Literacy Lines: 10+ Years of Blog Posts

This month’s post marks over ten years of my writing monthly blog posts for Literacy Lines, Keys to Literacy’s blog. Back in September 2014, I decided that blogging would be an effective way to share information about literacy and offer practical suggestions for teaching reading and writing—making these resources widely available to educators across the U.S. and abroad.

Here’s an excerpt from my very first post welcoming readers to the blog:

Since Keys to Literacy was founded in 2007, part of our mission has been to share what we learn about literacy instruction with educators, helping them improve students’ reading and writing skills. This mission is rooted in my personal commitment to share information about literacy instruction, which began in the late 1970s when I first had the opportunity to teach students who struggled with reading and writing at the Landmark School.

From that point on, I have been fortunate to find many opportunities and platforms for sharing with other educators. Writing chapters, books, and journal articles on literacy instruction; creating newsletters; presenting at hundreds of conferences; training teachers in districts across the country; delivering guest webinars; and contributing guest blogs have all enabled me to “get the word out” for many years.

We launched Literacy Lines because the internet and social media platforms now make it possible to reach a much larger audience of educators than ever before.

Since that launch, I have faithfully written at least one post each month and invited colleagues at Keys to Literacy, as well as other experts in the literacy field, to contribute. Today, approximately 30,000 educators visit the Literacy Lines website every month. I am both gratified and proud that my original goal of sharing knowledge and “getting the word out” about effective literacy instruction has reached so many teachers and students across all grade levels.

In this month’s post, I have selected some of the most popular posts from more than 130 blog entries, and organized them by topic. I hope you will explore the ones most relevant and appealing to your work by selecting the titles below.

Foundational Skills

• Phonics and Word Study: What’s the Difference?
• Developing Phonemic Awareness Using Letters
• The Importance of Teaching Prosody As Part of Reading Fluency
• Spelling Rules and Generalizations
• Teaching Handwriting
• Teaching the Schwa Sound in Unaccented Syllables
• Phoneme and Letter-Sound Ladders
• The Role of Orthographic Mapping in Learning to Read
• Systematic Phonics Scope and Sequence

Adolescent Literacy

• Reading Assessment Model, Grades 5-12
• Disciplinary Literacy
• Motivating and Engaging Adolescents to Read
• Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively

Instruction That Supports Both Reading and Writing

• Deconstructing and Combining Sentences to Support Comprehension and Writing
• Oral Language: The Foundation for Reading and Writing
• Connecting the Ropes: Integration Reading and Writing Instruction
• Teaching Text Structure to Support Writing and Comprehension
• The Power of Transitions Words
• Explicit Instruction of Note Taking Skills

Vocabulary

• Building Vocabulary: Semantic Feature Analysis
• Vocabulary Strategy: Use of Context 
• Vocabulary: Templates for Teaching Words In-Depth
• Previewing Vocabulary Before Reading
• Using Morphology to Teach Vocabulary

Comprehension

• Making Inferences to Support Comprehension 
• In Support of Main Idea and Comprehension Strategy Instruction
• The Science of Reading Comprehension
• Question Generation: A Key Comprehension Strategy 
• Background Knowledge and Reading Comprehension

Writing

• Writing Instruction in the Age of AI 
• Writing Instruction Scope and Sequence
• Planning Effective Writing Assignments
• Writing Personal Reactions to Narrative Text 
• The Stages of the Writing Process
• The Power of Quick Writes
• Teaching Basic Writing Argument Components

Literacy Learning Difficulties

• The Role of Executive Functions in Reading and Writing
• Accommodations, Modifications, and Assistive Technology for Students with Dyslexia
• Providing Reading Interventions Grades 4-9
• Teaching Vocabulary to English Language Learners
• Understanding Dyslexia