Timothy Shanahan

So let's dive in and make reading instruction a little less stressful and a lot more effective.

Hey everyone, I have Tim Shanahan here with me.

How are you today?

I'm doing great.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

Well, everyone, this is Dr. Tim Shanahan.

We've talked about your book.

And the more of these multiple layers... that you build in a child, the easier it is for them to read, to spell, and to write.

And what we're doing with phonics, it's only effective, according to Timothy Shanahan, up to the age of seven.

Dominic Wise at University College in London, he's shown that the kids who have had A lot of this phonics instruction are much less likely to read independently, read for pleasure, than the children that aren't.

So we're dampening down the child's long-term ability to develop vocabulary knowledge, greater sentence structure, syntactic knowledge.

So by the time they were done with first grade, they were only through a portion of the first grade curriculum.

And I think about Tim Shanahan, we talked about level books and making sure everyone has grade level content.

My main focus is exposing children to grade level content and ways they can handle that support and scaffold.

And then during small group time, if there are some previously taught skills they haven't mastered, we can hit those hard.