Sara

Now I know so many upper elementary teachers don’t have the confidence or the knowledge-no fault to their own. I feel like schools do a pretty weak job of supporting upper elementary teachers in the area of decoding. If a teacher sees a student who is struggling to read multisyllabic words, why is this really a challenge that we can’t ignore? I think oftentimes in upper elementary we have so much focus on comprehension, the standards, that pesky test at the end of the year, that sort of takes our focus away from that. But if students are struggling with multisyllabic words, why does that need to be a major red flag, like put on the brakes, address this now, that teachers need to deal with?

Marnie

Red alert! Red alert! We can’t let kids coast with that. I think it may help teachers to know that if you’re going to be reading on grade level and fluent for fourth grade, you should be automatic with about 4000 words, the most frequent 4000 words. And that means that when you come to a typical fourth grade text, you can accurately decode and recognize 99% ish of those words. So when you see a student misreading every 10 words or misreading every 20 or even 30 words that appears to a lot of teachers to be, oh, they’re doing pretty well. Well, actually, no, that’s a catastrophic gap, because automaticity in decoding and then late building upon that automatic word recognition is essential for being able to read fluently, which gives you the brain space, so to speak, to think about decoding. And that’s why it’s so common in upper elementary for teachers to say, look, the comprehension test that we have at the end of the grade says that they’re not able to do well, and so they have a comprehension problem. And indeed, that might be part of the issue, but more often than not, in my experience, and some data to suggest this as well, many of those kids lack the foundational sound based decoding skills, and then they lack the automaticity to recognize words in the blink of an eye. And so multi-syllable words, as we discussed, are harder and there’s also more of them, a lot of them, most words probably are multi syllable words. So it’s a big deal. We want to help our kids get that skill of automaticity, so they have good decoding skills, and then they start to recognize words in a split second.

Sara

Yeah. I try to remind teachers in upper elementary that if a student is struggling with comprehension, it’s not always a comprehension issue. It might be that they can’t actually read the words, and we need to address that first before we address anything with comprehension.

Marnie

Yeah, and I like to use a nonsense test there, Sarah, that’s a quick thing that can get to the root of the problem if they can’t read a series of nonsense words, moving up into multi-syllable words that have advanced phonics, like the long vowels, then that’s a sign that foundational system has some holes in it and it needs to be shored up.

Sara

Yeah, I love that reminder. Now I know that you have so many really easy strategies, effective strategies. You are just a wealth of knowledge when it comes to really helping teachers support their students in their ability to read multisyllabic words. So let’s talk about some of these strategies that would really work for upper elementary teachers supporting their students in this area. Now, you kind of shared some with me before we did the podcast interview. So let’s start with switch it. Can you kind of talk about what that is and how teachers can bring that into their classroom?

Marnie

Yeah, we have just a couple of strategies that build on top of one another. So I like to roll back a touch and not just think, how do I help the student decode this multi syllable word, but how do I make sure they have foundational systems that undergird that? And it kind of goes back to what you were just saying, it may be a comprehensive problem, but maybe it’s not. There’s something behind that. So what’s at the root? So when you read a multi syllable word, you’re reading obviously several single syllable words back to back. And so if your single syllable word reading skill is not that good, then that’s the root that where we need to target first.

Marnie

Fortunately, we have a few simple activities at Reading Simplified that do it and Switch It would be one of them. And so this is a Word Chain activity where you put a variety of letter sound cards on a board, just as much as you need to build a series of words, where you change one sound in each word, and you are moving every position in the word so kids aren’t just checking out with yeah, I’ve got it – fat cat, sat rat – every position gets changed. And the goal of this activity is to help students get better discernment at sound symbol processing. How sound symbol correspondences work. And also not just lining up sound and symbol or phoneme and grapheme, but also improving their processing of it. And so you can start at the simple three sound level. But probably a lot of upper elementary don’t need to start at three sounds. But just for the sake of learning the activity that you have the word mat on the board. Okay, you’ve got mat. Let’s change mat to map. Which are we going to switch? Which letter sound are we going to switch? The child takes out the t and drags down p, and says “puh” as she does it, and then maybe she checks the sound: mm – ah – puh. Okay, you’ve got map. Now let’s change it to sap, and then to sat, and then to sit. So you can see we’re moving in the vowels, and all the vowel contrast that you do really help with how the code works. And they learn short vowels really rapidly. And so you notice they’re doing basically a paired contrast. And the science of learning shows us that anytime you have to do paired contrast and discriminate between two things, the sounds and the symbols that match the things that I’m hearing in the middle of sit, that’s going to refine that and make the automaticity greater.

Marnie

And so you do that with three sounds. But if that’s too easy and they don’t make mistakes and you can’t really coach them to be challenged, then you want to go to four sounds, okay, you have held, switch it to help. And then you can go to five sounds. You have stomp, change it to stump, etc, slump. We even go to nonsense words eventually, sprist, sprud, sprunt, and I like to get my students to be able to do that activity just about as fast as I can. And then I know they’ve really got the foundational codes of how sounds and symbols line up. They’ve got much better consonant, consonant digraph and short vowel knowledge. And this is a game that kids like because it’s, it feels like a game, even though it’s a phonics activity. They feel like, Oh, it’s a mystery. I’m going to change, you know, stump to slump. It’s just one little tweak. And they’re moving manipulatives on a letter sound board that’s fun for them. So it’s nice that it’s fun for them, and it can take as little as five minutes. And also you can do it whole group and coach kids through their errors, and that they learn through their errors. And so this is one that even though it’s at the single syllable level, and we usually keep it at short vowels so that we can really progress into harder and harder phonemic difficulty, like the stomp, stump example. Even though all those things seem like they’re far from multi syllable word reading, they’re actually building the foundation that allows the student to then not just read cat, but like I said, cat-e-gor-y. And read more carefully when there is, adjacent consonants, which really trips kids up. Let’s see, like preferential the PR can be hard. So that’s one that we really find a lot of benefits, even for multi syllable word reading.

Sara

I love how you pointed out that in order for students to read multisyllabic words, they’re often reading single syllable words within that. And I think upper elementary teachers can see activities like this, like the three sound, example, mat to map, and they’re like, Oh, my students don’t need to do that. But the reminder of okay, maybe they don’t need the three sounds, but the five sounds, maybe six sounds, right? And especially if you bring in some of those nonsense words, just to practice their fluency and their quickness with interchanging the different sounds. I know for sure that my fourth grade students, especially my lower group, would have benefited from a regular activity like this, because, like you said, it just builds their automaticity and their confidence with the sound-letter correspondence, which is obviously essential if we want them to read these big multisyllabic words. I love that activity, and I also love that it’s like you said, five minutes a day. Teachers are always like, Okay, we have a few minutes before we go to lunch, or we have a few extra minutes before specials, bring that activity in then. You don’t have to have a ton of time to really support your students in this area.

Sara

So after switch it what’s the next activity that you suggest teachers incorporate?

Marnie

Switch it is so powerful. You’re going to be teaching phonemic segmentation, phonemic manipulation, letter sound knowledge, left to right, tracking and obviously it’s early decoding and early spelling, but you’re not teaching blending, which is pivotal for kids decoding skills, because you’ve said the words aloud. So what we do to teach blending is Read It, and we have two levels of Read It. So with Read It, when we start out to make sure that kids can blend sounds left to right, consecutively or continuously, we just give them a single syllable word, usually with short vowels. And again, we would target what’s hard for them. Okay, cat may be too easy, but what about scrimp? And when we give them the word scrimp, we want them to put the sounds together continuously. There’s some evidence that not segmenting first is superior to continuously blending. So some programs would have you say for scrimp, okay, let’s say the sounds s-c-r-i-m-p. What word? And that would be the segmented approach, but it’s actually been directly contrasted with the approach where you go sssscccccrrrrriiiiimmmmpppp to come up with scrimp and that’s the continuous blending approach that I just modeled and has been demonstrated to be more powerful. Quite a bit more powerful. You can look at the work of Gonzalez-Frey and Ehri, and they were building off work that came to the similar conclusion from the 80s and 90s. So, we would give the kid a word, ask them to read it, and if they can’t blend and read it, then we would just coach them to do that blend as you read. And we cover up the end of the word. So we might cover up everything but the SC in scrimp, then we might cover up everything but the SCR and then the SCRI. And so they should be holding that vowel scri, and then we release the M to them. Scrim. Now this is just a short period while you’re coaching them to have that blending skill. This is the foundational thing that you’re going to, again, need when you start adding syllables back to back. And so if they can do that with one syllable, then you want to do the same thing, with a slight variation for multi syllable words. So at that level, we call it blend by chunk. We use the term chunk instead of syllable, but either one. So instead of having them just blend phonemes, now we’re asking them to look at a whole chunk or a whole syllable at a time, like sim-pull and we cover up the back chunk. So we would cover up the ple, what’s the first chunk? SIM, and hold it. SIM, release the card covering up the PLE. What’s that next chunk? PLE. Now put it together. So now we’re going to be doing continuous blending of chunks or syllables; SIM, PLE.

Marnie

And you could imagine the same thing with a longer word, like category. Cover up everything but cat, get them to chunk the first sound cat, and then release the next one. CAT, UH, okay, well, they’re gonna actually see the E in category and say CAT, E. And that opens up another can of worms, which we could deal with, but you still do the same thing as just coaching them to blend as you read by chunk. So we do that with multi syllable words. We call it, read it multi syllable. And you start out with two chunk words where the words are already separated, so they would see SIM and there’s a space, and then they’d see PLE. So it makes that easier. And then later on, you would get to three sound words – In-ter-est, showing the breaks and moving on to four sound words, cat-e-gor-y.

Marnie

So showing the chunks first, and then they don’t just read the word, they write it and say the chunks. So when they write the word simple, they would say SIM while they’re writing those letters, and then they would write, PLE and say those chunks. So we do this at all levels. So kids are always tying phonemes and graphene sounds and symbols, and then you start to fade the chunks, and then you just give them a word, like learning that doesn’t have the chunk and see if they can do it. And if they get stumped, then you backpedal and cover up the ing and see if they can read the word learn. And that makes up Read It Multisyllable. Switch It and Read It at the Single Syllable really paves the way for that activity to be pretty successful.

Sara

Yeah, and I can see how. It’s like, if a teacher does not spend the time with the Switch It and getting their students used to the different letters that make the sounds, then Read It might be challenging, because their students don’t have that knowledge of the letter sound correspondence as they’re reading it. I like hearing how it’s challenging, but it’s simple at the same time. Like, if student encounters a word that they struggle with, we coach them through it, we remind them of what they know, we break it down, and we figure out where they’re at, and if they need to back up a little bit with the support, we give them that support. So I love seeing that in order for students to be successful with the continuous blending and the Read It strategy, we have to start with Switch It, because they have to be familiar with all of the letter sounds and the blends and the vowel sounds in order to progress in the next activity.

Marnie

Yeah, it’s built one upon each other. And it’s not just even with Switch It – recognizing letter sounds with super fast automaticity, but it’s also that there’s some processing speed and processing the code for decoding and encoding or spelling, that really is unlocked with that activity, because the hardest level of phonemic awareness, the manipulation that’s woven in, and it just kind of adds a little extra juice to how the child can, as you said, attack the words for Read It. Yeah, it’s really pivotal. And another thing I want to say, Sara, is I think sometimes when I talk about these activities, teachers think, oh, I don’t have time to do this. And I agree, but you don’t have to do them all year long, because these are quick fixes for most kids. And so for instance, I wouldn’t teach read it at the single syllable for probably much more than a week or two, except for some children with some significant learning challenges. So it’s just something you’re shoring up an issue that wasn’t really cleared up in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and then you’re off to the races, and you can build on that for reading more and more multisyllable words in text.

Sara

Yeah, and I’m glad you mentioned that, because I think oftentimes teachers feel it is hard to have a student in third, fourth and fifth grade that can’t read. That is a big problem. That’s a big challenge. But that doesn’t mean that it has to consume 100 %. Sometimes it is a quick fix. We just need to do it. I think so often we want to avoid it because we don’t feel like we have the tools or the knowledge, so we just ignore it and we just focus on comprehension or vocabulary, but it doesn’t have to take a ton of time. We just have to get started filling in those gaps and helping them make progress with the decoding.

Sara

All right, Switch It, Read It. What else?

Marnie

Well, then the next thing that’s really important is Sort It. This is where we teach advanced phonics like the long vowels or diphthongs. So the O sound could be the O in go and boat and show and home and toe. All those spellings relate to O. So we actually have kids read O sound words. Usually they’re high frequency words, and then they sort them by their spelling. So they put the word boat under a column that has OA. Then when they write it, they say B-OA-T. And the reason that we’re doing this activity for upper elementary is that, especially in light of the three cueing history, is a lot of kids don’t have all their phonics knowledge really secure. And just as there’s a big leap between single syllable and multi syllable, there’s a big leap between short vowels and all the variation of advanced phonics, like the long vowels and etc, where one sound can be multiple spellings. That’s tricky business. But our sorted activity is a quick way for this information to get learned. So they say, B-OA-T, they read another word, like show, and they sort it, and they say the sounds SH-OW. And then they go, and ideally you would have them read some text that targets the O sound with multiple spellings, which is something we provide in our Reading Simplified Academy. But there are other texts out there that are already doing that more and more in the Decodable text space.

Marnie

And so we typically would study like the O sound for a week and after a little introduction with those single syllable words, we’d also add in multisyllable words, but still focusing on high frequency. So maybe we would read pillow, slower, stolen, invoke, compose, expose, approach, that kind of thing, and making the transfer real. And even better, if then you’re reading your social studies texts about the Rev-o-lu-tion-ar-y War. You can drag out those sounds and words, have them circle the O in revolution. Then just fold those opportunities to learn across the course of the day, the phonics pattern that you are studying or you have studied recently. Similarly in that example, not just studying the advanced phonics, but maybe breaking up the word re, vo, lu, tion, ar, y. That’s been demonstrated by researchers many times over, that the learning of new vocabulary is much better when we see the word and we can tie it to phonemes and graphemes. So Sort It kind of lays another foundation for how to absorb this phonics information, how to see it transferred to real text. And then also, you, as a teacher, and the kids too will be like, Oh, look, there’s an O in approach. And have those conversations with the multi syllable words, but still pointing out, okay, yeah, let’s circle that OA, or let’s write that OA in another color. That’s the O in approach, just like the O in boat.

Sara

I always like to remind teachers, teaching things like phonics, word study, vocabulary, there are endless opportunities to focus on those in your classroom. Anytime you have words in front of your students, you can point out those things. It doesn’t require this separate thing or a whole new set of words. We just need to, as educators, be on the lookout for opportunities in our reading and writing to then point our students towards those things as well. So I love that reminder where it’s just like, okay, whatever you’re studying in science, social studies, or your read aloud, look for those words. And to your point, students do get so excited when they see a word and they can connect it to the knowledge that they have about the word. It’s like, oh, wait, I know how to read this now. I know what sound those letter combinations make.

Marnie

Sara, can I add something to this?

Sara

Go ahead.

Marnie

So some people might be tracking with switch it, read it, and sort it. These three activities that I’m recommending, and say, Well, that’s more than I can handle. But there is one thing that’s probably an easy thing to implement immediately, just like you were saying, let’s weave multi syllable word instruction across the course of the day. And that could be just as simple as when a child either misreads or misspells a word, we simply write it on the board and we say the sounds or the chunks that we’re hearing in the word Pro and then a space Gram: program, like we are going to a program after school to blah, blah, blah, and you give a vocabulary word and you’re connecting meaning print and sound, and that is the triangle model of word reading. Those are the features of what we have in our brain as good readers. We have semantics, we have orthography or spelling, and we have the phonological domain or the sound domain. So you as a teacher, can just take less than 30 seconds in the middle of a science lesson, and write out and say the sounds EN-VI-RON-MENT: environment, and this is what I mean by environment. And move on. And you’ve helped those kids get better at their decoding and their encoding of multi syllable words, because you’re showing them how our code works. It is a code for sounds that’s like, yeah, multi syllable and single syllable decoding and spelling all day long is probably like a principle that you can just fold into what’s already going on, even in art.

Sara

Absolutely, yeah. Every teacher has the opportunity. It just improves students decoding and their vocabulary skills as well. Now, these things are so practical? They’re so easy. I think teachers could easily bring them into their classroom. With that being said, I still know that teachers often in upper elementary lack the confidence, right? They’ve never done this before. This is not something that they have a lot of training in. Their curriculum usually does not address this at all. So they’re really left on their own to figure out how to bring these things into their instruction. So what advice or encouragement do you have for a teacher who knows that he or she has students that have a word recognition gap, but they’ve never done this before? They’re hearing these things for the first time, and they’re like, Okay, I hear it, but I’ve also never done that. Give them some encouragement and advice as far as just how to get started.

Marnie

Well, I would encourage you to not feel like you have to be the expert. You don’t have to be a linguistics expert to be slightly ahead of your student, and that’s all that you need to be. And you can have humility when they ask you about, well, why is this such and such a spelling? I don’t know. It’s interesting, and then let’s just study it. And there’s not the need to be a PhD in this, the main thing you need is the knowledge that recognizing words instantly is essential, and it’s built on the foundation of studying the code from left to right. And so those are concepts that if you have them, then you can then fold it in, as we said, across the course of the day, both for reading and spelling, simply by drawing out the sounds in the words that you hear. So maybe you never really thought that, long O is in approach. That’s okay. Just take the word approach, stretch it out in your mind. You can even do this out loud with the child. Okay, yeah, let’s see what’s going on with that word. I say the word as a-pproach, and then I’m going to analyze the spellings. And okay, so approach, oh, so that O is coming from this OA. And then you think to yourself, have I seen this anywhere else? You don’t have to know all the rules, yeah. You’ve seen the OA in the word boat and road. And you can even allude to that, oh yeah, this is like the O in road, and write it out road, the O in boat. So you’re just attacking the word by attending to sounds. And then when you get to something that’s tricky, in the case of approach, which looks like ah-proach or aye-proach. That’s okay too. You could know that it’s a schwa, but if you don’t, you just need to know this is a pattern in our language. A lot of vowels have multiple ways of being pronounced. So yeah, this looks like aye-proach, but in this word, we say, uh-proach. And in fact, one of the easy spelling strategies we use is to say the word the way it looks. So when I have kids write the word approach, that helps build implicit mnemonic, really, with how to spell approach. So I’m hoping that I kind of gave some examples of the things. Well, maybe you don’t know the labels, maybe you don’t know all the so called rules, but you can still just be a detective.

Sara

You just talk about it, right?

Marnie

Exactly. It’s like a read aloud, where you do the think aloud when you’re doing comprehension, and you say, I think this is what she’s thinking about her dog and Winn Dixie. And this is what I’m getting. This is what’s in my head, what you guys think. And the same thing, okay, when I look at the word approach, this is what I notice. You don’t have to be the expert. Everything doesn’t have to have a label. What is the sound explanation for it? And also, there’s not a lot of silent letters. Every letter has a reason for being.

Marnie

You don’t have to label everything. Everything is tied to a sound. Sometimes it’s unexpected, like the A in approach. But actually it’s kind of not unexpected, because it’s also in a lot of other words. So that’s another thing to think about. What are the other words that I know that’s like that? Above, around, approach. So there’s a pattern there. English word spellings are, by and large, still following a pattern that’s fairly predictable. It’s just that there’s one choice that’s more common and then there’s a second choice that’s less common and maybe a third choice that’s less common. But even that third choice is still a pattern that comes up. Like EA is mainly going to be E, but it can also be A as in steak or break. But guess what? It’s A as in steak or break when it’s with a K at the end. And that’s a pattern, even though it’s not as common as E as in each or E as in meal.

Sara

Yeah, and I love that reminder. We don’t have to be linguistic experts. It’s okay for you to tell your students, I don’t know, let’s, figure it out. And Google usually can give you an answer or, send it as homework. Okay, go home and find out. Why does the EA say A in this word specifically? See if you can figure out the rule. But it’s just bringing students into the idea that they have a lot more word awareness. And in order to do that, we have to be willing to talk about words and break down the sounds and show them this whole world of the code that they might not have fluency in when they come to us.

Marnie

Yeah, I love that word awareness concept.

Sara

Marnie, thank you so much. I just love hearing from you. Like I said, you have so much knowledge. I love how you support and encourage teachers, especially to really help and empower their students to be strong readers. Where can my audience connect with you after this interview? I know you guys have a special challenge coming up.

Marnie

Oh yeah, we’ve got a couple things for you guys depending on when you’re listening. First of all, everyone could probably get access to a little cheat sheet and info video that we’re going to put together for your audience. If they go to readingsimplified.com/stellar, or even if they just googled reading simplified and stellar, they’d probably stumble upon it. We’re going to have a little video of some instruction there, and also some step by step for how to do some of these activities, and also how to give the feedback, and that’s really one of the most important things, and I tried to weave a little bit of that in. And if you happen to be listening on the week of September 30, we are doing a five-day challenge. We’re going to teach Switch It and give you the resources to do that, and each day, teach another little tip in 30 minutes or less on how to keep optimizing it so you get the results that you need. So you don’t have to do Switch It for a whole year in fifth grade. Maybe it’s just a few weeks or a few months, and you get a lot of bang for your buck building the foundational system of sound-based decoding work so that they’re more capable of reading a multi-syllable word. So we’re excited to host that. That’s our biggest event of the year. Teachers get outstanding results when they implement this. We suggest that you implement it with one child or with a small group, and then you report on how they did, and we coach you. Not only do you get the goodies on how to implement but we coach you in our Facebook group on how to improve your practice. And we have prizes, so it’s a really fun time, and I think it might be relevant for those of you who have those kids who can’t read multi-syllable words because it shores up the foundation.

Sara

Yeah, awesome. We’ll, for sure, link to that in our show notes as well. So teachers definitely go check that out and Marnie, again, thank you for joining us today. I look forward to having you on again in the future.

Marnie

Oh, It’d be my pleasure, Sara, it’s great to talk with you. Thank you so much for this chance.