monkeypodeducation
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MEd, EBLI-Trained Literacy Specialist | Supporting kids with dyslexia and other reading challenges—and the families & educators who guide them—through practical, research-based instruction. I use a speech-to-print approach that’s efficient, effective, and grounded in real classroom and parenting experience. As the founder of Monkeypod Education and the parent of a dyslexic child, I’m committed to helping kids become confident, capable readers—without overwhelm.
04/28/2026
Today, while we were sorting the 4 most common long e spellings, a kindergartener said:
“When I was practicing my red words, I thought green was two short e sounds…
but now I know the two e’s say /ee/.”
That’s exactly what happens when short vowels are all they know.
Kids apply what they know to everything.
But English doesn’t work like that.
Sounds can be spelled different ways. Sometimes 1–4 letters represent one sound.
So when the code doesn’t account for the word, they get stuck.
When it does, they can adjust.
/grĕn/ → green
That adjustment—set for variability—is a strong predictor of reading success and how new words are learned through reading.
Learning phonics isn’t the goal.
Reading is.
This doesn’t mean teaching everything at once.
Kids need a secure foundation first—
short vowels, digraphs, adjacent consonants.
But once they have that, they need more of the code to make sense of what they’re reading.
That’s also why staying only in decodables is limiting.
Kids don’t get enough exposure to the patterns they actually need.
They’re not adjusting.
They’re not building flexibility.
And when they read real text,
they can feel it working.
Citations:
Seidenberg (2017) · Share (1995) · Savage et al. (2024) · Ehri (2014)
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