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…
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Boston Tutoring Services: Tell me a little about your organization. Pamela Civins: Boston Partners in Education (Boston Partners) has been contributing to the academic achievement of Boston’s public schools students since 1966. We mobilize volunteer academic mentors to assist struggling K-12 students in reading, writing, and math. In high school, our volunteers also support students struggling in science. Academic mentors help students gain the skills, self-confidence, and motivation they need to succeed in school and…
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When early readers begin to take on new literacy skills, it is important to remember that they need to assimilate a new rule into their repertoire before they can learn the variations on this rule. For example, when teaching young children that adding an ‘e’ to the end of a word turns a short vowel sound (a as in apple) into a long vowel sound (a as in cake), let them fully accomplish the use…
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In many preschool and Kindergarten classrooms, the relationship between how a letter looks and how it sounds is taught by showing the child pictures of objects, telling them the name of the object, and then telling them what letter the object starts with (‘cat’ starts with C, ‘dog’ starts with D). Some children just do not gain language acquisition in this way; what if they just can’t remember that ‘cat’ starts with C? When children…
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