[00:00:00] Welcome to Stories That Stick with me, Laura, as your resident storyteller. I'm here to show you how oral stories inspire and captivate minds young and old. Tune in each week to hear a compelling story and join in meaningful conversations. I'll be digging deep into the heart of storytelling, connection, and listening.
So whether you're a kid, teacher, caregiver, grandparent, or simply a lover of stories, This podcast is for you. Join me as you get lost in another world and discover how stories shape our lives. Here's to the next page in our story.
Hey, welcome to today's episode of Stories That Stick. Today, I have Dr. Julia Lindsay with me here. She is a literacy expert that, unbeknownst to me, I knew of before I even knew her. She actually partnered with somebody that I have talked about and that I worked with when I was [00:01:00] teaching in Boston.
And we had that shared connection and I reached Out to her and I am so thrilled to have her on to chat a bit about what decoding and phonics and word recognition can look like in an early childhood learning space. Kind of simplify things and answer some questions that maybe you have and maybe give you a few surprises along the way of facts you didn't know because she's got all the research and facts for us.
So I'm gonna let her introduce herself before we dive into our chat today.
Hey, I'm so excited to be here today and to talk reading with you. I'm Dr. Julia Lindsay, and I started my career as a teacher. I taught kindergarten and first grade, and I actually also coached down in the PK room sometimes.
So I do have some experience with our younger children. And I loved teaching reading and writing, but there were always things in my classroom [00:02:00] that didn't quite make sense. Things that I really didn't know what to do for my students. I had, you know, weird things come up both in their language development, but also in their reading development, where I would say, We've come up to a word that my student can't figure out.
And I was just like, wow, I have no idea what to tell you to get through this word. I don't have any tools in my toolbox sometimes. And I got really excited about literacy. So I decided to pursue a PhD and got a PhD at the university of Michigan. And I was really surprised to learn so much about reading from research.
within even a month of being in my PhD program that I had never had access to as a teacher. So that's what really started my passion about a few things. At first, I got really passionate about some of these early foundational skills, and I ended up actually writing a book called Reading Above the Fray that's for teachers about how to teach this and what the research says.
And the second thing is that I got really passionate about [00:03:00] sharing all of this and talking about it openly and especially talking about, Hey, research is ongoing. There's new stuff to learn all the time. It's really exciting that the science progresses. And so can we progress in our practices? And so today I partner with schools around the country to think about how we can make reading work better.
And I also think it's important for me to let everybody know. I do think that joy is a part of reading and that we should be striving for that joy and we can be striving for that joy even if we're using evidence based frameworks and strategies. So let's bring the joy back even within our research based practices.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for sharing that. , I think that probably you and I can both think of one of those moments because I also taught kindergarten and I was knee deep in teaching the best way that I knew how, which was a lot of throwing things at the wall and hoping things stick and seeing a [00:04:00] handful of children making sense of words and making sense of books and taking off and going like full speed ahead.
And then a handful of children that I just couldn't move. forward and I'll never forget like the biggest aha moment for me was I always knew about phonemic awareness and phonological awareness. I understood rhyming was something we should be building in, and I knew concepts about print, and knowing the page goes left to right should be building in, but it wasn't until it was this a ha moment of, I wasn't connecting the dots for the children.
It was almost as if everything was its own entity, and I wasn't Literally, explicitly saying Hey, you can say cat and ha. And then in a couple months Hey, because you know cat, and you know H makes the sound ha, look, you can change this. And now you can read this. Look, now it says cat.
Now this says ha. Watch this and I wasn't explicitly pointing it [00:05:00] out to them and that for me was the biggest aha. And once I started realizing that that was something that they needed was where I had a fire lit for me and I got my master's in teaching reading and that's when I started doing some.
individualized tutoring where I didn't have to use the curriculum my school was using, and I was able to instead use what I learned in my master's program, which was founded in research and multisensory learning and explicitly following a scope and sequence and identifying where a child was at.
And I think that there's a lot of us that have those moments that really shifted things. And it's so great that we have the ability now to seek out more information to better understand.
And yeah, wow. I love so much about that. And I think one of the things I love is, is something I talk about a lot, which is that we have to teach decoding on purpose.
And we don't want to just [00:06:00] kind of leave it to chance. And that can start really young, exactly in the way that you're describing, where it's not this like overwhelming, overly rigid experience necessarily, but we're being direct and upfront with kids about what they need to know. And that orientation towards teaching these really small skills in a really explicit manner is so critical.
And we see that time and time again in research, but so often we might expect kids to kind of spontaneously bring all those ingredients together. And instead, it's a lot more efficient and a lot more effective to give them access to, oh, how do all of these little things come together? And that can give them Such a different experience in reading.
So I love that story that you shared about your aha moment. And it definitely is reflected in, in the research and in things I talk about too.
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of what we hear is this kind of idea that we know, storytelling is [00:07:00] innate in humans, right? We are naturally storytellers and same with.
Walking and talking and developing language, right? But what we're learning and what we now know is that reading is not something that's just going to develop in that way. For some children, it does and it will, and for most, it doesn't. And it needs to be. taught to them in a way where we are connecting all the dots, we need to give them, like you said, the tools or the key to unlock this rather than hoping.
Yeah, I think it's important to remember human beings naturally want to make sense of the context that they're in and of things that they're hearing. So oral language, we're naturally going to try to make sense of that. But we don't naturally orient towards text, towards written words, unless we're directed to do so.
One really interesting way to think about this is that if we take a look at the average three or four year old who has not been explicitly taught [00:08:00] about letters or explicitly taught to read yet, which is what we would expect, right? That they wouldn't have been taught to read. Kids at that age, if you're reading a book with them, they spend about 3 percent of their time looking at letters and they spend 97 percent of their time looking at the pictures, looking at your face.
And of course, if you're interacting with little kids, you know, they might roll on the floor or look out the window or do anything else, but they're not really looking at. Those words. And that's because naturally they hold no meaning for us as humans. We have to have explicit experiences to make sense of those words.
But once we do have those explicit experiences, oh my gosh, it's so exciting. And children do find the act of learning, Oh, B spells this sound, but it represents a sound and I can actually add these sounds together and I can come up with words. They find that experience really exciting and really joyful in it [00:09:00] of themselves.
And so I think that having that acknowledgement of the difference between. Learning language and being exposed to language and doing that deep work with language and acknowledging, Hey, we need something a little bit different in the space of getting kids to where they'll become readers in elementary school.
And that means having thinking about some of these little ingredients that are going to make it easier for kids to access those reading skills in kindergarten, things like. The alphabet, things like phonemic awareness and how we can weave those into our day in a way that is connected to play, connected to language and connected to our overall philosophy and style.
But getting them closer to those early reading skills is going to make a big difference.
Absolutely. I, you know, as you were just describing that scenario, I was literally picturing my three, almost four year old and how often she's sitting with a book and doing so many of the things that I would expect her to be [00:10:00] doing, which is holding it upright, turning one page at a time, maybe, you know, saying some things.
Maybe she's retelling it or just looking so very carefully at the details in the in the illustrations and maybe sometimes Asking me what's happening in illustration or whatever, but over the last i'd say three months because with my six and a half year old she's been seeing and hearing me doing a lot more drawing attention to print and letters and sounds and having a bit more explicit interaction and conversations with her.
She's, her eyes are going in a different spot now on the page. I see her going to that. Because, you know, that's what they do, right? When they see peers or when they see others noticing something they notice. If you're out walking around a pond and one kid sees a frog, they all come hovering, they're like, what is it?
Let me see. And just in the same way that I have been really trying to reframe. My thinking about what we do when [00:11:00] a play-based setting, when we're following children's lead and we're, we're in a child based setting where they notice this frog, right? And then somebody is like, what is this? Oh, it's a turtle.
And somebody else is like, no, it's not a turtle. And maybe they're having a dialogue back and forth. You're probably not gonna leave that. space and never come back to that conversation. You're probably not going to leave that space and let them inaccurately think it's a turtle. Instead, you're going to see, are they still interested in this?
Yes. Okay. So you might bring some materials into your learning space that are a variety of frogs, different species of frogs. You may get some books that are field guides or some small manipulatives. You may start to have more opportunities for children to engage in conversations about these.
And. Somewhere along the way, you will explicitly teach them that this is a frog. And what a frog is, maybe you're going to explicitly teach them the life cycle. Because a child doesn't just naturally know a frog from a turtle unless they're told. Right? That a reptile versus an amphibian. And As a play based educator, that [00:12:00] feels, that explicit instruction, in whatever way that it's the adult holding the knowledge and sharing it with a child, through text, through books, through experiences, doesn't feel as uncomfortable as I sometimes feel well.
When I'm showing a letter and explicitly naming it and the sound, right? For whatever reason, inside me, I feel this slight discomfort of like, I'm doing this adult led thing and I'm supposed to be leading the children, and yet I have to keep reframing it. Because we teach children to tie their shoes. We teach them how to use the bathroom.
We teach them how to identify a birch tree. We teach them things explicitly when they're interested, when they want to know, right? And it, this is no different.
It is, it's true. It's also just like tying your shoes. It is a skill that you need to have to get access to other things. And so you can't really go run around on the playground unless you've got velcro shoes if you can't tie your shoes.
And you can't get access to the amazing world of literature [00:13:00] and of informational texts if you can't read. And so even though it might feel a little bit out of place, it's giving us access to a place that has a lot of opportunity for being child led and being playful. I think also some important things to keep in mind from the research On Children who are not even yet in kindergarten.
So these studies are often done on the alphabet with preschoolers because it's easier to control the conditions. So researchers are more confident. Hey, most of these kids don't know the alphabet. So it's a really good space to try things out. And we know that it is completely appropriate to teach kids about the alphabet as long as we're not being overly worried about testing and that sort of thing.
Of course, young Children can learn. The alphabet's names, its forms, and its sounds. And so in some of the research that we see, we see that that's can be really effective, even in seven minutes a day, where we have a quick explicit experience. Hey, this is the letter B. B can make the [00:14:00] sound, but let's all say, but let's find objects around the room that start with a B.
Buh sound. Let's maybe write a B on the board. Let's talk about, oh, we see these bumps, etc. It doesn't have to be you talking for seven minutes, but rather a quick teacher talk, and then some experiences around that letter where we're thinking about saying the sound, saying the letter's name, and looking for that form or making the form in sand even, or with markers on a whiteboard if we would rather do something like that.
And even if if you have a short amount of time, like I said, even like seven minutes can be effective at helping kids learn about those letters so that they're ready to to read. And we see that. Young children actually really like this kind of instruction. There's a sort of crazy study that was looking at alphabet instruction with pre kindergarteners and children were either in a condition where they were learning about the letter through storybooks or they were [00:15:00] learning about the letter in the way I just described.
It was just really explicit and then they had a bunch of chances to practice. saying the sound and that sort of thing. And the researchers were really surprised at the end because they found out that the kids learned better when they just had that explicit experience. And the kids said that they preferred it.
The kids were way more likely to say, I want to do that again. And when the researchers were watching this instruction, they also noticed the children were more engaged. So it's important to recognize that this act of learning about The code, the act of being able to say, wow, I know what these things are.
They're all over my mom's phone. They're all over the books we read in class. They're all over the TV screen. I see them when I'm in the car and I see a sign. Oh, those mean something and I can use them. That is joyful and exciting for kids. If we let it be, if we don't kind of. make out the joy by being, you know, overly intense about it, or if [00:16:00] we say to kids, well, this isn't going to be fun, but you've got to learn it.
Then kids will find the joy in this. sort of little moment of learning about these letters, and that, again, that joy will help support them as they continue to become a reader.
I mean, that in theory totally makes sense with what we know about children, right? Because they do want to learn, they are innately learners, they are interested in the world around them, and yes, they see print.
Maybe not, and not us writing or, you know, people writing as much as we would like, but they do see this everywhere, right? And I think you and I both know that where that we, you know, we all call that like light switch, right? When the child does finally start glancing down at the bottom of the page or the child does start saying like, The M on the McDonald's, that's my letter, right?
When they start seeing it, it's like you know, us as adults, when we see something, you can't unsee it. You don't suddenly start noticing environmental print and making this connection that these mean something and then [00:17:00] don't care about it anymore. Now you're like, right? You kind of want to soak it up and you want to make more sense of it.
And so it totally makes sense that a child may. feel this sense of accomplishment and pride of seeing, you know, making sense of these things, these abstract things that they're seeing and then wanting to dive in more with it, right? And I think our job is to, like you said, know that it can be done in a developmentally appropriate way.
It can be done in less time. It can also be done In depending on what you're setting is like, right? I try to think a lot about if we as educators know the scope and sequence, we know where they're starting and where they're going in a in a way that we can hold on to it in our mind. We can hold onto it.
Maybe feel a little more comfortable doing a bit more of that explicit instruction in incidental learning moments So maybe you're not doing it in a you know Formal group on the rug [00:18:00] every every day following this letter this letter this letter this letter, but you know You okay yesterday We talked about f because the kids are really interested in the frogs and you know So you're gonna bring that letter back in and while you're in this whatever space while they're outside side or they're in another place, maybe you're bringing that letter back in and you're doing it in the same explicit way.
Like, so I think what really has to shift is that the knowledge that we as educators have to hold. And before I hit record, you and I were talking about how little, you know, we actually knew being in a classroom setting. Where, you know, half of our job is to teach children foundational literacy skills. We weren't actually taught, like, all the components of what literacy is and how children actually develop it.
And so, I think, yeah, I'm, I'm curious to know, like, what are, it, it sounds like you shared kind of some of those, these surprising findings, right? And I hear you saying you work with [00:19:00] schools, like, what are some of these, like, the common challenges that you find educators are facing right now? In, in the early childhood space, when they're thinking about developmentally appropriate, you know, instruction that's based in evidence.
Yeah, so I think one of the things that comes up a lot is the hottest term in in reading right now is probably phonemic awareness. I hear it everywhere. Everybody wants to talk about it. So first off, what is phonemic awareness? Phonemic awareness is our ability to hear, manipulate, and say the individual sounds in language.
So that phoneme. So it's the k and cat and the ch. But it's not saying at rhymes with cat rhymes with bat, because that would be phonological awareness, which is the bigger umbrella term for dealing with all the sounds, not just that teeny tiny phoneme, that singular sound. So when we think about alphabet letters, they all tend to represent.
One or more [00:20:00] sounds. And so if you think about like the letter B, the pho, it repre represents is B. So if you have felt like, wow, what are all these terms? Hopefully that clarifies a little bit. Just like you were just saying about you and I have had experiences where we realized we didn't know as much as we thought we did in the classroom.
Phonemic awareness is actually a term I did not realize. I needed to know and I had never heard until I started a PhD program. So absolutely no problem if you are like still grappling with some of these definitions. And so that I think is one of the top things that people talk about and that they have questions about.
And one of the questions of course is, is it appropriate to do phonemic awareness tasks with young kids? Or should those be, you know, saved for kindergarten? The value of phonemic awareness is that it allows us to decode and encode words. If you can look at a word and you can say, Oh, that's at, at, that's [00:21:00] showing that, you know, phonemic awareness, and then that's letting you decode the word along with your knowledge of letters.
And it also lets you then spell the word, but you might say, okay, like that seems like maybe that's really a task for kindergarten. So some of the cool things to know about phonemic awareness are first that we actually see that children as young as. three can start learning phonemic awareness. And we've seen this in research studies, but I'll tell you that from my own experience as an aunt, I have seen my, my little nieces start learning these, some of these skills, even at two not in a, real instructional way, but just in a curiosity kind of way.
And so we know that young children can interact with these singular sounds. They can start kind of playing with them. We also see that phonemic awareness is one of the most important predictors of long term literacy success. And this is an utterly essential skill. And so when we kind of combine thinking about this, okay, young children can deal [00:22:00] with this.
And this is a really, really, important skill. Hopefully we can start seeing, well, it might be worth it to have some time to play with language and to play with those individual sounds. So just like we might do some rhyming games, rhyming songs, et cetera, we could also think about, well, let's do some alliteration and let's talk about, Oh, we hear that first sound in Bob, Bob Blacksheep, and we can talk about some of the individual sounds we can talk about.
Oh, your name is Taylor. It starts with T. And we can play around with that. And so doing all those things, some of them you probably already do all the time, maybe even just naturally, are all things that are going to support that phonemic awareness base. so that kids are more readily able to deal with learning these alphabet sounds and then deal with putting them together to read words and to spell words when they're ready for that.
So that's something that we can absolutely do. And, but we don't necessarily need to be [00:23:00] buying a curriculum to do that or something. We can use. Strategies and routines that we might already have in our classroom and more of an orientation towards these sounds in, in any kind of environment.
Right.
I mean, what that brings to mind, you know, it's, it's so interesting for me to sometimes reflect back and be like, wow, I was doing so many great things, right, that I didn't even realize I was doing. And then on the flip, I was like, I don't know, this is a caterpillar, this is a butterfly, this is a, and they don't know what the word is.
I'm like, look at the picture, what do you think it is? Right? And I'm inviting my children to memorize sentences and guess words. But, what I always did, one of the things that I always did, and that many people that are in, you know, preschool settings and with that age children, we do some type of community building.
building, especially in the first few months, right? And we know children are interested And they are interested in their own letter, right? We know that. So [00:24:00] names is a natural, great place to start. And one of my favorite greetings that we would do and then I would use along the way was Willoughby, Wallaby, Woo.
And it's this little, about an elephant, it's Willoughby, Wallaby, Woo, an elephant sat on you. Willoughby, Wallaby, We, an elephant sat on me. And then I would be, let's say, transitioning to wherever. And I would say, Willoughby, Wallaby, Wessica, an elephant sat on, and then they would say Jessica, right? And so, just doing that regularly, you're building in that alliteration, because you're saying the Willoughby, you know, over and over and over.
And then they're also, you know, we know, kind of, they're manipulating that initial sound. It's rhyming, but really, normally we think about rhyming as like, hat, hat, right? Or, you know, I can't think of a more complex rhyming word, but Wessica Jessica, what we're actually doing there is just manipulating that initial phoneme.
We're not, you know, we're not really making up a real rhyming word. And so [00:25:00] slowly, what you can do after you introduce that, you can start introducing the print, you can bring attention to it, you can have the child's name, and you're taking the letter out, and you're putting another letter in front of it.
And I mean, that, that's, that's, that's, When children start to naturally play around with words is my favorite thing. And that's why jokes with young children is also my favorite thing. Because I 90 percent believe that children do not get jokes at all. Because the majority of them are puns. So there's no way that they actually know the joke that they're saying.
They just like memorize it. But what they're doing is they're playing around with language. They're playing with language and they're, Making up words and when children start to realize, like, oh, I can say these funny words that aren't really words, they think it's hilarious. Or when they tell a joke that, you know, makes an adult laugh, you know, but they don't actually get it, they're playing around with, with words.
And I think, like you said, they, they can do it when it's in [00:26:00] this way that isn't, you know, Rigid and it isn't for the the end game isn't to meet beyond X page on X day of X curriculum, and it's not to be able to know X number of sounds or identifying the initial sounds in 10 words by the end of the year if it's literally for the joy of it, the fun of it, giving the Children the tools to enjoy it, right?
That's. We, we hold that right in the way that we present it to them.
Yeah, no, absolutely getting, I think there's so many different ways that we can support kids in, in engaging with these kinds of skills. And I think that, you know, Making sure that all the children under our care have access to these foundational skills so that they can enter into kindergarten and be ready to become readers and writers.
There's just no greater task. [00:27:00] We see time and time again how really, really critical those pre reading skills are for long term success. And so making sure that kids are set up with With the skills that they need and with a lot of knowledge about the world and a lot of chances to, to use language and to talk and, and ready to walk into those classrooms and be in that more academic environment is going to just be transformative for young, young readers and young writers.
And so, along with playing around with sounds and words, what would you say are some of those other really essential pre reading skills that we should be fostering?
Yeah, so I think that some of the other ones are things that we've already talked about. So I think that that's another really important thing to, to recognize is that right now, depending on the setting that you're in or the Facebook and, you know Instagram things that you're following, it might seem like there's just this crazy [00:28:00] amount of information about reading some of which might feel like is, is everything I knew wrong?
Is this all new? What is all this stuff? So keeping in mind that the critical elements are what you probably think they are. So when we think about the reading and we can bucket things in kind of two big categories, which would be decoding and then language comprehension, and together those things lead to reading comprehension.
We can think about a million different things under language comprehension that I'm not going to get into, but I do want to make sure that I don't ignore that. And if we think about decoding, we're really thinking about a few critical things. The first is knowledge of letters and the sounds that they represent.
The second is phonemic awareness or that ability to hear the sounds and. And say them and blend them back together. The third is print concepts and the last is vocabulary and utilizing those kinds of skills together is what is really going to allow us to [00:29:00] decode words and to to remember them in long term storage so that we can read fluently.
So if we think about print concepts that would kind of be the last one that we haven't really touched on is of course that we need kids to be able to pick up a book and navigate it. Where does the word start? Where, where's the sentence going? Which direction do I flip the page? All these kinds of things are really critical pre reader skills.
And I think that the other area of this that we sometimes might be hesitant to do much about, and we don't necessarily have to talk about this, but I think it's something to acknowledge is technology reading is not the same as print reading. And so if we do have technology in our classroom. Being direct when we need to be about how those texts work.
We often think of children at this age as like tech natives, like, Oh, we don't need to teach them anything about this. They just know how it works automatically. But if you're someone who uses [00:30:00] technology in your classroom and you have, say, iPads or something for kids. They need to navigate those books very differently than they navigate a print book, so it can be helpful to think about what are the concepts that they would need to bring to be successful in this kind of environment.
And if you don't use tech in your classroom, that's fine, trust me, they're going to get enough in elementary school,
but
I'm thinking about how we're helping kids navigate text and understand how to text operate, how do they, how do or are they organized and how do they work so that they're better able to actually read those words on a page instead of spending all of the time trying to remember, do I start up here or do I start down there?
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, what you were just saying, that really had me thinking of what you and I know of the different views of reading, right? And so we know that the, end game that we're all working towards is to help children to comprehend information that they're [00:31:00] taking in, presumably through print.
But there's still this piece of even if you're watching a documentary, there's still pieces of language development that are happening there cause you're having to auditorily process it. But I think knowing that for me, what's always helpful to point out is that literacy and early literacy is not just letter identification and, or even letter and sound identification, right?
That actually, if you go through your early literacy standards, you'll probably see there's 40 altogether that fall under language and literacy, and maybe only 4 or 5 that explicitly state something about letter identification or sounds, because there's all these other pieces that are just as critical to, to, to have.
If you have no vocabulary and no You know, context of which to base it on when you're sounding out a multi syllabic word. If you can't pull to the mind what that word means because you've never been exposed to it, you've [00:32:00] never heard it, it doesn't matter that you can read it, right? In the same way if you can't make sense of it or know how to hold a book.
So I think it's really important for us to, like you said, not get lost in the chatter and the overwhelm. It's so easy in this age for all of us to have that, that information overload and really just like teasing through and honing in on. And if there's one thing that you can start with, I think playing around with three to five year olds, playing around with sounds and words is a really great place to start.
If you're uncomfortable and you're unsure about any of the things that we've said. That's something you can do and something that I started doing with my young children, you know Just in the same way, like you said when you're saying a singing a song or doing a nursery rhyme I'll never forget my children's speech therapist One time suggested leaving out a word in twinkle twinkle little star and letting them feel it [00:33:00] And guess what?
My child started to produce more language because it was like a very clear word that he knew he could fill in. It wasn't this arbitrary, like, what do you want to eat? Right. It, I gave him, he knew the word. It was going to be twinkle, twinkle, little star. You know how I wonder what you. And he knew he'd heard me sing it so many times.
And so it's almost sometimes that like light bulb moment of what I used to do with my children, if I was reading a book instead of. Just saying it, I would just break down the phoneme. So if I was reading a book about, you know, animals, and I'd say like, Oh, and here is the shh ee. Do you see it? Yeah, there's the sheep!
Or even when you're getting into line, Okay, go get on your shh oo zzz. Shoes! That's it! Like, we don't have Yeah. And
that is actually asking kids to blend sounds back together, which is exactly what they need to do to read words later on. But that is a perfect example of a low stakes, fun way to work on this, that we would probably do [00:34:00] that.
Most of us might naturally say more like, Oh, Don't go lying on the floor. Come over and meet me at the door. And we're doing more of a ride, which this up just a tiny bit. And we're doing a little bit more focus on the skill kids really need in order to read. And you know, we can also do just like teeny tiny things.
So one very small thing that we can do is when we're talking about sounds and we're talking about letter names, we can just. point to our mouth. And that helps draw kids attention to how we're forming those sounds, which can be really helpful. And we do actually have a research study that showed that this helped kids.
learn the alphabet letter names and sounds. And so it doesn't have to be a big deal. We don't have to change a gazillion different things. If we're trying to get our footing with different ways of talking about sounds or talking about letters, just something as simple as pointing at our mouth can make a difference in kids learning.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. Well, this has been [00:35:00] so nice to chat with you and really break down some of these, what can feel bigger or overwhelming. Things for people that are unfamiliar with it all and haven't studied it for years of their life and dream about phonemes in their mind. So I really appreciate it.
Is there any last things you want to leave us with? Tell us where people can find you. I will link your social and your website and your book, but Feel free to tell us.
Yeah, the last thing I'll leave you with is don't undervalue shared reading. Shared reading is a really well researched technique.
I was going to ask you
about that, I forgot. Yeah,
it is such a great technique for supporting young children's vocabulary, print concepts. Early knowledge of letters and sounds and you can do it with basically anything, but I would suggest doing it with books that are print salient. So books that have crazy letters in them, like no, David has great examples of like, Whoa, [00:36:00] those are some really cool letters, just like I talked about earlier, because it pulls kids into wanting to look at the letters more, which is one of the goals that we need to have when we're doing early reading instruction.
And so, having conversations around that, about the text, about the letters, about the sounds, all of those things are excellent ways to support these early skills, and probably something you already do. So that would be the last thing I would leave you with is, is don't forget about shared reading and how powerful it can be and how fun for you and children it can be as well.
And you can find me basically anywhere you want with my name, which is Julia B. Lindsay. That's the name of my website. It's I'm very Google able because there's just not really other Julia Lindsey's. And you can find me on social media, except for TikTok. And you can also find my book, Reading Above the Fray, anywhere books are sold.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much. It was great chatting with you. I'll have all those links in [00:37:00] there. And I hope we get to chat again and maybe break down some, some other myths or things to make it just a little bit more digestible for people.
Well, thanks so much for having me. This was so fun.
The end. But really, that's it for today's episode of Stories That Stick. Inspiring and captivating minds, young and old. Remember, stories have the incredible ability to spark conversations, ignite imagination, and create lasting connections. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a five star review.
It really does make a difference. And, if you have a story to share or a topic you want me to explore, reach out to me on Instagram at LittleStoriesThatStick. Until next time, keep working that storytelling muscle and tell stories every day.
