Skippy Frog or Skip the Frog?

My childhood home in Billings, Montana had a huge unfinished basement providing ample storage space and room for my sisters and I to roller skate year round. I do not have a basement; I have a crawl space. A pitch back, spider web infested, 4-foot-tall crawl space where my prized possessions from years as a kindergarten teacher have lived since I left the classroom a few years ago to be a literacy coach. Over these past years, I have slowly given away most of what I once considered “must keep in case I go back to the classroom” items. 

The oral language development and use
of graphic organizers for prewriting captured here
are both obviously important.
 Also, I love that stool my mama gave me!

A few containers labeled and organized remain in my personal dungeon: a classroom set of yoga mats, little baggies of items corresponding to each letter of the alphabet (which I painstaking gathered from junk drawers, swiping my children’s toys and countless trips to my local thrift store long before similar phonological awareness tubs could be commercially purchased), puppets and my watermelon stool.  

Kiddos ready for Yoga Friday

Recently, I needed some counters for a professional development I am leading on using manipulatives to support phonological awareness interventions and I knew just where to find some. I opened the hatch, lowered the ladder and climbed down with a flashlight gripped between my teeth. As I opened the tote, the flashlight fell from my mouth as I exclaimed, “What the hell?” Staring up at me in the dim light were Lips the Fish, Eagle Eye, Stretchy Snake, Chunky Monkey, Skippy Frog, Trying Lion and that darling Dolphin. 

Let me rewind 20ish years. My undergraduate Early Literacy course was taught by Dr. Kathleen Brown, the eventual founder and director of the University of Utah Reading Clinic. Thanks to her, I understood about top-down/bottom-up processing, explicit and systematic phonics instruction as well as distributed practice.  One class period, she literally made each of us raise a hand and swear to never teach the Letter of the Week format, warning us about the push back we would get from colleagues. 

I have been reflecting on my college years often in light of the exciting, and sometimes heated, national conversation regarding how well university education programs prepare teacher candidates for the classroom. I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten a solid foundation from my undergraduate work, but even that could not save me from getting sucked in by the cute faces of those beanie babies when I met them on Teachers Pay Teachers. During my first few years in the classroom, I knew I should be gathering the little humans around the rainbow table for some sort of guided reading/tier 2/small group/intervention type instruction, but had no idea what that should entail. In exchange for my hard earned $3, I printed and hung up these cards. 

I now know that these "strategies" represented by the beanie babies are based on the 3-cueing system, also called the psycholinguistic guessing game, and assumes that students use context and guessing in order to decode unknown words. The evidence from the Science of Reading suggests that this is not what occurs during skilled reading. These cues are slow, inefficient and encourage students to take their focus away from the act of decoding. These deceptive beanie babies actually represent the habits of struggling readers.

When we look at the Simple View of Reading, as presented by Gough and Tumner (1986), we see that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension. When we understand the role of decoding in this way, it becomes vital to instruct students to decode in the way that will lead to automatic word recognition and consequently free up working memory for comprehension. 

 The Simple View of Reading: The product of Decoding and Language Comprehension is equal to
Reading Comprehension

I am relieved to say that I never really did a thorough job of teaching what each beanie was supposed to remind my budding readers to do. But unfortunately, I do clearly remember flying that stuffed eagle around the room telling my students to use picture cues.   

If you are interested in learning about the evidence that using Lips the Fish and the 3-cueing approach are not in the best interest of emergent readers, I have a few recommendations. First, read Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David Kilpatrick. Rightfully so, this book is currently taking the educational world by storm. The cognitive psychologist, Mark Seidenburg address these same topics brilliantly in his book Language at the Speed of Sight. His words on page 304 help to ease my mind when I think of students who had passed through my class while I was using this approach. The 3-cueing approach, Seidenburg writes, “didn’t develop because teachers lack integrity, commitment, motivation, sincerity or intelligence. It developed because they were poorly trained and advised.” Finally, the APM Reports podcast At a Loss For Words by Emily Hanford is part of a trilogy of reports that examine why so many students in America struggle to read. The one linked is the third in the trio and looks closely at this topic.  

This quote is becoming a bit cliché, but I don't care.
I still find it relevant as an important guiding belief. 

If you clicked on the blog because you currently use these confusing creatures and now your beanie baby bubble has burst, I have been there and I got you. We are educators at a time where knowledge, research and evidence-based practices are within our grasp. And it is ok, no it is admirable, for us teachers, coaches and administrators to change our minds. To look at our students, parents and communities and say, “I learned something new and now I will do better for every human who comes through that door.”  

Oh, what did I do with those darling stuffed creatures you wonder? They dove headfirst into the bin of Breathing Buddies! But that is another post...