Structured Literacy Workshop

These workshops have allowed me to learn a lot more about the English language and really how this language has come to be. We were shown many different histories and origins of words, sounds and letters which was very beneficial because it allowed us to make connections and having that understanding enables us to effectively teach others. For me personally, these workshops have really helped because I have not had much prior knowledge in learning about linguistics and what it means to teach these incredibly important concepts in language. Setting up students with the proper skills to decode, isolate, segment and combine letter sounds into words is truly detrimental to their learning. These modules have given me much more confidence to approach this in the classroom. It has provided me with many different resources to use and has given me a more critical eye when I review students’ work, so that I am able to pinpoint what to look for. It was very interesting to see this as a new way to teach language and phonemic awareness because when I was growing up our learning and understanding of words and sounds came from memorization and repetition. Even as a future educator now, I find myself having to learn all these new terminologies and strategies because it is something I have never had. I believe it is a much stronger teaching practice.

I would highly recommend this course to anyone interested in implementing a structured literacy approach – whether you’re a classroom teacher, a parent, a tutor, or an SLP. Liisa’s passion is infectious and she has sparked what is sure to be a lifelong learning journey into the English language for me. The depth of her knowledge is truly amazing; however rather than simply disseminating the information, I felt more that I “uncovered” the information due to her exceptional teaching style – not an easy feat in a virtual course! The time commitment involved in this course is well worth it and I can’t overstate the value of the content on my practice.

This was a much more comprehensive session than I was expecting. I had previously taken several Structured Literacy courses (from very reputable organizations) and to be honest I had expected this to be a complete review. I was very surprised by how much new information was presented – particularly about morphology and etymology. I had not really thought about using this with young students before but you have me questioning why I had made those assumptions.
I came away with such a deeper understanding of why these concepts are important for teachers for understand and for students to learn as soon as they are ready – which is much younger than I had thought. Thank you for such a rich session.
I have a lot to think about!

Overall, I think that Liisa gave some excellent new strategies for us teachers as well as some well supported examples. I like the examples that Liisa uses to reinforce her points. For example, when she brought up the base word “pack,” we found out so much. By building a matrix using the base of a word and adding compound bases, prefixes and suffixes, we unraveled so many new words. Students could then start to understand structure and how words look together. I enjoyed how Liisa shared so much of her research about certain words and as a result I am now very curious about spelling.
I also respect that Liisa has done a lot of research and is able to demonstrate how/why certain approaches in the past have not worked when it came to teaching children how to spell. Students retain more when they can make sense of what they are learning.
Through these workshops with Liisa Freure, I have become a curious teacher, and for my children and for my future students, I would like to be able to provide them with an answer when they ask me “why?”