Karen Filewych

Karen has over twenty-five years of educational experience as a teacher, school administrator, and language arts consultant. She enjoys sharing her love of literacy with teachers and students. She is now booking professional development for teachers for the 2025-2026 school year. She is fully booked for residencies!

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Words Change Worlds

"When teaching grade one I noticed how language — specifically learning to read and write — empowered students. This idea has captivated me since. Join me in my quest to change the world through words."
-Karen Filewych


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This week on the Words Change Worlds blog

Explicit and Systematic–It Works!

I love when I say something like this to a class–“What two letters say /ā/ in the middle of a word?” or “What three letters say /ing/?”–and they can answer with confidence! In classes like this, students are less likely to ask “How do you spell…?”, more likely to take risks and try on their own, and even more likely to be close or correct in their spelling.

In his book Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, Stanislas Dehaene (2010) states:

…all children regardless of their socioeconomic backgrounds benefit from explicit and early teaching of the correspondence between letters and speech sounds. This is a well-established fact, corroborated by a great many classroom experiments. Furthermore, it is coherent with our present understanding of how the reader’s brain works. (326-327)

Although Dehaene speaks here of reading, explicit and systematic phonics instruction empowers student writers as well. This is especially true when we provide students with regular opportunities to write and apply their phonics knowledge.

Give them the building blocks and the opportunities to create… then let them soar!

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