Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it, and some didn’t. Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Educators continue to debate how much to emphasize some ideas over others. Although the research on reading comprehension…
This September, be sure to pick up a book, visit a library, and explore places you could only see in literature’s grandeur. September is National Literacy month, which promotes awareness and interest in improving the overall literacy of a community. This can have a pleasing ripple effect through every individual life, their children, and their families. Multiple efforts to impede illiteracy have been made since the first National Literacy Month, but even after all these…
Dyslexia presents itself in various ways, but a student’s age strongly factors into the symptoms teachers may observe. Students with dyslexia in grades K-5 struggle to remember letter names and sounds. Recognizing sight words also poses a problem. When reading aloud, these students may substitute words and confuse letters with similar appearances or sounds. For example, students commonly mix up the letters b and d. Students in grades 6-12 may have a hard time recalling…
There’s a lot to like about digital books–they’re lighter in the backpack, and often cheaper than paper books. But a new international report suggests that paper books may be important to raising children who become strong readers. An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study across approximately 30 countries found that teens who said they most often read paper books scored considerably higher on a 2018 reading test taken by 15-year-olds compared to teens…
Reading is taught, not caught. This phrase has been in circulation for decades, but it bears repeating with each new generation of parents, and it has never been more fully supported by compelling evidence. Learning to read is a complex, unnatural, years-long odyssey, and parents should bear no illusions that their kids will pick it up merely by watching other people read or being surrounded by books. Kids literacy is more complicated than that. Parents…
When teachers familiarize themselves with students’ reading lives and histories, they may uncover reading trauma — moments when students had a negative experience with a peer, teacher or librarian that turned them off of reading. Students with reading trauma associate reading with painful feelings of shame or stress and doubt their reading abilities, said Boston-based educator Kimberly Parker in a recent webinar organized by the Texas A&M Collaborative for Teacher Education. Take reading logs, for…
In 2019, a grassroots campaign led by parents succeeded in passing a wave of dyslexia treatment legislation. Many states mandated hallmarks of the Orton-Gillingham method, specifically calling for “multisensory” instruction, to help students with dyslexia read and write better.* In New York, the city spends upwards of $300 million a year in taxpayer funds on private school tuition for children with disabilities. Much of it goes to pay for private schools that specialize in the…
Children’s poetry books are a rich way for kids to enjoy limericks, poetic stanzas, tongue twisters, and rhymes. Through poetry, they learn the joy of play on words, puns, and metaphors all while using their imaginations. Here are some fantastic, highly rated poetry books for children. Firefly July: A Year of Very Short Poems by Paul B. Janeczko – This book is bright and cheerful. Plus, it offers 36 short poems to coincide with the…
Before a child can learn to read, they need to have a good, well-rounded understanding of basic words and what they mean, and while that may sound a bit overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. There are very easy ways that you can build a preschooler’s vocabulary and introduce early reading concepts. In fact, you probably do some of these vocabulary tips already without even noticing it. From reading aloud to your preschooler to simply…
As the year comes to a close, let’s take a look back at some of the best children’s books of 2020. Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea by Meena Harris (picture book) One day, Kamala and Maya had an idea. A big idea: they would turn their empty apartment courtyard into a playground! This is the uplifting tale of how the author’s aunt and mother first learned to persevere in the face of disappointment and turned…
