April 7, 2026
Phonics You Can Hold
A lot of reading struggles aren’t about effort, they’re about abstraction. When phonics rules live only on a worksheet or a whiteboard, many kids never get a concrete “click” moment. From the NCRA conference in North Carolina, we sit down with Meagan Beam, founder of Otter Reading, to talk about a hands-on reading tool she built for the exact problems she kept seeing in her own classroom.
Website: spotlight4success.com
00:06 - Welcome From The NCRA Floor
00:29 - Why Megan Built Ottereading
00:52 - The Classroom Problem Behind The Tool
01:32 - Silent E Coding And Word Building
02:28 - Scope, Sequence, And Easy Organization
03:22 - Math Tools And Where To Buy
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Welcome to American Book Company Spotlight for Success.
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I'm your host, Danielle Pintozzi, and today we are at the NCRA conference in North Carolina.
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And beside me, we have our special guest, Megan Bean.
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She is the founder of Autoreading, and we are so excited to have you on our podcast today.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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I'm really excited to join.
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I so appreciate it.
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So, Megan, um, what brings you to NCRA today?
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So I have created a little hands-on reading tool to sports students who are learning or growing as readers.
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And I am just really passionate about sporting teachers and students, so I brought the tool and I am an exhibitor at the conference with it.
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And what inspired you to come up with this idea?
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So I was teaching third third grade a few years ago, and my students were really struggling with change the why to I spelling pattern.
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And I was like, there really has to be something out there where my students can take the Y off the end of the word and just throw it across the classroom to really understand the concept.
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And I couldn't find what I wanted, and so I went to Lowe's and got some PVC piping couplings and started writing and marking, and it just has really grown from there into what it is today.
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Yeah, so this one is talking about the silent E, so there's coding for the students to remember that with the there's the silent E, the vowel is long, and the scoop underneath is a representation that the I and the E are connected.
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Um Mr.
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Weaver, who's really passionate in leading the um research and stuff in the literacy world, gave me this idea.
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Like, and um I've been really grateful for his support too.
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Um so it just the coding reminds the students to read with the long vowel and then to that the E is silent, but it's also a way as they're decoding, they can build the word and practice or practice with the spelling pattern before they have to put it on a piece of paper.
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So, what are some issues you found in the classroom that really inspired you to make this?
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So part of it was from just really giving students a tactile way to take the different phonics concepts that are often very abstract into something that is more concrete.
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Um, and then I really as a teacher for 16 years, I also knew the struggle of trying to find manipulatives that served the entire phonics scope and sequence from just beginning to read CBC words and then all the way into morphology.
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And so I really wanted to provide something that supported that their journey and that, and then also for organization because I know what it's like to dig through bins or try to figure out how to organize stuff, and so everything I have comes in little labeled bags, so it's super easy for teachers to stay organized and to find the skills that they're teaching, and then for the students to easily clean up as well.
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And you said you also offer this for math?
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Yes, so I have um counting and support with like one-to-one correspondence, and then I also have um like counting to 100 or 120, depending on what the standards ask for, and addition and um subtraction facts and multiplication division facts as well.
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And where can we find auto reading products?
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So auto reading can be found on my website, um, ottereading.com, and I'm also on Instagram.
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Thank you so much, Megan, for joining us on our podcast today.
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We really enjoyed talking to you.
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Um I hope you enjoyed the rest of your conference.
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Thank you, and thank you so much for having me.
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I really appreciate it.
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