Breck’s kindergarten faculty attends the Plain Talk for Literacy and Learning Conference in New Orleans

In March, Breck’s kindergarten team—Amy Dornbach, Kerry Marshall, Liz Schoenborn, and Marcy Wegner—attended the Plain Talk for Literacy and Learning Conference in New Orleans, which is put on by the Center for Literacy and Learning.

This conference, which is regarded as the “nation’s premier literacy institute,” provides educators with the opportunity to learn from leading experts in literacy and attend evidence-based reading research and strategy breakout sessions. At the conference, the team enjoyed listening to keynote speakers Zaretta Hammond and Hamish Brewer. They also attended breakout sessions on orthographic mapping, high frequency words, and sound walls and learned more about Breck’s current Heggerty phonemic awareness program. 

As the entire Lower School continues its multi-year study on literacy, the kindergarten team used this conference as an opportunity to deepen their learning and reinforce the work they are doing in their classrooms, specifically around the implementation of “sound walls.” In the past, a kindergarten classroom might have had a “word wall,” with sight words for students to learn and memorize. Now, classrooms are beginning to use what is called a “sound wall,” with the different sounds that make up words represented through pictures of how your mouth should look when making that sound. This is a significant shift in the way Breck teaches reading in Lower School and has required an immense amount of new learning for teachers.

“Attending the conference helped clarify stuff for me,” says Marcy Wegner. “I took the class this summer [about this material], but I didn’t really completely understand it. We’ve got the curriculum, but I didn’t fully understand how to use it. But now, I feel like I can really focus on the wall.”  

At the conference, Kerry Marshall received the book 50 Nifty Activities for 5 Components and 3 Tiers of Reading Instruction, which the entire kindergarten team can use to take what they’ve learned and put it into practice through activities in their classrooms. 

“We have the sound wall, but how do you review it every day? How can you make it meaningful?” Marshall and the team wondered before attending the conference. “Now we have all these activities that we can do that support phonics, fluency, and phonemic awareness.”

Being able to attend the Plain Talk for Literacy Conference helped reinforce what the kindergarten team has been doing all year around literacy and invigorated them to continue digging into even more of this type of work. “We’ve been doing all this work and research,” says Marshall. “With everything that we’re doing, I think we’re going in the right direction.”

This opportunity for the kindergarten team was made possible because Wegner received the Ralph and Peggy Burnet Family Breck Faculty Chair in 2021. Wegner chose to use the funds she earned through this award to bring her entire team to the conference. “We are so grateful to Breck and the Burnett Family Faculty Chair for this experience,” says Wegner.