Jenny Baker
Jenny Baker is a Speech pathologist who has been working in the area of spelling and written expression for over 30 years. She is one of the directors of Fremantle Speech Pathology Services, a busy private practice in Perth that works almost exclusively with school aged children.
Jenny is also involved in the clinical education of speech pathology students, equipping them with the knowledge and experience required to operate in school-based settings.
Designing a Low Variance Spelling & Reading Curriculum
A Low Variance Scope & Sequence is a document that outlines the “what” and the “when” of literacy teaching – particularly in relation to systematic synthetic phonics; it “prescribes” a “map” of the “route” for Tier 1 and Tier 2 teaching. “Low variance” means that there is very little difference in the Tier 1 content across the grade; all year one students will be learning the same representations of the same phoneme on the same day of the same week!
One of the most important aspects of the design process for a Low Variance Scope and Sequence is word selection, as the words we choose to teach must act as the “vehicles” for unitizing or mapping phonemes onto graphemes within any particular spelling system. The words must work towards facilitating the “self-teaching” process.
We must capitalise on how words sound (phonology), what they look like (orthography) and what they mean (semantics) then use these factors to determine how to make the spellings of any particular sound (such as the “A” spellings – ay, ai, a-e) salient for our young learners.
In this webinar, Jenny will discuss how to select words to create the best possible entry into any sound system based on the properties that best discriminate between the chosen spellings. Intervention strategies and assessment ideas will also be addressed.
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
7:30 PM - 8:45 PM AEST Melbourne Time
ACCESS RECORDINGS AND MANY FREE RESOURCES HERE
Including the Scope and Sequence co-designed by Jenny Baker
AVAILABLE NOW
Another fabulous Sketchnote of this session by Dr Charlotte Forwood
Still have questions?
Check out the blogpost from Jenny available now!
This was a free event open to all Think Forward Educators.
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Hundreds of TFE members tuned into Jenny Baker’s session in September 2021. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can catch up here. While Jenny tackled many member questions in the session, she couldn’t get to all of them!
Enjoy this blog of her responses to a few key questions from this talk. If you have more questions feel free to add a comment to this blog post.