Christan DePauw

By Christan, founder of Flying Through Phonics • Elementary teacher/interventionist Every August, I get the same message from teachers. "My new firsties came in not remembering short vowels." "My 2nd grader forgot every digraph she learned in May." "My 3rd graders are reading like they're back in first grade." The summer slide is real. It's not a parenting failure. It's not a teaching failure. It's just what happens when a growing brain takes 10-12 weeks off from a skill that needs...

Hi, I'm Christan. Former classroom teacher, founder of Flying Through Phonics, and a little obsessed with making the Science of Reading easy for teachers and parents to actually use. Meet me → A 6-year-old sat next to me last fall, stuck on the word "ship." She'd been guessing at it for weeks. We pulled out three little boxes and three small chips. I said the word slowly. /sh/.../i/.../p/. She pushed a chip into each box as she heard each sound. Then she looked up at me, eyes huge, and said,...

Every reading teacher should know how to use blending lines in their classroom—especially during UFLI small group instruction. Blending lines (sometimes called fluency lines) are simple but incredibly powerful. They’re just a short list of words that follow the same phonics pattern, and students read them across the line for repeated decoding practice.