Teach reading the way the evidence says
Beginning readers need explicit, systematic phonics — not guessing from the pictures.
Written with AI — this one isn’t Tammy. The Field Guide covers ground her videos don’t, and keeps to what’s well established. It doesn’t know your students, and nothing here overrides your school’s policy or your state’s law. · 1 min read
What to do
- Decades of research point the same way: beginning readers benefit from explicit, systematic teaching of how letters represent sounds.
- Phonemic awareness — hearing and playing with the sounds in spoken words — is the foundation, and it can be taught before a child reads a single word.
- Give early readers decodable books that use the patterns they've been taught, so they practise decoding instead of guessing.
- Don't teach children to guess words from the picture or the first letter. Several states have now restricted that “three-cueing” approach in early reading instruction.
- Phonics isn't the whole of reading. Read aloud every day, including books well above their own level, and talk about words and ideas.
Why it works
Reading isn't natural the way speech is; the code has to be taught. Children left to infer it often develop guessing strategies that work on simple books and then fall apart as texts get harder, frequently around third grade. Teaching the code explicitly closes that gap for far more children.
Try this tomorrow
If you teach young readers, look at the books they're practising with this week. Could they decode most of the words with what you've taught so far? If not, that's the book to swap.
Watch out
Phonics is necessary but not sufficient. Don't let it crowd out read-alouds, conversation and vocabulary — comprehension depends on them.
More from the Field Guide
Wait three seconds after you ask
Silence after a question isn't dead air. It's thinking time — and most of us cut it off.
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Make them remember, not re-read
Pulling something out of memory is what makes it stick. Build that into every lesson.
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Show them first: I do, we do, you do
Explicit modeling beats hoping they'll figure it out — especially with anything new.
Written with AI — not by Tammy