Episode 134: Teaching Kids to Read with Rebecca McAllister of the Active Reader

Rebecca McAllister is a certified teacher, literacy specialist, and co-founder of The Active Reader. With over 10 years of classroom experience, Rebecca has always been passionate about helping young learners thrive—but it wasn’t until she became a mom that everything shifted. Teaching her daughter to read made her realize that even as an educator, she had never been shown how to teach reading in a clear, systematic way. That realization led her to structured literacy and Orton-Gillingham training—and lit a fire that hasn’t gone out since.

In our episode, Rebecca and I discuss how she came to co-found Active Reader and what she’s done to build the business up. We also get into strategies for improving reading skills and what we’ve seen during our teaching days. A quick but informative episode!

 
 
 
 
 

Read the transcript for this episode:

Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.



Rebecca McAllister is a certified teacher literacy specialist and co founder of the active reader with over 10 years of classroom experience, Rebecca has always been passionate about helping young learners thrive, but it wasn't until she became a mom that everything shifted. Teaching her daughter to read made her realize that even as an educator, she had never been shown how to teach reading in a clear, systematic way that realization letters structured literacy and to Orton Gillingham training and lit a fire that hasn't gone out since today, Rebecca is dedicated to equipping parents and educators with the tools, knowledge and confidence to support strong reading foundations right from the start. Hey Rebecca, welcome.


Rebecca McAllister  

Hi Lily, thank you so much for having me. 


Lily Jones  

Absolutely. So I would love for you to tell us about your journey as an educator in whatever direction you want to take.


Rebecca McAllister  

It okay, it is a bit of a journey. So I come from a family of all teachers. It's almost like every single person is a teacher. And so growing up, it was kind of like that was the only option, is what it felt like. But my parents were very passionate educators as well. My dad was a principal. My mom had the same role for 40 years at a private school, working in phys ed, and they loved their jobs and loved their life, and they thought that that would be the best thing for me as well. And I struggled a lot through school, and that will kind of get to a little bit about that too, but they ended up kind of pushing me and guiding me into teaching. And I mean, I was good at it. I was a camp counselor, a babysitter like I worked with kids. I love children, and so they sort of guided me in that direction. And I went to Teachers College. And when I came out of Teachers College, I wanted to do something a bit different, so I did some curriculum development for a Canadian charity for a little while, and then finally got on to, actually, I went into private school, so I got permanent kind of right away, which was which was great after a couple years of curriculum development, and then I worked for 10 years as a teacher in a private school, found my place and in the in the phys ed department as and really loved that. I enjoyed it, but I did find I always felt like there was an idea coming for me. There was kind of something that was waiting for me that was going to happen. Didn't totally love the structure of like, being forced to be in one place from eight to four every single day. And just started to kind of think about, like, what are my other skills? What else am I good at? What else can I do? And that's kind of how I was led to the active reader.


Lily Jones  

Amazing. I love that, and I love thinking about having this feeling like I've definitely had that experience too, of like something's going to happen or I'm going to do something, but not quite knowing what it is. So tell us about how it became clearer. And why did you start the active reader?


Rebecca McAllister  

So I started it... It was right after I had my daughter. I started looking at her and kind of thinking about what, what I can do to teach her how to read. I mean, I wanted just to create the best environment for her, and just loved her so much, and wanted to do whatever I could for her, and started exploring books right away, because I liked having a routine and kind of purpose in my day. So started exploring like story time kind of right away, and creating this rhythm in our in our day together. And then I I realized that despite my time at Teachers College, despite my practicums, despite 10 years of teaching, I also taught grade eight and history and a few other courses as well for a while, but realized that in all that time, I had never been taught how to teach a kid how to read. I mean, I was thought like I was taught think pair, share three cueing system, all these kinds of things that have to do with memorization and guessing. But then I was looking at my baby, and I was like, it has to start somewhere. And where does it start with an infant? I mean, it does start from the beginning. And realized there was, like, this whole gap of knowledge that I didn't have, and then also put together. It's taken some years to come to the realization of the amount of struggle that I went through in school, and why that was, and what it was. And it's only sort of been a recent light bulb, that light bulb that I've put it all together, but I wanted something better for her, and wanted to do something right away and like and learn what to do. So that's that was the inspiration behind it. 


Lily Jones  

It's so interesting how having our own children can have us take on different perspectives. I remember that when my kids were born too being like, Oh, I taught kindergarten. Was like, oh, there's a whole world of learning that happens before that which I cognitive. Lily knew. But before being a parent, I was like, didn't have a full understanding of that. So I I know that you explored the Orton Gillingham approach in your journey of learning about, how do people learn how to read? Can you tell us a little bit about how you discovered that and what impact it had?


Rebecca McAllister  

Yeah. So when I started to think of ideas I was I was like, Okay, what kind what can I do for toddlers? What can I do for parents that can help teach them how to read? And my one of my good friends and my unit, she was my university roommate. We would have monthly sushi dates where we'd just sit down and we loved like talking creatively together. And she had done all these things in the world of literacy. And this is Robin. She's now my business partner, but she she had been trained in the Orton Gillingham approach, and she had been talking about it for years, and I was always like, what, what is this weird thing she's doing? What is this big term? And kind of didn't, didn't pay much attention. But when I brought this toddler reading idea to her, she had all of the tools to help us put it together. I had sort of the phys ed background teaching, active learning, play kind of experience. And then she had the Orton Gillingham experience. And so she had had her full training, and we figured out together a product that we could create that could basically put the Orton Gillingham approach in a parent's hands, so without having any and it's our early reader pack, so it's this, so without having any experience, or any even knowledge of what structured literacy is, or the Orton Gillingham approach, a parent can pick this up, and they can teach their child letter sounds in a in the way that the Orton Gillingham asks you to. So together, we kind of put this whole whole thing together. And from there, I ended up getting trained in Orton Gillingham, and that's actually when I realized the extent of my reading struggles, and through getting trained in the Orton Gillingham approach, I actually remediated all of the struggles. I mean, not all readings always a journey, but I remediated a lot of my own struggles, and actually taught myself how to read at the age of 36 and it became clear that I just tried to memorize the entire English language and just kind of gotten by on that, and that's where a lot of the struggle came. I've never been diagnosed with anything, but I it would lead to dyslexia is but the Orton Gillingham approach allowed me to, kind of like, see the world clearly, suddenly. 


Lily Jones  

That's so powerful and amazing that you were able to have that experience. And also I can imagine so powerful when you're thinking about teaching students, being able to draw off of your own experience, and especially going through that at an older age, you know, being able to have that kind of reflection of what the experience was like, too. I can imagine it really impacts your teaching as well.


Rebecca McAllister  

Yeah, definitely. My mom always said, too. I mean, everyone knew I struggled, but I got passed along because I was a good, respectful kid who sat quietly in the classroom. And I remember my mom saying that my grade one teacher, this was in the early 90s, was like, oh, there's a new method that's come out that we're teaching. It was like, the whole word approach. And she was like, Don't worry about phonics. My mom was like, What about phonics? She was like, Oh, don't worry about it. We're doing this whole word approach. It's this new great thing. And that switch really deeply impacted me, because I needed to learn phonics. I needed multi sensory learning. I needed kinesthetic learning, and no one ever saw it or knew it or did anything about it unfortunately. 


Lily Jones  

Yeah, unfortunately. And also, I'm glad to hear how you're, you know, seeing that gap now, and I think that in the whole world of reading, a literacy instruction, right? Like people swinging back more towards the science of reading and really knowing that we can't have these gaps for anyone, right? Like, that's not an effective way of teaching reading.


Rebecca McAllister  

Yeah, no, no. And I thought back to to my time as a teacher. I remember when I was teaching grade eight, the president, the school council president, would get on the announcements, and she she'd be reading the announcements every day, and they'd be announcements she hadn't practiced and was just seeing, and she would struggle through them every single day. And I remember just listening to that and being like this, poor grade 12 can't read, she can't read, and I have no idea what to do about it. And then looking in my grade eight class, there would be these smart, smart kids who could do so well on assignments. But then we'd have some. Uh, reading out loud kind of things, and I I'd see these huge gaps in their reading and and I still was sitting there, completely powerless. So now, having the knowledge I have, looking back, I was like, it's kind of a hard thing to reflect on and look at, too that I saw these things and couldn't do anything about them at the time, so I'm glad I have the tools now.


Lily Jones  

Absolutely. And so tell us a little bit more about your offerings at the active reader and like, what is a typical lesson or resource?


Rebecca McAllister  

Yeah, so we created, we started with flash cards. So these are, these are our flash cards. It's called the early reader pack. It's recommended for it can be for kids one and up. I mean, I use it right now. My daughter is in grade one, and she's printing her letters all in the wrong direction, top to bottom or bottom to top instead of top to bottom, and like going in the wrong ways. So I'm using it right now to have her practice proper letter formation. My son, who's in JK, is showing some early signs of reading struggles, which I am able to identify. So every night, we're doing five letters at a time and just going through the letter sounds. So it teaches a parent or a teacher to teach the letter sound using the Orton Gillingham method. So they would say the name of the letter, a keyword, and then isolate and say the sound. It allows a child to visualize this keyword, a picture for the visual learner. This is a raised letter which allows them to trace and touch and follow the directional arrows. So that's the tactile learning. And then on the back there's kinesthetic or, sorry, there's multi sensory activities that dive into all the different senses. And so this is one thing that we I recommend. I mean, I have one in both of my kids rooms. I've also teachers in classrooms, use them for one to one learning settings, or use it as their example when they're doing sort of choral literacy instruction. And so that's our early reader pack. And then what we've just brought out now is I spent we spent a long time developing curriculum for early childhood literacy, or sorry for early childhood spaces. So we created a 30 week program so it covers every letter of the alphabet and diagraphs, and it's a structured literacy program that has been completely outlined for you. So there's no there's no experience needed. It's pretty much a pick it up. All of the scripts are there, all of the content is there all of the activities there's there's video instructions as well that they can follow along with and so this is for daycares and preschools. It can be for teacher for home as well, but it's really to help fill the gap in the early childhood spaces. So I my two children had very different experiences in their childcare experiences. So my daughter had very experienced ECE teachers who knew phonics, did phonics naturally. And then my son ended up the teacher retired. He ended up with a new ECE teacher, and he didn't do one letter in his entire time in preschool. And it kind of helped us see that there is no there are no standards in these early childhood spaces of what needs to be taught for literacy, and also, just like I wasn't taught in Teachers College how to teach a child how to read, early childhood educators aren't being taught as well. They're not learning the importance of phonemic awareness. They're not learning how the brain works and what needs to happen to teach it how to read. They're not learning the early signs of struggles that they can identify, that children as children, are going through. So we wanted to fill that space, because the earlier you start immersing a child in literacy, the better their their outcomes are going to be. And kind of at the moment, children entering, I think it's about 25% of children entering grade one don't have the foundation to learn how to read, and so that is where the gap really begins. So if we start in early childhood developing these skills, they're entering grade one like my daughter was entering grade one reading novels, because she did these programs with me, and that it just showed me how much this works. And so it's 30 weeks. It's just five to 10 minutes a day that a teacher can do. And then these are sort of some of the handouts that you can see. So it's all activities that it's sound maps, it's letter search and finds, it's decodable sentences, it's reading comprehension, things like that that really allow a teacher to dive in. To each letter sound and practice it every day, so that children are really immersed in it and really deeply learning the information in a way that's developmentally appropriate. So they're using games, they're using their hands, they're having fun, so they're learning to really love learning right away, so that they're motivated to do these activities and to pick up books and to to love learning.


Lily Jones  

What a great resource. I love hearing about all the different parts, and I appreciate how they're short lessons too, particularly for little tiny children, right, being able to fit those in and make them part of the day. And I'm curious about how you infuse, like play waves? Do you have learning in addition to this?


Rebecca McAllister  

Yeah, so everything in here is multi sensory, everything we have the teachers doing each activity explores a different sense. We have, like an auditory activity. We have a touch, we have a kinesthetic, we have a visual but we do incorporate a lot of games that. So the platform is, is a digital platform. When someone signs up for the course, they receive the two manuals, they receive their early reader pack, and then they're also given access to a digital course. And we've created games for every week, a couple days of every week that involve using the cards and using the content of the course. So they'll be doing things like letter tic tac toe, where we teach a teacher how to set it all up with the letters they're exploring only the sounds they've already heard, because the Orton Gillingham approach goes from simple to complex. So the course has been designed so the child is never having to do something they haven't learned yet, so they're not exploring you until they've finally been immersed in this short vowel u sound, and then from there on, we use you. So that's like an example. So the games are fully designed with what the kids have already learned and what they need to review and learn. And it's all like fun, letter search and finds around the classroom and how to execute that. Rhyming games, syllable games with syllables, things that are simple, that the kids can grasp and can do, and everything's fun.


Lily Jones  

Yay. I love that. Awesome. Well, that seems like such an amazing program, and it's so cool to see how you've created all these different parts to support teachers and parents and children. And I know building a business takes a lot, and so I'm curious what you've learned through starting the active reader.


Rebecca McAllister  

Oh my gosh, so much. I think, I think, first of all, it's so important to follow your gut and to take a risk and take a chance. And what I learned through building, everything I've built has directly been because of things that were needed in my life, needed for me and needed for my kids. So I found things that I feel really, really passionate about. I'm able to use my skills as a teacher. I'm able to be a better mom, and I'm able to really light that fire within me, which is something that I always it's something that I want in life. I want to, I want to live a really dynamic, active life, and I feel like it's kind of allowed me to, I mean, it hasn't come without challenges, that's for sure, and some sacrifices. But I think it's all worth it to follow your gut and your heart.


Lily Jones  

I agree, and I love the that you put it as, like wanting to live an active life, you know, feeling that drive to create something is so powerful, and allowing yourself to follow that through. And I think for many of our listeners that they might be classroom teachers, being like, I kind of have this feeling, kind of like you described years ago, being like, I have this feeling that I maybe want to do something else. I kind of know this drive is within me, but I'm not really sure how to start. And do you have advice you would give to them?


Rebecca McAllister  

I actually started really small, and I, I did, yeah, I did little things first, I'm also a visual artist, so that's something that I did on the side as a hobby. And I started with visual art exploring having a little bit of a business. And so I started with selling my art a little bit, and then I started hosting classes where I'd teach weaving, and I teach macrame and things like that, and that allowed me to kind of get my feet wet and test it out and just do it very slowly. And it was like kind of no risk. It was just for fun. So I do recommend that small steps. But then. Then when you reach that point where you're like, well, then I had my idea, and I had already practiced, and so it was familiar to me to be like, this is something that I can build, and these are the ways that I can build it. And talked to a lot of people and mentors and found Robin, who's my business partner, which really allowed me to be like, Okay, I can, I can step out and I can do this now and then I just did it, kind of like, yeah.


Lily Jones  

 Just go, yeah. Sometimes you just do it. I mean, I like that, because it's both the baby steps. Like, sometimes you don't need to just do it right. Like, sometimes it's like, all right, I'm just gonna, like, dip my foot in and try this out. But then there comes a time, I think, where it's like, All right, ready to go, you know, after doing that. So allowing both to happen, when it feels good,


Rebecca McAllister  

yeah, I think you need a period of time to kind of, or at least I do, to process it and ruminate in it and get comfortable with it. But then you reach that point, and then there's like, a go point that I think you follow.


Lily Jones  

Yes, absolutely. So I've loved our conversation and hearing more about the active reader. Can you tell people how they can connect with you? Yeah,


Rebecca McAllister  

so if anyone wants to try out a week of our course, there's a free Am I able to if I can give you a link to attach, we'll put it in the show notes. Okay, there'll be a free download for the full week of the worksheets for letter A, so you can explore what teaching the letter A would look like in your class. So all the kind of worksheets. So we'll have that link for you. And then my Instagram for the active reader is at the underscore active underscore reader. And I also have a YouTube channel. If you search Rebecca McAllister and we're post I'm posting there all the time.


Lily Jones  

Wonderful. Thank you so much.


Rebecca McAllister  

 Yeah, thank you so much for having me. 


Lily Jones  

It was a pleasure. Bye.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai



Lily Jones