Language and Learning

24/12/2025

24/12/2025

Final Elf Update for 2025 - Welcome to the hidden ducks 🦆 Christmas Edition 🎅🏻I’m happy to report the Elf Challenge was accepted and all 🎅🏻 were located! 🎄

20/12/2025

🎄 12 Days of Evidence-Aligned Literacy | Day 8: Syntax & Sentence Structure 🎄

This season, I am sharing 12 days of evidence-aligned literacy resources, one per day, to support teachers, coaches, and leaders in strengthening instruction from foundational skills through skilled application.

Day 8 focuses on syntax and sentence structure—a critical, and often under-taught, component of reading comprehension and writing. As we move beyond individual words to meaning, syntax—how sentences are structured—plays a pivotal role in helping students make sense of text.

📘 Why Syntax Matters for Comprehension: Amplify: The Science of Reading Podcast
A powerful conversation with Julie Van D**e, Ph.D., and Dr. Susan Lambert that explains why syntax may be the missing link in comprehension—and how syntax is rule-governed and systematic, much like phonics.

📗 IDA Perspectives: Syntax (Professional Reading)
A research-informed examination of sentence structure and its role in literacy development, grounding syntax instruction firmly in the evidence base.

🎁 The Syntax Project (Australia)
An extraordinary, freely shared collection created by expert teachers and leaders, including:
• FREE downloadable syntax lessons (Pre-K–Grade 6)
• A complete Syntax Scope & Sequence
• Templates aligned to The Writing Revolution
• Clear implementation supports
A true example of research-to-practice done right.

🧠 Syntax Matters: Sentence Writing & Sentence Comprehension
The late William Van Cleave’s enduring work reminds us of the essential link between writing sentences and comprehending them—and the lasting impact of explicit sentence-level instruction.

🌍 Syntax: Somewhere Between Word and Text
The brilliant Nancy Chapel Eberhardt shares: Syntax: Somewhere Between Word and Text from the PaTTAN Literacy Symposium. Nancy explores how syntax bridges word-to-text comprehension, particularly for bilingual learners, with attention to morphology, word order, and meaning. Nancy Chapel Eberhardt

🔗 Research to Practice: Seriously, Syntax Matters
A clear explanation of how sentence structure supports understanding who did what to whom, and why syntax becomes increasingly critical as texts grow more complex, from the incomparable, Nancy Lewis Hennessy.

📚 Classroom Application: The Syntax-Attuned Teacher
The one-and-only, Dr. Margie Gillis, offers practical routines that build teacher knowledge of syntax and support comprehension across the instructional day.

📌 Bottom line: If we want stronger comprehension and writing, we must intentionally teach students how sentences work. Syntax is not “extra”—it is essential.

📌 Explore Day 8 and every day after, here: https://bit.ly/Kastner12DaysOfLiteracy

20/12/2025

🎄 12 Days of Evidence-Aligned Literacy | Day 7

This season, I am sharing 12 days of evidence-aligned literacy resource, one per day, designed to support teachers, coaches, and leaders in strengthening instruction from foundational skills through skilled application.

Day 7 highlights a powerful set of comprehension-focused resources from Great Middle Schools, specifically their work on Getting the Gist.

The Getting the Gist resources are grounded in reading research and designed to support students’ ability to identify central ideas, synthesize information, and articulate meaning, critical skills for adolescent readers across content areas.

These tools move beyond surface-level recall and support the kind of strategic comprehension and academic language development students need to access complex text.

🔎 What you’ll find on the site:

• Clear explanations of the Getting the Gist routine, including why it works and how it supports comprehension
• Step-by-step instructional guidance for modeling, guided practice, and gradual release
• Strategy Guides for ELA, Science and Social Studies to support implementation of the GIST across content areas
• Classroom-ready lesson materials that can be used across grades and content areas
• Supports for diverse learners, including scaffolds for students who struggle with language, attention, or text complexity
• Professional learning resources that help teachers understand how Gist instruction fits within a coherent, evidence-aligned literacy framework

These resources are especially valuable for grades 4–8, where comprehension demands increase and students must learn to efficiently extract and express meaning from increasingly complex texts.

📌 Strong decoding alone is not enough. Students must be explicitly taught how to make meaning from text, and Getting the Gist provides a research-aligned routine that helps bridge foundational skills and skilled reading application.

📌 Explore Day 7 resources and every day after, here: https://bit.ly/Kastner12DaysOfLiteracy

More evidence-aligned tools coming tomorrow!

19/12/2025

"...children struggling to read aren't going to be helped by the one-size-fits-all approach that is typical in so many schools. Rather, we need teachers who are trained to use a toolbox of principles that they can apply to different types of children." -Maryanne Wolf

18/12/2025

Do you ever have years where you notice a consistent message or theme coming through if your professional reading or learning. For 2025 I am constantly being reminded of the need to target both reading and writing because one supports the other and targeting both in an intervention session can be very powerful.

17/12/2025

🎄 12 Days of Evidence-Aligned Literacy: Day 4 🎄

This season, I am sharing 12 days of evidence-aligned literacy resource, one per day, designed to support teachers, coaches, and leaders in strengthening instruction from foundational skills through skilled application.

Day 4 highlights a Wakelet of curated recordings and resources from a multi-state book study of, 7 Mighty Moves, by Lindsay Kemeny, a study collaboratively hosted by three state chapters of The Reading League:

📘 The Reading League Pennsylvania
📘 The Reading League New York
📘 The Reading League North Carolina

7 Mighty Moves is a powerful example of what happens when research, instructional clarity, and classroom realities intersect. Lindsay Kemeny’s work is especially impactful because it reflects the voice of a practicing classroom teacher, someone actively navigating the complexities of instruction while remaining grounded in evidence.

Her work reminds us how essential it is to learn with and from practicing educators as we translate the science of reading into effective instruction.

If we want research-aligned practices to take root, we must continue to elevate and learn from educators who are doing this important work every day.

📌 Explore Day 4 and every day after, here: https://bit.ly/Kastner12DaysOfLiteracy

17/12/2025

Finally getting to watch the recordings from the 2025 Write Now Conference - Key Note from Joan Sedita

17/12/2025

How do you use writing to support reading comprehension? Is it part of your intervention toolkit?

15/12/2025

It is never too late to provide support for students with reading difficulties, even if they are beyond the early years of school.

The latest meta-analysis by QUT (Queensland University of Technology) Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Callula Killingly and team has demonstrated the effectiveness of interventions targeting core components (such as comprehension, vocabulary or decoding) for improving the reading skills of students in Years 4-12.

Read more about the study in The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-its-never-too-late-to-help-students-learn-to-read-even-in-high-school-271757

Download the FREE Explainer: https://research.qut.edu.au/c4ie/explainers/explainer-reading-for-older-students/

Read the full open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2025.100758