Decode and Conquer with Darlene Adams

I always say I don't teach curriculum, I teach children.
Love this the moment is the curriculum. Let's build moments with our students.

What you do in real time teaches more than any lesson plan.

Each interaction is a chance to model calm, connection, and problem-solving in a way that lasts.

We often teach reading skills one at a time —
phonics here, vocabulary there, comprehension later —
and assume the connections will magically form on their own.

But reading doesn’t work like that.

Children don’t learn skills in isolation and then suddenly integrate them.
The integration has to be designed, modelled, and practised alongside the skills themselves.

This is why so many children can “do the parts”
but struggle when real reading is required.

Strong reading isn’t built by collecting skills.
It’s built by weaving them together as they develop.

When we teach with the connections in mind,
reading stops feeling fragmented — and starts to make sense.

What connections do you see children being expected to make on their own?

This is so great. Explaining so that kids can understand.

One of the most important ideas in reading science is that skilled reading is not made up of isolated skills learned one after the other.

Reading develops as a coordinated system.

This is why I’ve always loved Scarborough’s Reading Rope. Each strand has its own source — phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, background knowledge, language — but they must be developed together, not separately.

Strong strands taught in isolation don’t automatically twist into a rope. Integration is not an “extra.” It’s the point.

This idea aligns closely with what Reid Lyon describes as one of the core reading maxims: becoming a skilled reader requires many interwoven skills developing over time.

In my work, I see the difference immediately when instruction honours this — and the cost when it doesn’t.

What happens to reading in your context when one strand is missing or delayed?

This response to a question on someone's substack post that I commented on a while ago is an important topic so I decided to post it here as well. Spread it around a bit. 😊

Science of Reading is a body of research that studies how children's brains actually learn to read; unlike language it must be taught. Reading is a skill that requires actually neurological changes in the brain. This ability comes at different ages or stages of development because everyone's brain is different. This process is also highly dependent on personality, interests and environment.

So if you think of reading as skill, there are many different aspects that need development before one can be considered a fluent reader. Scarborough's reading rope is a great visual to understand all the individual skills that make up reading as the main skill. SOR actually supports structured phonics as a foundation and rich language experiences, background knowledge, oral language, vocabulary and comprehension building.

As you can see, the environment of an early learner is very important to this process of learning to read. If early learners are enveloped in an environment rich with language experiences - listening and speaking when it comes to reading phonics is one little piece of the puzzle that lets them explore what they already know in a different format. I think whole word learning comes out of a teacher's desire to provide that rich language environment.

Some kids can learn to identify words by their shape or being exposed to them often, but those kids generally have a lot of gaps in their ability to read a passage or to read any unfamiliar language that comes their way.

Even though whole language has been out of fashion, as you say, it is still practiced often alongside phonics because teachers have curriculums they have to follow and content that needs to be learned by students who haven't figured out the phonics system yet.

All of this supports the original post of why traditional classrooms are not the best environments for the support of natural ways of learning. Classrooms have age based groupings and curriculum objectives that do not support neurodevlopment and individual variation. If teachers just teach them the rules of phonics then hopefully they will be able to use those rules when their brain is ready to apply them. If you teach whole word then kids have a few words they know but don't know the rules and don't have any rules to apply to new words.