Hello

I grew up all over the US. As a student attending schools in Arizona, Missouri, Connecticut and Virginia, I was primarily taught to read using the whole language approach. As a result, I didn't love to read independently.  Luckily, I had a mother who read to me, my brother and my sister nightly, so I was exposed to a wide range of books and built an extensive vocabulary. Still, I found it frustrating and embarrassing to read out loud in class. This got substantially worse in high school because when I came across new vocabulary for example in a science textbook, I had no idea how to decode the word. Instead, I relied on memorizing these new words. It wasn't until college when I started my degree in education that I learned that my struggle with unfamiliar words was simply a result of never being taught phonics in a structured and explicit manner. 

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Working in the McGuffey Reading Center at the University of Virginia taught me invaluable skills which improved my ability to decode words and also teach foundational literacy skills to my students. Over the years, I have used a wide range of phonics and literacy programs and what I found is the most important elements of teaching a child to read is to teach the skills in an explicit, structured and multi-sensory manner. Starting early and building a strong foundation of skills including phonemic awareness, phonological knowledge, and the ability to segment and blend sounds within words is essential for reading success.

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Research has proven that learning to read is not natural or intuitive like the acquisition of oral language. The skills that support a child's ability to read must be directly taught. As a Special Educator/Learning Support teacher, I have focused most of my career on developing how I teach students to read. Creating the Reading Journey ABC app is the next step in my learning journey as I share resources to help provide explicit, systematic and multi sensory learning for children.

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