Much of the work that we do in the How to Teach Reading and Spelling, Bringing the Science of Reading into the Classroom course focuses on how to look for the sequences of letters that occur in English words, orthography. There are regularities and patterns in these sequences and we want our students to start to think logically about those patterns instead of having to memorize words over and over again. The brain likes patterns and through carefully crafted lessons with specific questions, our students will learn how to ask themselves those same types of questions, eventually learning new patterns independently.
To teach teachers to design lessons and question sets for lessons follows many of the same steps that are used with students. I ask teachers to become students and I model the selection of words and questions. The same format is used in my book which accompanies the trainings; there are questions to teach each orthographic pattern and the questions to ask. However, eventually, teachers need to create questions themselves. This video demonstrates a group of teachers going through that process of choosing words and creating the question set to teach the Au, Aw spelling pattern.
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