Newsletter – Get Ready for Graduation – May 1, 2026

When we follow the directions and engage with the tasks prepared for students to do in Book Bums’ Foundations for Literacy curriculum, kids (and even teachers) like to take short cuts. I get it. Being efficient has its benefits after all. However, the lesson plans are written in such a way as to accomplish sticky and thorough learning.

The other day, I heard a student say, “Can I just glue on all the cereal and then read the words?” The teacher said yes. But I’d have said no—and I wish the teacher had too.

The idea is that we don’t simply do the task of gluing on the o’s to make words. The idea is that we continually remind ourselves that two o’s can say /oo/ (as in tooth) or /oo/ as in books. The goal of gluing cereal isn’t simply to have a bit of crafty time. The aim is to remind ourselves that when we glue two oo’s (made with cereal bits in the lesson) they represent a particular sound. I’m so picky about it that I require my students to pick up one cereal piece in each hand. Two hands. Two o’s.

Would it be faster for the student to mindlessly glue on all the o’s and then decode the words or would it be better for them to glue two o’s onto a word and decode that word and then glue on two more o’s (with the teacher reminding him or her of the sounds) and decoding the next word? Hint: Nothing we do at Book Bums should be done mindlessly.

What’s gained in efficiency is a loss when it comes to instructional opportunity.

Please, teachers, follow the lesson plans. Don’t take short cuts. Say, “Dr. Christy requires that we do the words one at a time.” I’ll take the blame for the deliberate practice—and you can take the credit for students having sufficiently mapped the words into their memories so that, now, they no longer need to make each sound, for the words are already orthographically mapped in their memories. They’ve come to just know the words on sight.

You know those game boards we use in most every lesson? Sure, your students could skip the game and “just read” the words, going around the board and finishing up in no time. But, going around the board multiple times means that your students are seeing all the words on the board—if only incidentally—many more times, and those words are making their way into your students’ memories. The goal of the game isn’t the game. It’s the multiple exposures to the words. Don’t take short cuts, for you cannot do so without shortcutting your students’ gains.

If it feels too easy for your students, that’s no problem. It means you’ve taught them well. You are still to do all the tasks. If it’s easy the tasks will be completed quickly, so coach your students that the more they see and decode words, using what they now know about how words work, not only will their reading improve but their spelling will too. When words are orthographically mapped into our students’ memories, should they misspell a word, our students will say, “Wait. That doesn’t look right.” And then they’ll use those sharpened pencils with those erasers I’m so adamant about using to make the needed changes. We want that to happen.

If your child is doing a lesson with you, it’s because they misspelled words featuring that phonics lesson on the initial assessment I did with them. That error indicated that your student does not, yet, have a firm enough grasp of the phonics lesson and/or those words are not yet sufficiently mapped into his or her memory. Our goal is not only accurate decoding. Our goal also for our students to spell well too.

Students who write fon for fawn are using phonics. When they write fon and they don’t recognize that the spelling seems strange in some way. and they don’t consider another way to spell the word so it “looks right” to them, we know they haven’t had enough experiences with the word fawn and that word is not yet orthographically mapped in their memories. That’s a problem worth solving, and it’s a problem easily solved.

No shortcuts.