Erin Masi- Reading Interventionist

Does writing feel like a marathon for your child? ✍️🏃‍♂️

If your child’s letter formation isn’t automatic, every sentence is an uphill battle.

Every time E has to stop, think, and fix the direction of a letter, he loses his train of thought. This is why writing feels:
🐢 Slower than it should be.
😩 Exhausting for their little hands.
🧠 Frustrating because their big ideas get stuck behind a slow pencil.

Proper letter formation does more than just make things neat. Research shows that physically writing letters trains the eye. It activates the brain’s reading circuit in a way that typing or tracing simply doesn’t.

When the hand knows the feel of a letter, the eye recognizes it faster in a book. 📖✨

We aren’t just practicing pretty letters; we are building a faster, more confident reader and writer.

Is your child’s pencil slowing down their brain? Let’s talk about it below! 👇

As a Reading Specialist, I’m looking at more than just right or wrong. I’m looking for Phonetic Accuracy.
If your child spells beach as beech, they aren’t failing—they’re winning! It proves they’ve mastered:
✅ The /b/ sound
✅ The /ch/ digraph

And they’re beginning to learn long e vowel teams.

It’s common for kids to read words before they can spell them, but for a sound to be truly ingrained, they need to be able to do both. That’s when orthographic mapping really sticks! 🧠

If we aren’t focusing on spelling yet... then what ARE we looking for? 🤔

Here are ‘The Big 4’ for Kindergarten writing. These are the foundational building blocks I look for before we ever worry about a misspelled word.

1️⃣ Capitals
2️⃣ Punctuation
3️⃣ Spacing
4️⃣ Encoding (Sounding out words)

Focusing on these four things builds the writing muscles they need without the frustration of being perfect.

Save this for your next writing session! 📌

Writing can be a major stressor in the early grades. My goal is to keep it low pressure by teaching them that spelling develops over time.

Beginning readers simply don’t have the phonics skills yet to spell everything correctly.

As they learn new phonics skills, I help make sure they are reinforced in their writing, but when they ask “Did I spell that right?” I often reply with “That is great kindergarten/first/second grade spelling!

It’s not to say that spelling doesn’t matter, because it does reflect their phonics skills, but the goal is to get early readers to experiment with spelling sounds and learning to put their thoughts on paper.

After each writing, I usually pick 1-2 things that he can fix as a learning moment.

In my Part 2, I’ll discuss more of the goals for beginning writers. Stay tuned!

If your child mastered the ‘eigh’ pattern from my last video, you’re ready for the next step: Heart Words. ❤️📖

Not every word follows a predictable pattern—and that’s where the frustration starts. Watch how we map the word SAID and use a multisensory trick to lock it into memory forever! 🧠✨

Here is how I teach high frequency words to my own kids and students! If there is a common spelling pattern, I teach it to them when they’re learning the word, and have them practice it within other words. This helps them unlock dozens of new words at once! 🔓📖

In the Science of Reading, this is called Orthographic Mapping. Watch how we take the tricky ‘eigh’ pattern and use it to master an entire family of words in under a minute.

Hit save and try this for tomorrow’s homework! 📌

High frequency words are so important, but it always felt like something we’d forget to practice until we did this. Having them somewhere visible and a routine for practicing has made a big difference!

Does your child shut down the second they see a word with more than 4 letters? You aren’t alone! In this video, my little reader hit a wall with the word earwigs, but a simple Science of Reading strategy came to the rescue!

The Secret: Syllable Division. ✂️

By physically cutting the word into smaller, manageable chunks, we reduce the brain’s workload. Instead of guessing, they learn to decode the word part by part.

For older kids or kids who struggle with dyslexia, the goal would be to teach them to cut the words themselves. Stay tuned for a video to see how to teach them this! In short, they need to find the vowels, and then cut between the consonants.

Save this hack for your next homework session! 📌

Sideline boredom? Not here! 🏈📖 This is our favorite way to stay sharp during big brother’s practice and games. It’s multi-sensory so it’s great for kids with reading difficulties or dyslexia!

When a child spends all their brain power sounding out a word, they often lose the meaning of the sentence. This is why some kids can read but can’t tell you what happened!

Teaching them to re-read the sentence once they’ve decoded a tricky word bridges the gap between fluency and comprehension.

Save this for your next reading session! 📖✨