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All Resources for Parents - New! articles

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Share music and playful rhythms to help students generate and organize writing ideas. Kick off Music In Our Schools Month on Dr. Seuss's March 2 birthday with this pre-writing activity.

Parents are a child's first teacher, and there are many simple things you can do every day to share the joy of reading while strengthening your child's literacy skills.

Go on a "building" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Oral history is a method to learn about past events from the spoken stories of people who lived through them. When students conduct oral history research with members of their families or community they are participating in active learning rooted in the student's own experience. Students are actively engaged in collecting data when they do oral histories. Not only are they learning history, they are learning to be historians.

Many kids love to read about science and nature as well as real people, places, and events. Nonfiction books present information in engaging and interesting ways. Find out how you can help your child learn to navigate all the parts of a nonfiction book — from the table of contents to the diagrams, captions, glossary, and index.

A nationally representative sample of 213,100 fourth-graders participated in the 2011 assessment. Learn more about the key findings and trends in this Reading 2011 snapshot.

Learn the answers to 10 commonly asked questions that families and educators of students with disabilities have about charter schools. You'll also find links to state-specific resources that can help you better understand how charter schools work in your individual state.

Almost every week there is a news story about a new finding or discovery in science. These news stories are one of the exciting steps in the science world: sharing what you find! Helping kids share their own scientific findings will make them feel like part of the scientific community.

Learn about the common signs of dyslexia, how parents can support their child and celebrate their strengths, the role of assistive technology, how the latest brain research can help kids with dyslexia, and more.

Real-life scientists use charts and graphs as a way to organize and understand the information they have gathered. Young scientists can do the same! These activities will help you and your child create simple bar charts together, learn the vocabulary of graphing (axis, scale, labels, etc.), and have fun building "on-the-ground" graphs using real objects.

Reading aloud is one of the most important things parents and teachers can do with children. Learn about how reading aloud builds many important foundational skills, such as introducing vocabulary and providing a model of fluent, expressive reading, and find tips on how to read aloud with children at home and in the classroom, while building comprehension and helping children recognize what reading for pleasure is all about.

Keeping kids interested and motivated to read is sometimes a challenge. Learn how to effectively motivate young learners, including tips from kids for teachers and parents, classroom strategies that work, and guidance for motivating struggling readers, reluctant readers, and boys.

Go on a "weather" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Discover some simple hands-on activities and games that can be done at home or in the backyard to help your child develop a deeper understanding of cause and effect — and strengthen reading comprehension and scientific inquiry skills.

Discover the importance of early language, listening, and speaking on literacy development. If you suspect that your child or a student is struggling with speech, language, and/or hearing problems, learn more about testing and assessment, accommodations, and additional professional help. You'll also find tips on reading aloud with children who have speech and language problems or who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Get the basic facts about what it takes for a young child to learn to read, best practices in teaching reading, the importance of oral language in literacy development, why so many children struggle, and more in this overview.

Get ready for a really great school year. Find out what to look for during your school's open house and back-to-school night, tips for helping your child make a smooth transition from summer to school, how to establish homework routines, and even a booklist full of wonderful school-themed picture books to share.

Helping children understand the concept of sequence develops both literacy and scientific inquiry skills. Here are a few simple activities that families can do together to give kids opportunities to observe, record, and think about sequencing.

Go on a "cooking" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Media-rich and interactive websites can play an essential role in science instruction. They can encourage students to think critically, by providing tools for modeling, visualization, and simulation tools; discussion and scaffolding; and data collection and analysis.

Using students' questions as a basis for investigations in science education is an effective teaching strategy. Not only do students pose questions they would like answered, but they are asked to find ways to answer them. This article also recommends nonfiction science books that use a question and answer format to find information and model how to communicate what you know.

Keeping a science notebook encourages students to record and reflect on inquiry-based observations, activities, investigations, and experiments. Science notebooks are also an excellent way for students to communicate their understanding of science concepts, and for teachers to provide students with feedback.

Learn more about how very young children acquire the language and phonemic awareness skills that will help them become strong readers, warning signs of delayed development, and how parents can support their child's literacy skills through meaningful conversation and read alouds.

Find tips on how to read with your child from the time he is born, learn how to build comprehension and critical thinking skills during read alouds, browse our book-centered activity packs, and discover links to dozens of themed book lists.

By reading and writing about the lives of real scientists, students can learn more about the nature and history of science and how important scientific discoveries were made. Students may also begin to see themselves as scientists by trying on scientists' lives for size.

When students practice observing in science, they use their senses to collect information about objects and events related to a question, topic, or problem to solve in science. Learn some strategies to help students organize and analyze their data through presentations, sharing, and discussion.

When fiction and nonfiction books are integrated into the teaching of a content area such as science, graphic organizers are useful for organizing information and enabling students to classify observations and facts, comprehend the relationships among phenomenon, draw conclusions, develop explanations, and generalize scientific concepts.

Inquiry-based, discovery-focused science instruction is widely viewed as best practice today. Students learn science best when it is integrated with other areas of the curriculum such as reading, language arts, and mathematics. This includes reading textbooks, newspapers, magazines, online information, and children's and young adult literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

Children begin using their senses to recognize patterns and categorize things at a young age — skills that play an important role in early learning. This tip sheet provides some simple activities, as well as recommended books, that parents can use to help their kids build pattern recognition and categorization skills in science and math.

Go on an "ocean" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First Grade)

The research is clear that children who don't read during the summer can lose up to three months of reading progress and that loss has a cumulative, long-term effect. The following resources and articles provide information about summer reading and summer learning loss. Plus you'll discover great activities to encourage kids to learn, read, and have fun in the summer sun.

Learning how to write individualized IEP goals is an important first step in developing your child's IEP. IEP goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, use action words, realistic, and time-limited) and based on research-based educational practice.

Go on a "rocks" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First or Second Grade)

Reading Rockets has packed a "virtual beach bag" of activities for teachers to help families get ready for summer and to launch students to fun, enriching summertime experiences. Educators will find materials to download and distribute as well as ideas and resources to offer to students and parents to help ensure summer learning gain rather than loss.

Learn more about the English spelling system, how spelling supports reading, why children with dyslexia and dysgraphia struggle, which words should be taught, and instruction that works.

Young kids love technology, gadgets, and nature! While parents may be looking for ways to reduce screen time for their kids, here are a few helpful suggestions for integrating simple technology and books into your outdoor adventures in a fun and educational way.

Science and math explorations provide your growing reader with a chance to record all kinds of observations. Young children love to keep a special journal, and fill it with all sorts of drawings, scribbles, sketches, notes, and graphs. Try these ideas and books, in addition to adding the date to each entry, and watch as your child's observational and recording skills grow along with your child.

Hands-on measurement activities are fun to explore with children. Introduce your young learner to these interesting new vocabulary words and knowledge, and help your child develop an early love of measuring everything in sight!

If your child has ADHD, paying attention for long periods of time can be a challenge. So, meet the challenge head-on — make reading time fun time for you and your child.

You'll find sharing books together is a great way to bond with your son or daughter and help your child's development at the same time. Give your child a great gift that will last for life — the love of books.

You'll find sharing books together is a great way to bond with your son or daughter. Reading also helps your child's language development and listening skills when you talk about the story and ask questions. Large print books can help a child with mild to moderate vision loss discover the world of books and make tracking the words easier.

Cerebral palsy can cause difficulty with muscle tone and control. Your child may have delays speaking or have speech that is hard to understand. Reading with your child and having your child name objects in the book or read aloud to you can strengthen his speech skills. You'll find sharing books together is a great way to bond with your son or daughter and help your child's development at the same time.

Like all children, your child will learn and develop, yet she will likely develop more slowly than other children her age. Reading aloud and talking about the story and the pictures will help your child improve her vocabulary and help teach grammar. Here are some other tips to help your child enjoy books and reading.

Whether your child has mild or severe Autism Spectrum Disorder, making reading a fun activity can help your child's learning and social skills. You'll find sharing books together can be a good way to connect with your son or daughter. Reading also helps your child's language development and listening skills.

Children with speech and language problems may have trouble sharing their thoughts with words or gestures. They may also have a hard time saying words clearly and understanding spoken or written language. Reading to your child and having her name objects in a book or read aloud to you can strengthen her speech and language skills.

Go on a "Lorax" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: First Grade)

As a young reader, your child is learning to make predictions while reading which they can use to monitor their understanding of the story while thinking ahead to the next part. Scientists, just like readers, make predictions all the time. Help your child begin to see the connection between what she does as a reader and what she can do as a scientist. Below are two simple ways you can encourage your child to put her prediction skills to work as a scientist:

Many of the "tools" needed for science, math, and engineering exploration are right inside your home! Here are five ideas for putting everyday tools to work for some everyday fun:

Learn more about the four recommended practices in Response to Intervention (RTI): universal screening; progress monitoring and differentiation; systematic skill instruction; and system-wide implementation.

The What Works Clearinghouse reviewed the research on two practices used in center-based settings with 3- to 5-year-old preK children, as well as a number of specific curricula. Positive results are shown for (1) Phonological awareness training and (2) Interactive and dialogic reading.

One way parents can help children become interested in science is by explaining the scientific process. The scientific process is the way scientists go about asking and answering scientific questions by making observations and doing experiments. Review the steps of the scientific process below, and learn how to incorporate your child into each one!

Reading in the "comfort zone" means that students read well enough to understand the text. Here's a simple technique that students can use to determine if a book is right for them.

Familiarity with Greek and Latin roots, as well as prefixes and suffixes, can help students understand the meaning of new words. This article includes many of the most common examples.

Music stories are compositions of a narrative or descriptive sort. Students can listen for the story in the music, and this type of music can be integrated with literature, literacy, social studies, science, mathematics, and the other arts.

This article describes evidence-based practices that encourage first graders' engagement with texts. The authors review reading as a transactional process, revisit the benefits of reading aloud to students, provide a rationale for promoting engagement with texts, discuss three literacy strategies implemented in one first-grade classroom, and share examples of work contributed by the students.

Stepping outside is a simple way to set foot into nature's laboratory. Backyards and neighborhood walks can lead to interesting conversations that contain new vocabulary words. You'll also be helping your child developing important scientific skills such as observing, predicting, and investigating. Try these fun outdoor exploration activities to nurture the budding scientist or mathematician in your home!

Homework is important, but helping children with homework isn't always easy. Here are some ways you can make homework easier for everyone!

Classrooms can be perilous in a number of ways for students with learning disabilities. Here are some tips to remember when working with students with LD.

Leveling mania has gripped many elementary schools. The use of carefully leveled texts designed to meet the developmental needs of many readers is a common feature in current reading programs. Although popular leveling systems — Reading Recovery, Benchmark texts, Lexiles — may vary in terms of the number of levels and discrimination among them, at the core they all attempt to classify texts in terms of their perceived difficulties for specific readers. In a desire to match readers to texts, books are scrutinized, classified, and sanctioned for reading only when the match between reader and text has been firmly established.

Critical thinking, the ability to think deeply about a topic or a book, is an essential skill for children to develop. Here are some helpful tips and recommended books to strengthen your child's ability to think critically.

Speech recognition, also referred to as speech-to-text or voice recognition, is technology that recognizes speech, allowing voice to serve as the "main interface between the human and the computer." This Info Brief discusses how current speech recognition technology facilitates student learning, as well as how the technology can develop to advance learning in the future.

No one wants to start their day in a frenzied mess of untied shoes and breakfast in hand as the school bus approaches. Follow these five short recommendations for smoothing out those rough mornings.

Go on a "snowy day" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: Kindergarten)

Our Top 8 back-to-school tips for parents emphasize communication, organization, and staying up-to-date on special education news.

Our top 10 back-to-school tips for special education teachers emphasize communication, organization, and a focus on student success.

Go on a "farm" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: Kindergarten)

It's time to head back to school. And while kids are stuffing their backpacks with new school supplies, we're packing a different sort of bag here at Reading Rockets — one filled with resources to help make one of the most important evening events of the school year really sparkle — back-to-school night.

Learn about American Sign Language (ASL)/English bilingual programs to support the acquisition, learning, and use of ASL and English to meet the needs of diverse learners who are deaf and hard of hearing.

Summer's temperatures often send kids and parents inside to cooler air. Here are a few tips to make the most of those hot afternoons with some literacy and math fun using only your newspaper, computer, or other household items.

This article describes research-based principles and best practices for reading to deaf children. The underlying principle is a positive belief in the children's ability to become strong, enthusiastic readers.

Libraries and bookstores are great options for building a home library. Another great resource for books is a book swap. Consider organizing one for your neighborhood or block. It can be a simple afternoon undertaking, or with more time and effort, a fun event that will become an annual tradition! Below are some suggestions for organizing a book swap for kids.

The summer is a time to unwind and relax for parents and kids alike, but learning should not come to a halt. By focusing on your child's interests, involving the family, and setting goals, you can motivate even the most reluctant learners

This article briefly highlights the knowledge base on reading and RTI for ELLs, and provides preliminary support for the use of practices related to RTI with this population.

Letters are all around us! Here are some ideas to use print found in your everyday environment to help develop your child's reading skills.

Reading comprehension is often a concern for the teachers of students with autism. The comprehension strategies described in this article may help some students gain comprehension skills and improve their ability to read and communicate about written material.

Almost every interaction in a child's world is preparing them to become a reader and writer. This article outlines the stages of writing development, and tips for adults to help along the way.

Sharing poetry with kids is a great way to highlight language. Poems include humor, interesting words, tongue twisters, alliteration, and opportunities for choral reading among other important literacy concepts. This article provides guidelines for a family poetry jam — a great way to promote literacy and togetherness in your own home.

It is well recognized that hearing is critical to speech and language development, communication, and learning. Children with listening difficulties due to hearing loss or auditory processing problems continue to be an underidentified and underserved population.

Sharing lots of different kinds, or genres, of books with your child exposes him to different words, different kinds of images, and whole new worlds. This tip sheet suggests some genres to try with your young reader that complement 'traditional' fiction. Some are suggestions for read alouds, while others may be ones your child can read on his own.

Teaching vocabulary is complex. What words are important for a child to know and in what context? In this excerpt from Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, the authors consider what principles might be used for selecting which words to explicitly teach.

In preschool, your child will learn many types of skills. Reading books together in which the characters are going through the same thing can also help your preschooler develop these important skills. Below are four books in which the characters are learning some of the same skills as your preschooler. Consider adding these to your next stack from the library.

This study describes a second-grade science curriculum designed to individualize student instruction so that students, regardless of initial science and literacy skills, gain science knowledge and reading skills. The instruction incorporates flexible, homogeneous, literacy skills-based grouping, use of leveled science text, and explicit use of discussion and comprehension strategies.

Go on a Seussian Green Eggs and Ham reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: Kindergarten)

Students who comprehend the most from their reading are those who know a lot about words. These students know about word prefixes, suffixes, word roots, and multiple meanings of words. Families can help develop word knowledge through simple conversations focused on words.

It's important to remember that a lack of sleep can greatly impact your preschooler's behavior and ability to have a good day at preschool. Try this little experiment with your child to make sure they understand and maintain an appropriate sleep schedule.

Captioned or subtitled media is a great tool for teachers looking to differentiate classroom instruction — research has shown that ELLs, students with learning disabilities, and students who struggle academically may all benefit from following along with captions while watching a classroom video. Learn more about the benefits of captioned media and additional resources for captioned material in this article.

Go on a "sleepy" reading adventure! Teachers can support reading together at home with Reading Rockets family literacy bags — designed to encourage hands-on fun and learning centered around paired fiction and nonfiction books. (Level: Kindergarten)

Combine two great American treasures — Dr. Seuss and your local newspaper — for some reading and writing fun in your classroom or at home.

Seuss silliness is contagious! Spread it to your classroom writing centers.

Choosing a preschool for your child can be a tough decision; what works for one child may not work for another. This is particularly true for a preschooler with special learning or behavior needs. The following three considerations can help you get a head start on finding the right setting for your preschooler.

Reading Rockets helps parents and teachers address the aftermath of natural disasters with children through reading and books.

Assistive technology is any kind of technology that can be used to enhance the functional independence of a person with a disability. Learn more about Assistive Technology and ways your students might benefit from it.

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