Do I Slow Down or Keep Moving? When What We’ve Taught Isn’t Sticking

You’ve taught the rules and patterns, and the student seems to know them. But when it’s time to actually read or spell, they’re still working much harder than you think they should be. This is a tricky place to be with a student.

So, do you slow down and really work those earlier skills, or keep moving through your scope and sequence?

I tend to do a little of both. Before I decide, though, I want to figure out what the student actually knows and where I’m losing them.

The -CK Example

Let’s say I’ve taught the -ck pattern (the K-Rule). The student can tell me when to use ck. They know the rule and can read and spell back, neck, sick, rock, and duck in isolation.

Then I mix things up. Can they still recognize and use the pattern when those words aren’t all sitting together? What happens in dictation? What happens in a sentence? And finally, what happens when they see the pattern while they’re reading?

I’m looking for the place where it stops being comfortable.

If the student is still working hard at the individual-word level, that’s probably where I’d spend more time. I want those familiar word groups to become really familiar, not because we’re memorizing lists of words, but because we’re giving the brain lots of success with the same pattern.

Then when stack or trick appears, the student has something to connect it to. The word may be new, but the rule isn’t new, and it’s recognizable.

There is actually some interesting science behind this. Reading researchers use the term orthographic mapping to help explain how words we’ve successfully worked out become stored in memory and, over time, easier to recognize. That’s part of what we’re trying to build when we teach a pattern and practice it with groups of words.

But what if back, neck, and sick are easy, and the student only slows down once those words are in a passage?

That’s different.

I probably wouldn’t keep drilling the K-Rule as though the student hadn’t learned it. I’d spend more time reading and rereading short passages, working on phrasing, and giving the student opportunities to see familiar patterns in connected text. Repeated oral reading is one of the fluency practices that has good research behind it.

And I wouldn’t necessarily stop the scope and sequence until everything is perfect. Some students need a lot more practice before a skill really sticks. I can keep that earlier pattern showing up in reading and dictation while we begin working on something new.

That’s one of the things I like about OG. Moving forward doesn’t mean we have to leave what we’ve already taught behind.

So, would I slow down? Maybe.

But first I’d figure out where the student starts struggling. If it’s with the words themselves, I’d spend more time on the rule with reading and dictation. If it’s when those words move into actual reading, I’d spend more time there.

Sometimes the question isn’t really “Does my student know this?”

It’s “Where can they use it, and where can’t they use it yet?”

That answer would probably tell me what to do next.