After you have fought long and hard for your child's IEP - you want to make sure that the goals your child's intervention team are working on actually make sense. It's easy to fall into the trap thinking that once your child's IEP is in place everything will be taken care of, but unfortunately, more often than not - it just isn't the case. In case you missed it - we talked about 3 Reasons Your Child Isn't Understanding What She Reads.

All things change right...from having your little one on your lap to having a moody teenager that believes nothing you do is good or right. Well just as they change - the strategies we use to help them must also change. Unfortunately for many readers, especially struggling readers - the struggle to fly under the radar and just keep up in the classroom, came at the cost of actually developing strategies and supports that would help them really understand their reading.

Enhance comprehension beyond simple questions! Learn how to foster deeper understanding through implicit and explicit questioning, vocabulary development, and strategic instruction. Explore methods like Webb’s Depth of Knowledge model and assessment tools to drive meaningful comprehension goals.

Bed time stories can be such a treasured part of the family routine for young children. The ability to listen to stories and imagine and learn new words is truly magical. However, sometimes as parents, we may find ourselves going through the motions and missing out on some of the deeper level connections and meaning we could begin modeling for our children.

Here are a few strategies and things you can be thinking about as you are reading with your child. Keep in mind, you don't have to be presenting ALL of the strategies EVERY time you read. Pick and choose so it doesn't feel like it has become a school lesson :)

Discover effective comprehension strategies! Learn how explicit instruction enhances understanding through direct explanation, modeling, guided practice, and application. Explore our grade-based strategies to empower students at every level. Download our free guide aligned with Common Core State Standards for targeted instruction.

We know that comprehending what we read is the sole purpose of learning HOW to read. But surprisingly schools have placed a heavy emphasis on how quickly children read instead of how effectively they are comprehending the material they are reading. While your child may awe you with their oral language abilities (their ability to tell you about complex things going on in the world) you might be surprised to find that your child's reading comprehension skills are breaking down. :

Discover the 4 common reasons for breakdowns in reading comprehension! Learn how weak decoding skills, limited background knowledge, inadequate vocabulary, and poorly developed strategies hinder understanding. Explore our blog for effective comprehension strategies and free resources.

Research is very clear that Phonological Awareness is a foundational strategy for students to obtain the necessary literacy skills to read and spell effectively and efficiently. However, teaching older students phonological awareness skills can be difficult because many of the resources out there are geared towards younger students and the images, worksheets, and resources can be insulting to older students.

We know the importance of phonemic awareness for our young students - but we absolutely cannot forget about this literacy skill when it comes to working with our older students!

As a parent, it can be incredibly frustrating to watch your child struggle through the weekly spelling word lists. Depending on what type of list is coming home this can be pure torture.

Hopefully your child is receiving a patterned list that follows one concrete pattern like "Magic E" in which you might get a list including words such as take, home, sale, date, note, etc. or words that follow more complex patterns like night, sight, sleigh, neighbor in which "igh" says I and "eigh" says A.

We wanted to dive into some of the core components of literacy (reading and writing) in order to help you, as parents, continue to support your children in developing solid literacy foundations at home. We know there is a lot of jargon surrounding the field of education so we want to try and break that down for you.

If you are fighting over homework every night - it's time to figure out what is going on. Often well meaning parents and teachers attribute a student's difficulty finishing or completing work to laziness, but the reality is that is just rarely ever the case. It's important that parents don't lose out on a more positive relationship with their child and get to the bottom of the homework struggle as quickly as possible. Often this struggle is caused by an unidentified learning disability - by identifying the core cause of the difficulties and outlining a plan you could change the future for your child.

A hallmark of dyslexia is an inconsistency between a child’s reading level and oral language level. Often, dyslexic students are highly verbal; talkative, inquisitive, articulate, and have amazing vocabularies!

One of my all-time favorite students who happened to be dyslexic had the most amazing vocabulary as a young student, he still does today! He would hear a new word used in the context of a book or adult conversation and immediately add it to his repertoire.

Identify struggling readers in your classroom with these 5 tips. Discover signs like slow reading, word substitution, and difficulty applying spelling rules. Download our mini-assessment to pinpoint students who may need a different learning approach. Act now to support your students effectively.

A common theme that we hear from many of the parents we work with is, “everything was fine until third grade.”

Parents often wonder, what happened!? My child wasn’t struggling in class, the teacher didn’t express any concerns, their reading was on grade-level or close to it, and then suddenly in third grade everything fell apart. What happened!?

Students with dyslexia need to be taught in the way that their brains learn best. As teachers, it is our responsibility to learn how to meet the needs of this unique and special learning style. Research tells us that people with dyslexia often have average to above-average IQ’s. 

The reason that they struggle in the school setting is not that they lack the intelligence it’s because people with dyslexia learn differently.

Master syllable division strategies for decoding multisyllabic words! Learn essential rules like Rabbit, Reptile, Tiger, Camel, and Hornet divisions. Decode with confidence and enhance reading skills.

There are many misconceptions around dyslexia and unfortunately teachers went through a lot of training in college through their teacher training programs and yet still never received formal instruction in specific learning disabilities. We are here to dispel many popular misconceptions and we have a free printable!