monkeypodeducation

Today, while we were sorting the 4 most common long e spellings, a kindergartener said:

“When I was practicing my red words, I thought green was two short e sounds…
but now I know the two e’s say /ee/.”

That’s exactly what happens when short vowels are all they know.

Kids apply what they know to everything.

But English doesn’t work like that.

Sounds can be spelled different ways. Sometimes 1–4 letters represent one sound.

So when the code doesn’t account for the word, they get stuck.

When it does, they can adjust.

/grĕn/ → green

That adjustment—set for variability—is a strong predictor of reading success and how new words are learned through reading.

Learning phonics isn’t the goal.
Reading is.

This doesn’t mean teaching everything at once.

Kids need a secure foundation first—
short vowels, digraphs, adjacent consonants.

But once they have that, they need more of the code to make sense of what they’re reading.

That’s also why staying only in decodables is limiting.

Kids don’t get enough exposure to the patterns they actually need.
They’re not adjusting.
They’re not building flexibility.

And when they read real text,
they can feel it working.

Citations:
Seidenberg (2017) · Share (1995) · Savage et al. (2024) · Ehri (2014)

Four years ago, I changed my approach to reading intervention.

I saw my son stuck below grade level
while getting intensive intervention.

I was seeing the same thing with my students:

They learned the skills.
But they didn’t catch up.

I had been trained to simplify—
controlled phonics, leveled text, scope and sequence.

This study challenged that.

In a Grade 3 intervention study (Downs et al., 2026; 283 students, 17 schools),
students read texts above grade level
with explicit multisyllabic word instruction
and strategic rereading.

They didn’t lose fluency.
They made stronger gains in reading accuracy (g = 0.47).
They were 2.79x more likely to reach high accuracy.
And the lowest-performing students improved the most.

For me, this shift matters.

When students don’t catch up,
it impacts how they see themselves.

In my experience, working in complex, meaningful text, with the right support, builds confidence and motivation in a powerful way.

The shift isn’t making text easier.
It’s supporting students inside complex text.