Blog
Notes on teaching reading
Practical pieces on the part of reading instruction nobody trains you for: keeping track. Written for the people doing the teaching, from what Literacy Trail users run into.
A five-minute weekly reading check-in for parents
One short routine for the end of each homeschool week: what to look at, the three questions to ask, and how it changes the next week's lessons.A simple end-of-year reading portfolio for homeschool
What a homeschool reading portfolio needs to contain, how to build it from the daily log instead of from memory, and what to leave out.Documenting reading intervention for a meeting
What to bring to an RTI, MTSS or parent meeting about a student in reading intervention: the log, the skill summary and the one-page story, in minutes.Free ways to track reading lessons, and their limits
The free tools people use to track reading lessons: a notebook, the manual, a spreadsheet, a shared doc. What each does well and where each one stops working.How long should a phonics lesson be?
Most structured phonics lessons run 20 to 30 minutes. What the minutes are for, when shorter is better, and why the record should track them.Running a phonics small group at different lessons
A practical shape for a small reading group whose students are not on the same lesson: shared routines, split new material, and a record that stays individual.Session notes that parents actually read
How reading tutors write session notes that get read: one line, in plain words, with what the child did and what comes next. And what to keep private.Should you skip lessons in a scripted phonics program?
When a lesson in a structured phonics sequence is safe to skip, when to compress instead, and how to record it so the roadmap stays truthful.Starting UFLI Foundations mid-year: where to begin
Placing a student who joins UFLI Foundations partway through: a quick way to find the lesson, what to mark as already taught, and how to keep the record honest.Teaching two siblings the same phonics program
Running the same structured phonics sequence with children at different points: when to teach together, when to split, and how to keep two honest records.When a child forgets sounds between phonics lessons
Why a sound that was solid on Tuesday is gone by Thursday, what it does and does not mean, and a short review habit that fixes most of it.Why Developing is the most useful rating
Three-level ratings work because of the middle one. What Developing means, why it drives review, and how to keep it from becoming a place skills go to hide.
Literacy Trail is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the University of Florida Literacy Institute. It contains no UFLI lesson content, only lesson names and order.
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