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Rethinking How to Organize Your Literacy Block

Figuring out how to organize your ELA block seems like it should be fairly straightforward. But in reality, it never feels that way. All the different literary components to fit in plus addressing the wide variance of student need can make it seem like a puzzle you can’t quite piece together.

Here are some things to consider that might help.

First, if you’re thinking about separating your block into sections according to the 5 pillars as spelled out by the National Reading Panel, I’d pause. The components that make up the pillars–phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension–all go hand in hand.

Comprehension is highly dependent on vocabulary. Phonics, phonemic awareness, and vocabulary are all intertwined. Fluency plays a big role in learning vocabulary from a text as well as comprehension, but is highly dependent upon a student’s command of phonics skills…which go hand in hand with phonemic awareness. Researchers Seidenberg, Cooper, Borkenhagen, and Kearns wrote an excellent summation of this interconnectedness in their 2020 paper, Lost in Translation? Challenges in Connecting Reading Science and Educational Practice.

“In fact, the components are highly interdependent.… In short, the components interact. Skilled reading is possible because of the dependencies among these types of knowledge. Learning to read is possible because learning about one affects what is learned about others.”
Seidenberg, Cooper, Borkenhagen, and Kearns, 2020

They caution against siloing the pillars into separate parts of the literacy block, warning that the five pillars are “not a sufficient basis for designing an effective reading curriculum.” They also lament that “[i]n extreme cases that we have observed, first grade reading instruction consists of blocks of time spent on each of the components, in the order they were presented in the report. The focus on the components leaves little time for reading and talking about books.”

Segmenting the ELA block into sections that are meant to target each pillar not only leaves out time for reading and talking about books, as these researchers point out, but it also leaves out some very crucial areas of literacy instruction. Natalie Wexler (2023) points out two of them, noting that “two biggies are background knowledge—either of the topic or of academic knowledge and vocabulary in general—and familiarity with complex syntax.”

What else is missing?

Writing.

Writing is almost never talked about in SOR conversations. Steve Graham, renowned writing researcher, pointed this out in a 2020 International Literacy Association article, saying that “largely missing in this discussion is writing – writing development, writing instruction, and its relationships with reading. This is still a missing link, as explained in this excellent 2024 research paper.

Writing is a powerful vehicle to support all of literacy development.

Tim Shanahan (2026) explains it well when he reminds us that “[i]f you want to be a reader you must perceive the separable phonemes within words, recognize the most common spelling patterns, link meanings to the words in text (vocabulary), understand the grammar well enough to permit comprehension, trail cohesive links accurately, and recognize and use discourse structure.” Writing also provides students with ongoing opportunities to work with phoneme awareness and spelling patterns.

Writing highly supports comprehension, something Graham has been saying for years. When using an integrated reading-writing approach, Graham and colleagues (2018) find, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension all measurably increase.

So what does all of this mean for teachers trying to figure out how to design their literacy block?

Understanding that foundational reading and writing skills both must get their own dedicated time, designing your block means centering texts at the core.

Understanding texts drives everything–the reading skills you’ll need to teach, the words and phrases students will need to understand, the syntactical structures they’ll need to grapple with, and the background knowledge you’ll want to build.

Determining what strategies are especially helpful in helping students understand a text, rather than isolating specific strategies or question types is exactly what Shanahan (2018) advises teachers to do. He says to “[f]orm your questions—not on the basis of standards or skills lists—but on the basis of the texts themselves.” This is the work that real reading requires, and that’s the real work we want our students to experience.

Then, consider that writing about reading can help put the pieces together and augment comprehension. It’s this kind of integrated approach that Graham advocated for in that 2018 article.

It comes down to designing your ELA block around reading and understanding real texts for real purposes, and balanced with purposeful writing.

It’s the approach I most ascribe to as well.

It’s the approach I use when I help teachers think about how to make their literacy instruction more efficient and more powerful. Rather than thinking about teaching reading and writing as two separate things that always inevitably compete for time, think about getting more bang for your buck with text-centered lessons that bring them together.

I put together a simple, free guide to help teachers do just that: Double the Impact in Half the Time. It walks through how to plan integrated reading and writing lessons so that the two work together, rather than competing for space in an already-crowded literacy block.

Coach from the Couch Michelle Ruhe doing virtual coaching session for literacy teachers.

Who is Coach from the Couch? I’m Michelle Ruhe, a 25+ year veteran educator, currently a K-5 literacy coach. I continue to learn alongside teachers in classrooms each and every day, and it’s my mission to support as many teachers with this hard work as I can.