In my last post (yeah, it’s been a long time. I don’t get paid for these, you know), I made the case for the importance of phonics instruction, while acknowledging it should be just about 30 minutes a day in the early grades. But I also pointed out that the quality of that 30 minutes can be highly variable.

Even when you have a program that sequences phonics instruction systematically and explicitly, it needs to be acknowledged that this is only a small part of what is on most teachers’ plates each day. Kindergarten – 2nd grade teachers usually teach most core subjects, and may be drawing upon a panoply of programs they are supposed to be experts in, while managing a bunch of young homo sapiens who have not yet fully developed a prefrontal cortex and the ability to regulate their emotions and behavior. It’s exhausting, to say the least.

I’ll never forget the moment when I realized that the students in a school I was supporting had not read anything more than a few pages of text for close to two months.

There were a myriad of potential excuses for it. They were ramping up for test prep season, there was a spring break and a snow day, they had cycles of interim assessments that broke into their instructional time, they rotated between reading and writing units during core ELA time, and had been in the middle of a writing cycle, etc.

It took me a while to see it clearly, as I came only once a week, at most, and couldn’t always see the full picture. But then it hit me like a ton of bricks once I did. How could students improve their literacy when they weren’t expected to read for sustained and structured periods of time daily?