Teacher Aides – Supporting Learners in a Structured Literacy Classroom

Welcome to this short course about supporting learners in a Structured Literacy classroom. This series of workshops will be useful both for newer teacher aides who are building new skills, and also for those who are more experienced and want to refine their skills to develop students reading and spelling. 

There are two slightly different workshops: one for supporting learners in Years 1-3, and one for TAs working with Year 4-8 ākonga. 

Course contents:  

➤ A brief introduction the foundations and principles of structured literacy, so you will feel comfortable with some of the research information that helps us know the most effective ways to support literacy development.

➤ Most importantly, we will be focusing on very practical HOW TO strategies for supporting learners in small group literacy instruction, including:

‣ phonemic awareness
‣ word reading and spelling
‣ letter formation & handwriting
‣ teaching high frequency words which are harder to spell, like ‘said’, ‘where’, and ‘they’
‣ how to organise and give feedback to students during book reading practice.
‣ in the workshops for older learners, participants will also learn some helpful routines to help students read and spell longer words with lots of syllables in them (like ‘volcano’, ‘gymnastics’ and ‘sustainable’)
‣ how to support reading fluency development.

Participants will receive a printable workbook for the course, which will include step-by-step instructions for all the teaching strategies we learn about together. 

Course content is not aligned to any one scope and sequence – it focuses on strong teaching practices that will fit into any structured literacy approach.

Parents: You are very welcome to join this course! I feel the contents would be equally useful for any parents wanting to support their child with reading, spelling, and writing at home. 

Ngā mihi nui, 

Emma

Emma Nahna
Speech Language Therapist
Literacy Coach
Sound Foundations for Literacy